DNN Platform vs. Evoq Content vs. HCL Digital Experience

DNN [Platform] is great for organizations of any size who wish to have a robust CMS to manage their site. DNN is not ideal for a small site that is better suited to a super easy to user interface such as Wix. DNN [Platform] is plenty strong enough for enterprises and large entities.

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If you just need to implement a website that is dynamic but not real big in Data Processing almost anyone can do so with very limited knowledge as long as you know how to use a Word Processor and your Browser. If you don't have experience with setting up a Server to run a website there are Companies like PowerDNN, Rackspace and WinHost that can help and I recommend them in that order if you are using DNN. If you need a more sophisticated e-commerce website and don't have much experience with Servers, SQL Server etc. then you should find a consultant to help you install and setup not just the DNN Platform but also select the proper Modules to accomplish what you want to do. If you need a highly customized website that is very data intensive and you are not experienced then be sure to save yourself the time and money by finding a qualified Consultant to help you. The beauty of DNN is that it can handle as simple or as complicated of an Application as you need depending on what your needs are and how far you want to take it.

HCL DX does really well at managing and maintaining the site. It allows the business to basically maintain the site while IT spent time developing new and enhanced functions. The main issue I currently have with HCL DX is not directly with the product but it does play a role. It is difficult finding skilled resources to support HCL DX in my experience.

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• Very easy to use CMS - Ease of use is paramount with CMS products to minimise on support calls. Also the template structure of pages ensures that content editors cannot inadvertently corrupt the layout of the page.
• Powerful application framework - The existence of APIs for all functionality within the CMS provides limitless scope in terms of developing bespoke applications which sit within the CMS.
• Commercially supported option available - For larger clients, the comfort factor of having a direct line to the developers of the application is a big selling point.

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• DNN is a feature-rich, open-source project with a flexible license. This let us use it without licensing costs for custom solutions or as-is with no custom code just plug-in modules.
• DNN is written in Microsoft .NET C#. This allows our developers and our customers to use their existing skill set to install and maintain the solution.
• DNN is made for Windows platform, allowing us and our customers to deploy solutions to existing Windows servers or in some cases hosted platforms.
• DNN integrates with Windows authentication allowing us to deploy intranet solutions and use single sign-on for improved user experience and security.

• With Version 8.5, IBM Web Content Manager introduced in place editing capabilities which allow authors to make content edits on sections of the page instead of going to the content itself. This feature allows authors to make changes in context of the page and preview changes within the actual look and feel of a live page.
• Projects provide a collaborative atmosphere for the author community so that authors can interact and work as a team to manage inter-dependent content changes under one project and publish all changes at once, instead of working separately on individual content changes. This brings awareness across authors in an organization and easy knowledge share.
• IBM Digital Data Connector is a cool feature that allows [users] to integrate external content sources onto the portal using IBM Web Content Manager presentation components. This allows UI/UX designers to present integrated external data in any manner they want, manage UI changes with an underlying approval process and leverage syndication to push changes live immediately.
• IBM Web Content Manager offers a targeted content feature that allows business users to deliver personalized content to customers based on customer demographic information, browsing history and other transaction related information. Any rules created follow the publishing process thereby making it just a configurable item resulting in less turn around to turn on the feature on a website.
• IBM Web Content Manager offers 'multi lingual solution' out of the box which allows content creation for almost all popular languages.
• Syndication feature has improved a lot and it now provides a detailed views comprising of 'failed items', 'items that have syndicated successfully, 'items in queue'. Failed items view provides detailed and clear cut information of what resulted in failure helping IT to troubleshoot problems easily.

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• Out of the box, it has some modules, but not enough unless you do a paid version.
• The support is a bit slow.
• The menuing can be confusing and terms used a bit strange. which makes training difficult.

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• It can be a bit heavy-handed when it comes to styling. It's sometimes necessary to spend a little extra time to overcome styling issues.
• Up until version 8 of the core DNN platform, implementing single page applications (SPAs) required extra efforts.
• It is very difficult to split a site across multiple servers for load balancing

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• IBM Web Content Manager should provide some easily usable connectors through a GUI to connect to bring content from custom data sources including connecting to Salesforce and custom databases.
• Should further optimize and enhance creation of rich and responsive content driven UIs on various digital channels.
• Should further optimize and enhance content personalization features.

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Even though DNN is a good CMS, I have worked with other CMSs which are far more robust at this point, and would not be overly inclined to select DNN unless cost of the product is the most important factor along with staying on .NET. DNN is a whole package so unless the client has a requirement of including authentication, authorization for users, eCommerce, sticking to something simple is a better option.

