Crownpeak CMS vs. Dynamicweb vs. Volusion

Crownpeak DXM is a great solution if you are looking for a flexible platform that allows engineers to quickly develop while also making it easy for content authors to work especially in scenarios where you need multi-language support. It is also good for scenarios where you want a cloud-based solution and are looking for just one vendor to handle hosting and offer the CMS.

Incentivized

For small/medium organizations where non-professionals should work with the system in everyday situations, Dynamic Web is a good solutions. Works well on Mobile. Not very complicated to add new shops/add new countries to the solution. I have never used the headless functionalities but they should be well working, as I have heard. it should be very easy to implement with Business Central, but I have seen it being more complicated than expected.

Incentivized

Volusion is a good company if you're starting out. The problem is that, if you want more complexity out of the program, you're kind of stuck. Also the regular time out errors and slow downs can be very frustrating. Packages that miss overnight deadlines because your system stops working can cost you customers. In today's highly competitive market, that's just something that's hard to put up with. If you have a lower volume of business you might be able to work around these issues.

Incentivized

• Build & manage digital experiences without dependency on your IT team
• Built-in Digital Quality tool (DQM) tool allows you to check the quality of content and any accessibility issues and immediately flag any issues before publishing.
• Build websites with the component-based technology and spend less effort in creating the best user experience for the end-user

• All-in-one setup makes it easy for a small/medium organization to get an easy and fast go to market
• Good overview of progress of product enrichment with the built-in dashboard
• Easy enrichment both in the PIM and with upload of data in excel-sheet

Incentivized

• Templates are pre-built for a good end user experience. I've gone through the process of building custom sites as well as tweaking both free and paid templates that Volusion's design team provides.
• Their support team didn't use to be as helpful, but in recent years have answered nearly all questions I've had. Their support section within the database provides detailed walkthrus as well.
• Order processing is easy once you've been trained on the system. We got to a point where nearly the entire process was automated from initial purchase through shipping.

Incentivized

• Crownpeak moved to a web browser admin tool in 2018, which has made the admin experience much better, but there are still a couple of features missing from the browser version that won't arrive until later in 2019.
• Integration with 3rd party digital asset management tools would be great.
• Smoother integration with source control would be nice.

Incentivized

• Design templates and way to build pages are not very intuitive and lack ease of use for non-professionals
• Layout of Dynamic Web sites are not the most sexy. But they work!

Incentivized

• API calls use the previous call as a reference, even if you weren't the one we made the previous call. Can lead to data gaps, so you often have to set a manual date range to look back to make sure you aren't missing any data.
• Not as customizable as most ecommerce platforms
• Not as many integration options as most platforms

Incentivized

None of our Crownpeak clients are currently thinking about replatforming.

When you spend so much time with a product like this and not only have you witnessed its growth, but you almost feel like you are next those that make the decisions of building features a certain way, you can't help but want to stay and be a part of their continued growth. It's simply a great product. Can it improve? By all means! But it will only improve because of users and avid resellers like me.

Crownpeak DXM is a flexible easy to use CMS platform speaking to the most challenging localization scenarios. Crownpeak users have the freedom to integrate DXM platform with their existing technology at no cost. Moving from legacy systems to the Saas platform is painless and cost-effective. Extensive targeting and personalization options are something that users will benefit from.

Incentivized

I know what to do to add a new product, promotion or do an analysis of sales.

Incentivized

We have never encountered any issues with the availability.

Pages load very fast on production (assuming you develop with basic SEO practices in place) due to Crownpeak's publishing architecture. The slide downside is that publishing can be a bit slow at times.

Crownpeak DXM's service and support are outstanding. We have immediate access to both the tech support team and the software engineering team. We can get a support person on the phone whenever needed, and we can schedule impromptu training sessions at any time. Best support I have ever received from a platform provider in 20 years of software and application development.

Incentivized

You have to wait on hold for at least 45 minutes every call—the tech support person never knows the answer right away so they put you on 10 minute holds only to come back and say they're still looking for answers. The chat function could take days to get a response. Our "Dedicated Account Manager" never checks in or answers, nor are they ever in the office when we call. It's like they try to be as unavailable as possible until you forget why you even called in the first place. Insane.

Incentivized

We received on-site training from Crownpeak, the trainer had touched upon every possible scenario and provided great insights about the product & ease of implementation.

My team left training with a solid understanding of how to use the product and the developer training ended with a test to ensure the ability to properly develop was learned properly. Recently, Crownpeak has added a self-paced training option which makes it extremely flexible to on-board new developers.

SaaS model is perfect for us to avoid slow and costly version updates to get access to new features and functions. Crownpeak is a true SaaS model, so we get all the good new stuff without the need to invest in effort, time or money. this frees our teams to focus on content creation and deployment, which is pretty fast because the DXM publishes straight to html through the headless model.

It is best to use the built-in features and recommended services for the most turn-key experience (ie. Skipjack for payment processing so that it can all be done from the Volusion backend).

I was not at this team within my organization during the evaluation period of Crownpeak. However, my previous team used Sitecore. Crownpeak is a bit easier to use from a UI perspective and has more creative options within the tool. Sitecore's clunky UI also was a reason I found out later why we ended up using Crownpeak as our DXM.

Incentivized

Easy to use for smaller organization and a pro-active agenzy.

Incentivized

While k-eCommerce was very glamorous to us because it integrates with our main workflow, it just didn't have some of the marketing features that are so integral to the way we do business online. The set-up costs were also way too high. Volusion is so affordable and feature heavy, it makes it very difficult for any shopping cart provider to compete. You can find others who are competitively priced and have similar features, but they simply aren't as robust (at least for the way we use it)

In some recent projects we have delivered to our clients, we were able to roll out sites in shorter time period due the scalability of the Crownpeak's DXM solution.

• I'm pretty sure it raises our back-end development costs by making the development process (of creating input forms and producing outputs from the content) more complicated and painful than it needs to be.
• It helps lock our clients in to us because not a whole lot of agencies have Crownpeak expertise.
• It helps our clients not have to deal with their own IT teams, which they tend to dislike working with.

Incentivized

• Made selling online very easy
• Fast go-to-market

Incentivized

• Honestly, when you're in the dashboard, the UX is simply horrendous. I mean, everything that should be 1-2 clicks away is 4-6 clicks away, and each pages takes at least four seconds to load. You just find yourself wasting a lot of time waiting for things to load. This should be more simple.