Google Tag Manager vs. Ibexa DXP vs. Progress Sitefinity

I have found Google Tag Manager as the go to solution for managing all of your event and conversion tags for your website. Not only does it make it easy to manage all of your tags in the one place, it is fairly intuitive to use and there is plenty of videos and help documentation online to help set up what ever you need. No scenarios come to mind at the moment on where it is less appropriate to use.

Incentivized

I always recommend Ibexa DXP to my fellows. The only scenario that I would not recommend it is if the site is either too small, too simple, or that they simply cannot afford to stand it up properly.

Progress Sitefinity remains a little heavyweight for sites that require basic text content, or a limited number of pages. However, its flexibility (including the range of different content types if supports) make it a good choice for any organization requiring advanced content management capabilities at an affordable price.

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• Selecting elements on a site [object, class, cookie, etc] (to later fire an event, send some data, etc) is very easy with triggers. Want to add an event when someone clicks on a button? Super easy. It was many many DOM selectors and you can even add custom functions if you need to do something more specific
• In general, firing events in different circumstances is very easy mixing triggers and tags. You can track almost any element of the DOM and do whatever you want with it.
• Testing is a great functionality. Only you can see what's on the site and you can debug it easily by seeing which events or tags were triggered and all the DOM elements involved (and why they matched the trigger).
• Working in environments (staging, production) and versioning is easy to do, deploying changes in 2 clicks.

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• Content Taxonomy: Content is managed in a tree. Though taxonomy vs folksonomy is a near-religious debate among professionals, clients seeing the system for the first time just seem to "get it" more often.
• Content Flexibility: Common content types such as blog posts and articles are available out of the box. However, customizing these and creating new content types is very easy.
• Developer Friendly: Developers need only a little PHP experience to get started. Of course being an expert doesn't hurt and opens the door for the development of custom modules.

Incentivized

• 'Low-code structured content' (dynamic content types) is one of Sitefinity's most powerful features that allows you to structure content according to business needs, while at the same time dampening editorial freedom to ensure accessibility, meta enhancement, SEO and API consumption can be achieved.
• Sitefinity's content provider model allows us to flexibly (by means of admin interface) easily aggregate or separate content sharing within a multi-site instance.
• This proofs particularly powerful in emerging situations where there suddenly is a demand for content sharing across countries or regions.
• Adaptability at its core.
• While there's never a perfect fit for everything, it allows for easy code customization and extension being a .NET application at heart. Giving it a corporate edge over other custom solutions, whether it is on the development side or deployment side (on premise, IaaS or Azure DevOps Paas). And it has enabled us to put the system to use in its core feature - which is to manage content, where on other occasions we were able to take full advantage of its features such as A/B testing and personalization.

• There are several good integrations, but there can always be more. Native tracking for call tracking solutions, analytics providers, non-Google advertisers would be top of my list.
• Documentation is just dreadful. Luckily there are some awesome folks out there doing crowdsourced tutorials (shout out to Simo Ahava) but by and large the Google Tag Manager instructions are worth what you pay for them.

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• Limited partners when you compare to other solutions (WordPress, Drupal, etc). It took us a while to find a solid, trusted developer.

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• Diagram or illustrate more use cases for server setups, and managing of upgrades.
• I'd like to see the ability to synchronize from one server to multiple others at once.
• Implementation assistance as part of the purchase rather than farming out to 3rd party, although they did answer every question we asked in order to determine our best architecture setup.

Incentivized

I haven't found another option for us to use especially one that is free. Down the road we may go a different route but for now GTM is a good option and does what we need it to do. It'd be nice to get more support or more integrations but with the free version there's only so much one can expect to get I suppose.

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Very happy with current relationship and websites

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Pricing makes this a no brainer. Not the best CMS, but with work arounds and some fumbling around we are able to make it do what we want it to do

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No difficult obstacle to overcome but Google Tag Manager can still be difficult for many users to deploy. Sure the basic HTML script can be deployed quite easily, but when you start to require triggers, variables, etc, it can be a little daunting.

