Coveo Qubit vs. Plone

Coveo Qubit is a very helpful platform mainly for organizations that need to provide a solid business model before carrying out any implementation or new functionality. In addition, it is a very good tool to generate changes and show different content to different types of clients, with their personalization and segmentation criteria.It is ideal for simultaneous testing and customization, only one of these activities individually is not recommended.

Incentivized

The larger your organization, the more appropriate Plone will be. This is not to say that Plone is a worse choice for small websites, only that the minimum investment for a Plone site is certainly higher than for other platforms. If you already use Plone for your site and are looking for a redesign or an overhaul, I would only advise switching to a different platform such as WordPress or Drupal if your organization is downsizing. For any other situation, Plone is the natural choice for your growth.

• Qubit platform uses solid testing algorithms and delivers reliable reporting and analytics of testing campaigns. The dashboard section is easy to use and provides a good high level overview of the core campaign metric performances.
• On-boarding and implementation of Qubit technology was painless and well handed throughout the entire process even with more complicated platforms.
• Turn-around time for development and testing of campaigns is extremely fast. This enables the business to have a much higher throughput of tests and allows for quick validation of ideas rather than having to wait for months before a test is ready to go live on production site.

Incentivized

• Plone is a folder-based system, organising content in a similar way desktop-users are doing for the last two decades. No need to teach non-tech customers some relational-database like paradigm for content management.
• Plone is secure. It is the most secure CMS you can get your hands on.
• Plone is flexible, and makes fast development easy.

• While they do work very closely with us, especially our success manager, more involvement on a technical level or a dedicated engineer, would be a great advantage. We develop a lot of experiences in house and, like all companies that dev in house, we have our own way of working. A dedicated engineer that got to know us better as well and understood how we work could only help. Sometimes, a few errors can get through QA due to this.

Incentivized

• Not everything is configurable or editable by Plone, and when you need to adjust or add custom pieces in, you need to deal with Zope. Zope has an ugly, confusing and difficult UI and structure as a backend.
• Using 3rd party products is difficult to do - there are a few different ways to get them installed, all of which take a bit of luck to get right.
• Building custom products for Plone is not fun. You've got to deal with an archaic framework to tie in that is not well documented (there is documentation about many things, but not great documentation and there are a lot of holes in the documentation).

Qubit is currently providing resources and support we do not have internally. Our relationship managers are exceptional and I feel well informed and well supported by their team. The tool is nice, but our contacts from the company are the real reason to maintain our relationship. They work hard for clarity and continue to help us push for additional opportunities.

Incentivized

We have critical systems running on Plone so will need it in the future.

Free to use since its Open source, so we don't have to worry about licence costs.

We know how to use and develop Plone and it has no limits.

Very simple user interface, built on top of advanced functionality, makes the platform easy to use. The team at Qubit are also very open to feedback and introduce new and useful features fairly often. On the reporting side, the inbuilt dashboard reports are good for a top-level view of test results, and Qubit have made a lot of their output data available should you wish to run your own analysis

Incentivized

Compared to the amount of Plone sites, users and customizations we have in our organization, the amount of support requests and training needed is really small.

The new user interface in Plone 6 is even better, it is super fast, has lots of different blocks for enhancing the page, has flexible layout system and is easy to extend with more features.

I would say that the Qubit account managers are always available for any request. We have a lot of different promotions that could always do with last minute optimizing or changes and Qubit can be relied on to get this changes up and running in an impressive amount of time, so that we don't need to patch live or wait for the next IT sprint. Invaluable to our business.

Our Plone sites are very robust. We have critical systems on Plone and we have been running sites on Plone for over 20 years with very little unexpected downtime.

Technology is good for A/B testing and personalisation - allowing any team with a dedicated developer to create test relatively easily and to report/analyse them in a fair amount of details. Some advanced features, especially on the set up of test cells, are dearly missing. Unfortunately, new features are often not free of bugs... Also, support is sub-par, which means new features are realised without proper documentation, example or training (but of our Qubit counterparts and internally).

Incentivized

Plone is very intensive in its operations, and if not configured well it can be slow. However it is designed and built with speed in mind and with proper use of coding, templates and caching can perform extremely well under high loads. It is capable of scaling to very high load availability environments with no specific coding requirements.

Qubit are supportive and flexible in providing support. They are happy working out of usual hours, even on weekends and if I have any doubts about the set up of an experience they’re quick to respond and willing to check my work. On particularly big revenue days they monitor our account and they’re quick to identify and problem solve any issues.

Incentivized

There are not too many Plone companies in the world. But the ones who are, are high level professionals

The training was great, but would be great to have a script or PDF with some explanations of the qubit JS layer. Without the script you can just try to learn on your own, so the training is not as powerfull as it could be. On the other hand - would be great to have training related to reading statistics or personalisation.

Incentivized

I have been participating Plone training and the trainers have always been professional. Materials were good and the instructions clear

Well organized, professional training with good materials and instructions

Implementation couldn't be easier. All we needed to do was insert the tag. (easy) and set up the data layer. (dev required) This was pretty smooth in comparison to some of the other tools we use on our site, and was done in less than a day. Note : Data needs to be collected for a set period of time before you can accurately rely on the data that you are receiving. This is normal though with everyone else that we have used

Incentivized

At the time of taking the product, we found no comparable alternatives. Since then, the product has only grown from strength to strength, so it still does not have any comparable competitors that offer both the technical product and business knowledge that Qubit can. Google appear to offering a competing product which may be one to watch in future, and something for Qubit to keep an eye on

Incentivized

Drupal: Plone is cheaper, so with Drupal is more complex to reach the required ROI. However, Drupal has a lower learning curve WordPress: For our necessities it has a more expensive learning curve than plone. Joomla, is easier to use. However, it have some issues on security and web content where Plone is much better

Incentivized

Our requirements change throughout the year like most E Commerce retailers. At Christmas and Peak we're dealing with around ten times the usual traffic on the site. Qubit had no problems with this at all, tests continued to fire, and stats were still reported accurately. I don't think that it is the most server intensive .js anyway, but we have seen no issues at all.

Incentivized

Plone has no limits. We have massive sites and can run them just fine

• Faster recognition of customer needs - finding out exactly what customers are doing when they come on site.
• Assessment of online assets for effectiveness and improvements - facilitated the analysis of 500 online feedback questionnaires for a campaign.
• Mapping out lead conversion and helping identify opportunities to improve it.

• The impact Plone has had at the University of Oshkosh is as follows: this software allows student workers to learn about IT departments and CMS's in a user-friendly way. It gives many students great jobs that look great on their resumes.
• Since there are great training manuals for Plone, there is increased employee efficient in the workplace. Training doesn't take long, and if there's ever a question, the Plone manual is a great tool to refer to.
• If an employee using Plone quits, its easy to find someone to replace them with quick training and great resources.