Crownpeak CMS vs. Kibo eCommerce

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

The platform has flexibility at its core and we have made full use of that capability. Even if Kibo [eCommerce] hasn't been ready to provide features and functions we need, we have the opportunity to build them ourselves. The platform started as Mozu and while it was relatively well-developed for DTC, it lacked a lot of basic B2B functionality. As a result, when we were ready to move into that arena, we built a lot for ourselves (including a multi-level account system and a tool to manage it). Keep in mind, too, that Kibo eCommerce is part of a larger suite of tools. The company has purchased a mobile Point-of-Sale system, Baynote, Certona, Monetate, and an OMS. If you need a full-scale solution, they can offer a lot. As I mentioned previously, their support and documentation need shoring up. They're not terrible, but they hinder (rather than help) when it comes to fulfilling the platform's promise of letting the customers be self-service in building out their capabilities.

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

• Mozu offers a flexible multi site setup where you can feed multiple sites from the same product and order database.
• Mozu allows you to create as many attributes as you would like across customer, orders, and products. This flexibility can be really powerful.

• 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

• Prebuilt Integration - There is not currently a large number of preexisting integrations, but custom integrations are fairly quick
• Time to Deploy - Don't get me wrong, We have deployed in the timeline we expected, but if you are trying to get something off the ground fast, Kibo might not be right for you. It is a robust platform that take some time to get up and running.
• Complicated Shipping - if you have a complicated shipped process, you might want to look for a tool to help, Kibo does not have very robust out of the box shipping capabilities.

None of our Crownpeak clients are currently thinking about replatforming.

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

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

One positive note is that I have always been able to get someone on the phone in support whenever I have called, even at 1 AM. Getting someone on the phone is only half the battle though. In the first few months of using Mozu it often seemed that support didn’t know anymore about Mozu than we did. This has slowly started to change, but as a daily user you are likely to be on par with support in terms of knowing what to do when you encounter a problem. The support phone number is really most useful for having them put in a support ticket for you rather than typing it all out yourself and emailing it. It is very rare that the support reps are actually empowered to solve the problem at hand. Unless the issue you are having is user error, they will just take your information and pass it on the proper department. Your request or problem will then be ignored for months on end. Some day, it might actually get fixed but you are unlikely to be notified that this has happened. Most of these issues are assigned an internal ID that they use for tracking. Support is more than happy to pass this ID along, but it is useless. There is no way to actually see where the issue lies in the endless queue of similar issues.

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.

At the time of our implementation Mozu did not have any processes or procedures set up around going live. We basically were forced to just wing it and hope for the best

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

We had a custom, in-house ecommerce website before moving to Kibo. It was brittle, slow, and wasn't going to scale nearly well enough or fast enough to keep up with our requirements

Incentivized

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

• Kibo has always delivered rapid & exceptional support to our organization
• Kibo has been cost-competitive when considering other vendors
• The platform continues to add value without requiring substantial additional investments