Craft CMS vs. Salesforce Experience Cloud

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Craft CMS
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Craft is a CMS for creating custom digital experiences on the web. Craft can support design portfolios, multinational marketing sites, and other kinds of sites, and integrates with tools like Salesforce, Mailchimp or Hubspot to offer a full business solution.
$130
per month per project
Salesforce Experience Cloud
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement (formerly Salesforce Experience Cloud or Salesforce Community Cloud) is an online forum powered by Salesforce that enables businesses to connect with their employees, customers, partner organizations, and prospects. Designed to help facilitate communication and information sharing, customers can ask questions and request help, administrators can integrate data from third-party apps, and employees can collaborate across projects and…N/A
Pricing
Craft CMSSalesforce Experience Cloud
Editions & Modules
Team
$130
per month per project
Pro
$240
per month per project
Team
$279
per year includes one year of updates ($99 for support each subsequent year)
Pro
$399
per year includes one year of updates ($99 for support each subsequent year)
Enterprise
Contact Sales
for when a project has specific licensing requirements
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Craft CMSSalesforce Experience Cloud
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsHosted Craft CMS option available with a discount for annual pricing.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Craft CMSSalesforce Experience Cloud
Best Alternatives
Craft CMSSalesforce Experience Cloud
Small Businesses
ManageWP
ManageWP
Score 10.0 out of 10
Square 9 Softworks
Square 9 Softworks
Score 9.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
MediaValet
MediaValet
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
MediaValet
MediaValet
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Craft CMSSalesforce Experience Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.8
(71 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.1
(15 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(5 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(18 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.4
(4 ratings)
User Testimonials
Craft CMSSalesforce Experience Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
Pixel & Tonic
Suitable for mid-size to large websites (20 pages+). If you have a massive project with dozens or hundreds of content contributors, complex editorial process/workflow, are tied to a non-Linux platform (Microsoft Server), you may want an enterprise CMS like Episerver. If you need a small, cheap, theme-based, basic website with 5-15 pages, you'll probably go to WordPress.
Read full review
Salesforce
For well-suited, this product is great for your external clientele groups that you would not necessarily want to have a high user fee rate for. So basically general public or a group that will be authorized to come in and just do a few things here and there, but you don't necessarily want them access to all of your systems and your data points for groups that it would not be a great use for. I'd say probably your high level internal staff, they're going to be using a lot of the backend functionality automations, evaluating data, managing data, and doing custom inputs. That's just not what's intended for.
Read full review
Pros
Pixel & Tonic
  • Design-agnostic templating system. No themes. This means you can use whatever HTML, CSS, JS you want, and integrate it with Craft.
  • Versatile field types, with 3rd party plugins providing a bunch more. Everything from plain text to address, color picker, date/time, file assets, one-to-many relationships, and more.
  • Control panel with clean, responsive UI makes content updates easy for clients.
Read full review
Salesforce
  • Easy to use, just like Salesforce's other products. Many users can sit down and figure it out in no time, and with a little training become power users.
  • Fast and secure - Salesforce is a leader in the cloud world so you get consistently fast results and security that is top notch in the industry.
  • Accessible from anywhere - if you use cloud CMS already this is a no-brainer, but for those that do in-house CMS still, this is a major difference. Mobile access from anywhere on the planet without a VPN is something you just can't do without the cloud.
Read full review
Cons
Pixel & Tonic
  • Could use a more robust implementation of rich text editor.
  • Some functionality that requires plugins, for example, advanced field management, should be part of the core install.
  • It should be a bit easier to brand the control panel w/logo and color scheme.
Read full review
Salesforce
  • Unlike other CMS platforms like Wordpress and Adobe Experience Manager, Salesforce does not provide a fully featured editor with a drag-and-drop design tool.
  • Our content creators and marketing team often struggle with permissions and how to distribute content across different experience cloud sites.
  • Also, there is no side-to-side comparison view for content editors to update the content easily.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Pixel & Tonic
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Renewal exercise is already underway. Platform is to ubiquitous to not leverage, especially at a Fortune 50 firm
Read full review
Usability
Pixel & Tonic
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Strengths: - Intuitive for Salesforce Users – If you’re already working within the Salesforce ecosystem, the Salesforce CMS is easy to navigate, with a clean UI, drag-and-drop content management, and reusable assets for quick updates. - Seamless Integration – Since it connects natively with Experience Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and CRM, it allows for efficient multi-channel content distribution without needing extra third-party tools. - AI-Powered Personalization – The ability to deliver dynamic content based on user profiles and engagement data is a huge plus, making content delivery more relevant and impactful. Challenges: - Learning Curve for New Users – If you're not already familiar with Salesforce, the interface can feel overwhelming, requiring training to fully leverage all features. - Limited Customization & Workflow Automation – While it works well for structured content, advanced approval workflows and deep editorial customization are limited compared to enterprise CMS platforms like Adobe Experience Manager. - Media & Design Limitations – Salesforce CMS is not as robust for managing rich media-heavy content, which can be frustrating for teams needing more flexibility in multimedia presentation.
Read full review
Performance
Pixel & Tonic
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Again, since we provide and recommend solutions, I can't speak to every client's individual experience, but can offer general reflections as to keep their collaborations private, that they are satisfied with the experience. We hear a lot about how this system helps to encourage collaborations between their own business partners, customers, and internal members, and enables quality integrations with other products that help drive revenue.
Read full review
Support Rating
Pixel & Tonic
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Although support from Salesforce itself can be quite unresponsive sometimes, the community hub is incredibly helpful. The large user base of Salesforce products contribute to troubleshooting and the forums are a powerful tool for finding solutions and possible bugs and response times can be quite fast compared to your regular support channels.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Pixel & Tonic
Craft was originally developed in response to ExpressionEngine's shortcomings. While ExpressionEngine has caught up in some regards, it still looks and feels a bit unpolished by comparison. Additionally, ExpressionEngine's vendor has never gotten UI right - not on their website, nor in their CMS. Craft remains easier to use, more polished and provides a wider feature set in its base install (without needing plugins). As for WordPress - while I recognize its massive popularity, I find its reliance on themes, third-party plugins, along with security shortcomings, make it a poor fit for the larger custom projects we build. On the other hand, if you want to throw up a passable website in a day, you can't beat WordPress.
Read full review
Salesforce
Salesforce Experience Cloud was selected due to its tight integration with our existing Salesforce CRM platform. Customization of the portal was much, much simpler compared to Sharepoint - especially with role-based security parameters that are ultimately inherited based on attributes within the Salesforce CRM platform. Salesforce Experience Cloud was a natural fit for this customer-facing purpose.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Pixel & Tonic
  • We don't have hard numbers on Craft's impact on our ROI, but we recognize that its feature set, ease of use, and integrated ECommerce allows offering a superior product to clients.
Read full review
Salesforce
  • Time savings for our customer success team - no need to continually follow up on tickets as customers have access to see status themselves
  • In the future, it will also allow us to create more impactful knowledge articles that will increase self-service over ticket creation
Read full review
ScreenShots