ExpressionEngine is a content management system from EllisLab in 2002, a successor to pMachine Pro, a blogging system, which is written in object-oriented PHP and uses MySQL for data storage. ExpressionEngine is their flagship Content Delivery Platform.
$249
per year
FirstSpirt CMS
Score7.2 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
FirstSpirit CMS is an enterprise Content Management platform for creating, governing, and publishing digital content across websites, applications, and other delivery channels. It combines visual authoring, developer tooling, workflow controls, and content-delivery options for organizations managing multilingual and multisite digital estates.
ExpressionEngine is a very powerful and flexible content management system. It can handle a simple small business website all the way to a large corporation's website. If you are a business with multiple websites ExpresionEngine can handle that as well with it's Multiple Site Manager. I think ExpressionEngine would be less appropriate for a global large scale business with a magnitude of sites with different regions and languages.
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
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.
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
Content structuring. You can set up channels and fields to hold just about any kind of information imaginable; text, images, videos, numbers, code, etc. You can structure this information any way you want and in any order. You literally create your own information database just the way you want it using a clear, easy online interface.
Template system. Utter freedom. Need I say more?
Exensible. There are a lot of add-ons, extensions, and other external modules that extend the core functionality of ExpressionEngine. Need a user management system? Check out the User module at http://solspace.com.
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
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
For me, one of the greatest strengths of ExpressionEngine is also one of their weaknesses. There are so many add-ons available (some free, some not) for ExpressionEngine to allow you to do just about anything you want. However, the more add-ons that you use the more you have to deal with when performing updates. For instance, is the add-on compatible with the new version of ExpressionEngine - or even another add-on? What if that add-on gets abandoned by the developer - is there another that can perform the same functionality?
I think that ExpressionEngine needs to offer more out of the box than it does. Yes, you can get add-ons for just about anything but this adds to the cost. I have a list of add-ons that I use on almost every site which can raise the cost of getting started with a new site by $100-300. So add that to the cost of a license and you're at $400-600 and you haven't even started working on it yet. For instance, I shouldn't have to buy an add-on to allow me to customize the menu for my end-users.
The membership management feature is seriously lacking. Fortunately, there are add-ons (for an additional cost) to allow you to manage things better.
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
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.
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
I'm satisfied with the way that my site runs on EE. My primary concern is that support is now a profit center for EE's publisher and so they've consequently gutted their community support boards. However, a good EE community is developing at StackExchange. At this stage, I don't think that EE is a good choice for an individual site owner. WordPress or SquareSpace would be a better choice unless you have a budget for support.
ExpressionEngine is very powerful and flexible. With this flexibility comes a bit of a learning curve. There are some great online resources for getting up to speed with EE, but the control panel can be a bit daunting. A lot of EE's installation process involves settings, configurations and flipping of switches. It is tedious, but well worth it as you ultimately have a very robust, secure and scalable CMS. Also, as of version 2.9.2, the control panel isn't responsive natively. You'll want to have a big enough screen to see the full control panel UI. Personally, I think the control panel would benefit from a major overhaul. It would be nice to see the colors and UI controls "modernized" and be able to more effectively customize the layout. Yes, some of this is built-in, and there are third-party add-ons to help, but maybe we'll see more refinement in future versions.
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.
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
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
The admin section would slow to a crawl the larger the tag section grew. There were many areas where better pagination would've helped improve performance. Nothing complicated, which made the lag so frustrating
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
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.
I have personally never found any complications when trying to receive support from EllisLab in regards to ExpressionEngine when using the support plans they offer. I have always been responded to promptly and received satisfactory help with whatever my needs were in an extremely timely manner. This makes rating the support offered an easy job for me
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.
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
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.
After installing the system a few times, you can see a pattern of things that have to be done to work the way you want them (settings, paths, etc.). By knowing what you want, you can put together some scripts that prepare the file system for installation, adjust post installation configuration settings, and install initial templates.
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.
ExpressionEngine is vastly more flexible than any other content management system I have used to date and the quality of the add-ons are significantly higher than what you find in other directories. The ExpressionEngine community is also very willing and helpful with if you have any questions or run into any issues.
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
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.
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. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
Maybe it's scale-able from the content user perspective, but it was very limited from the programmers perspective. So many custom hacks were necessary that it reached a point it would be impossible to upgrade to a newer version
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
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.
Being able to be recognized as a leader within the ExpressionEngine development community has led to us being sought out by those customers seeking expert guidance.
We tend to specialize in using ExpressionEngine for our customers, so it has been easier to ramp new resources up on our development process, as well as be able to seek out independent experts to use as sub contractors or freelancers.
As we have been using ExpressionEngine almost exclusively for a number of years, we have built a reusable repository of proprietary code that makes our development process much more efficient and decreases the effort required for our projects.
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
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.
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