IBM products always moves forward to adapt to new requirements and technologies. I have used versions 6, 6.1, 7 and 8 of IBM WCM, and I know IBM is ready to revamp the tool based on emerging needs, and still provide the capabilities to migrate your old system to the newer versions.

Evoq proved to be a solid backbone for our property-management portal, handling ≈300 active rental listings without performance hiccups. The page-builder made it straightforward to craft listing templates that surface photo galleries, floor-plan PDFs, and embedded map pins, while role-based workflows let leasing agents edit unit details (price, availability, pet policy) without touching global site settings—a big win for operational control.

For the management side, the platform’s extensibility let us plug in a third-party rent-payment widget and an automated maintenance-ticket form with minimal custom code. Evoq’s built-in analytics have already highlighted which neighborhoods and bedroom counts drive the most traffic, guiding our marketing spend.

Two caveats:


Search & filter logic – Out-of-the-box search was too shallow for renters who expect Zillow-style filtering. We had to commission a custom module for filter chips (price range, amenities, walk score), which added time and cost.
Mobile image optimization – High-resolution gallery images affected load times on 4G; a CDN or Evoq’s Digital Asset Optimizer add-on is advisable.



Overall, Evoq delivers reliable content governance and enough flexibility to support both consumer-facing listings and back-office property-management workflows, provided you budget for advanced search customization and image delivery tuning.

New versions has increased user experience facilitating usability.

I don't see how it could get any better unless they moved their staff into our offices. You have available to you any type of Support you need or want, both paid and free from thousands of developers and consultants all over the world. You might even find some on Mars if you look hard enough.Also, with all of the available resources available from your Browser you can literally find the answer to any question you have in a matter of minutes.

We had some issues related with performing and the support was suitable and sucessful.

Evoq proved to be a solid backbone for our property-management portal, handling ≈300 active rental listings without performance hiccups. The page-builder made it straightforward to craft listing templates that surface photo galleries, floor-plan PDFs, and embedded map pins, while role-based workflows let leasing agents edit unit details (price, availability, pet policy) without touching global site settings—a big win for operational control.

For the management side, the platform’s extensibility let us plug in a third-party rent-payment widget and an automated maintenance-ticket form with minimal custom code. Evoq’s built-in analytics have already highlighted which neighborhoods and bedroom counts drive the most traffic, guiding our marketing spend.

Two caveats:


Search & filter logic – Out-of-the-box search was too shallow for renters who expect Zillow-style filtering. We had to commission a custom module for filter chips (price range, amenities, walk score), which added time and cost.
Mobile image optimization – High-resolution gallery images affected load times on 4G; a CDN or Evoq’s Digital Asset Optimizer add-on is advisable.



Overall, Evoq delivers reliable content governance and enough flexibility to support both consumer-facing listings and back-office property-management workflows, provided you budget for advanced search customization and image delivery tuning.

Implementation was successful due to Websphere application server used.

My experience with Joomla! was over six years ago so a lot could have changed. However, I prefer DNN over Joomla because DNN offers more modules and a better administration user interface.

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Drupal is a highly expensive tool and is not offering anything extraordinary at a high price. If I keep its pricing in account then there should be some extraordinary features but unfortunately, there isn’t anything special about it; rather it was slow in its working. All these things actually forced us to move to Evoq that is just perfect in its working. Its working speed, interface, and UX are so simple that none of our team members find it tough to utilize. It has so many features like content scheduling and rich text edit. It allows easy editing of the text as well, and one can directly add text according to need.

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Magento and Prestashop are E-commerce CMS platforms. They are used in a different scale of application than WCM.

Concerning Joomla, it's a useful CMS forsmaller website. Once again this is an other scale of application than WCM Liveray can compete WCM 7 concerning the : ¤ specific development ¤ security ¤ responsive

• DNN helps us win bids on projects through the improvements the community has done over the past few years; we were ready to scrap it all together but it has made great strides
• DNN's community has come back and is actively working to improve and expand the capabilities of the cms
• on a negative note, the confusion between evoq and dnn has caused us headaches

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• DNN have given us the ability to have basic sites for clients up and running in a very short time. This makes the client happy.
• DNN has taken the trivial, simple tasks of changing text on a page or an image on a page and put it into the hands of the client. They do not have to pay us to do it and that also frees up more time for us to spend on development.

• Negative: Very complex architecture for on-premise deployments (too many servers to installed)
• Positive: Easy customization
• Negative: Architecture limited to cloud solutions
• WCM is an old product and needs an update
• Blog, and community are not integrated in Digital Manager for discussion
• Templates are not available to integrate basic services (FileNet, more complex BPM , e-commerce)

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