Digital River vs. LightCMS (discontinued)

Well suited if you are wanting to implement a solution with minimal staff or resources to support a large project such as E-Commerce software delivery.

LightCMS is perfect for 90% of websites out there. It has all the basic modules like calendars, photo galleries, news/blog, or forms building built in. Small businesses to mid-sized businesses are perfect for LightCMS. We use other solutions when the requierments for the website include a lot of third party integrations or custom modules. As a hosted CMS it has the same limitations as others with server-side development.

• Digital River's email marketing arm has always been top notch. They are very connected with their customers, quick to alert us to any problems they are experiencing and respond if we bring something to their attention.
• The Global Commerce platform has grown leaps and bounds in the last few years. Its great having a cloud based ecommerce platform that can be accessed securely from any computer in the world.
• Worldwide payments continues to be a Digital River strong point. They are continually investigating and and doing the work necessary to new countries and locales to their platform.

• LightCMS provides all the major functionality 90% of sites need. It keeps out of its own way by making these solutions intuitive and simple and not trying to solve every problem for everyone which would over-complicate the tool-set.
• This is the easiest to use CMS we have ever seen. I tell my client's that if they can make a Facebook post, they can manage their website, and it's true. Their UI is so easy and keeps getting easier to use. Untrained users get it in minutes and are able to manage their sites without our help.
• LightCMS's code is simple and light-weight. Sites are fast and the CMS doesnt get in the way of performance.
• You can do almost anything you want (except server-side programming) with LightCMS. So, we can create any design we want and it works great with Light CMS's tokens and editable regions concept (which is also simple to implement.)
• Constantly upgraded and fixed, the product is 1000x better after 10 years of working with it, but is still simple and not bloated.

• Their flexibility and customizability are lacking. Changes to our cart or store require a lot of lead time discussions and development time.
• They have many strange UI implementations for things. One search bar is a wildcard match, while another is a string match. One setting might break your product, or be editable once, but you cannot change it after that one time.

Incentivized

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

• While keeping it simple is LightCMS's thing, some of the elements/modules could use deeper options or control for advanced users.
• Some content, such as calendars, cannot have data exported/imported easily.
• Support was amazing 10 years ago. We openly talked about how awesome they were... it isn't as good as it once was, but is still way above almost every support of other CMS systems we have used.

N/A I wasn't the person that implemented or recommended Digital River. But from an eCommerce standpoint I liked the organization overall and would recommend it.

We evaluated our ability to expand internationally with our current e-commerce platform and decided we could get to market faster with Digital River

We have looked at hundrends of CMS's and LightCMS is a perfect entry-level system for most of our small to mid sized clients. LightCMS's feature set is less complex than almost every other system and the actual interface is miles ahead of most other CMS systems. It's simply thought out better. It lacks sensibility and an API as well as other advanced features many more expensive or more DIY systems have, but the simplicity makes up for it.

• Definitely positive impact in local markets
• Positive impact in email marketing
• Some positive experience with tailoring it for our business objectives

Incentivized

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

• While I always think the price could be cheaper, LightCMS is incredibly inexpensive if you consider the costs of hosting, support, and upgrading is all included.
• As part of their partner program, we are able to control client accounts from our master account, making moving between clients easier and supporting them faster which ultimately makes our labor costs better.