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It is quite easy to navigate through the backend and also, you can directly work in frontend view. Dynamic content can be created on the fly. Their Landing page features are awesome. You create a page by drag & drop.

Very big fan of this CMS, as it allows scalability, performance, and everything else. The support is great whenever we need it. As a marketer, the digital/marketing side of things is very easy to use and we've seen strong results from an SEO and marketing perspective. I can't speak to the developer/creative side too much, but in talking with these teams, they do recommend the tool as well.

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Has been solid for us on availability

A bit sluggish sometimes as the compiler works.

GTM does not provide support. This is one of GTM's biggest issues but it's due to the level of customization for each website. If your team thinks they would heavily rely on the need for a support staff it is probably better to invest in a paid service with a team that can support your needs.

Incentivized

They are directly reachable and help you to deal with other services, e.g. if would like to set up a CDN for China or if you would like to integrate a tool like HubSpot. If there is anything you are missing, they help you to find a workaround until they can deliver such items - like local language versions.

Support can be pretty good, even though, depending on the level of licensing, it can take longer to hear back from their team. They do have a phone option, which works well. Overall, they are knowledgeable, and helpful when needed. At times, support is able to access the system directly and troubleshoot critical items when needed.

I thought there was a little bit too much emphasis on AdWords stuff, not enough on the generic application of GTM.

Planning and communication will help greatly with an in-house implementation. If there are large teams, try to limit the number of people involved to 1-2 developers (back-end dev may be necessary depending on your platform), one analytics marketer and one project manager.

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The partner selected makes a significant impact on the usability and experience

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N/A - I was not part of the implementation team. We have had this internally for over 5 years. Based on my experience, ensure that you have documentation on the initial implementation and subsequent upgrades. I would also recommend to have all the documentation on how and why the system was implemented the way it was

Incentivized

We moved to GTM from a standard Google Analytics implementation. GTM is much more flexible and easier to make changes, especially as the changes relate to multiple sites and environments. While there is a learning curve when figuring out how to use GTM, I believe the change has been worth it because it helps us understand at a more fundamental level how our tracking works and gives us a lot more control over what we track and how.

Incentivized

eZ Publish isn't as large in community size and number of installations as other content management systems. However, it's just as capable and met our needs:

• Developers, system administrators, and project manager can all speak the same language during the development and maintenance cycles of a site.
• End-user training is very straight-forward.
• Vendor support is available.
• Client IT departments can access if need (developers/designers/sysadmins).
• The community is there (forums) and there are solid contributions (extensions) from both the vendor and the community.

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It is hands down just easier for our customers to use. The interface and the page builder experience is much better than what we have used in the past and has many enterprise features even in the lower price-point

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We’ve priced other enterprise products and found Ibexa DXP to be a bit more expensive. However, not enough to dissuade us from staying with the product.

Seems pretty scalable.

The partner ecosystem is small. However, we've worked with two Ibexa partners over the last 10 years. They were very skilled. They were great companies. We've interviewed other Ibexa partners in North America. We found them all to be professional with solid resumes.

• GTM is very useful to determine if a particular element on the site is useful (i.e. is it being watched, is it being clicked, does it help customers navigate through more pages). As an SEO person, I can use this information to decide what to optimize for but also to track progress and see improvements in engagement.
• With the use of Google Tag Manager, I was able to easily inject an A/B testing tool which lead to several improvements in lead generation.

Incentivized

• Common knowledge: By making eZ a core offering, developers, system administrators, and project managers were able to communicate with each other effectively.
• Training: Due to its content taxonomy, end-user training often went well.
• Support: In our case, we had Gold support from eZ Publish which saved time and helped with customizations.

Incentivized

• Sitefinity has reduced the amount of time it takes to edit and publish content, which has enabled us to get information out more quickly.
• Sitefinity allowed us to establish a consistent and modern brand identity and apply it across multiple websites.

Incentivized