HCL Digital Experience vs. Sitecore Experience Manager

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
HCL Digital Experience
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
HCL Digital Experience is based on the former IBM Web Content Manager and IBM WebSphere Portal products, acquired by HCL Technologies from IBM in late 2018. The product allows the user to create, manage and deliver engaging omnichannel digital experiences to audiences with responsive content, targeted offers, seamlessly integrated applications and consistent branding across channels (web, mobile, and hybrid mobile/web applications and more).N/A
Sitecore Experience Manager
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Sitecore Experience Manager is an enterprise-grade CMS competing with Oracle WebCenter, IBM Web Content Manager and Adobe. It presents a fairly wide and comprehensive swath of inbuilt features. In Sitecore WCM editing takes place from within the page with its inline editor, allowing editors and authors to create display rules and content within the context of the page in an integrated process. It allows the creation of blogs, wikis, polls, integrates with social media, and is mobile…N/A
Pricing
HCL Digital ExperienceSitecore Experience Manager
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
HCL Digital ExperienceSitecore Experience Manager
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
HCL Digital ExperienceSitecore Experience Manager
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
HCL Digital ExperienceSitecore Experience Manager
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
HCL Digital Experience
5.0
5 Ratings
46% below category average
Sitecore Experience Manager
9.0
19 Ratings
12% above category average
Role-based user permissions5.05 Ratings9.019 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
HCL Digital Experience
4.1
5 Ratings
65% below category average
Sitecore Experience Manager
8.0
17 Ratings
4% above category average
API4.14 Ratings8.016 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language4.15 Ratings8.014 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
HCL Digital Experience
2.9
5 Ratings
89% below category average
Sitecore Experience Manager
8.4
19 Ratings
10% above category average
WYSIWYG editor7.04 Ratings8.019 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness3.15 Ratings9.018 Ratings
Admin section3.15 Ratings9.018 Ratings
Page templates1.15 Ratings8.016 Ratings
Library of website themes1.15 Ratings8.06 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design4.04 Ratings8.016 Ratings
Publishing workflow1.14 Ratings8.017 Ratings
Form generator3.02 Ratings9.017 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
HCL Digital Experience
1.9
5 Ratings
115% below category average
Sitecore Experience Manager
8.4
18 Ratings
14% above category average
Content taxonomy1.15 Ratings9.016 Ratings
SEO support2.15 Ratings8.014 Ratings
Bulk management2.13 Ratings8.012 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions2.14 Ratings8.017 Ratings
Community / comment management2.13 Ratings9.014 Ratings
Best Alternatives
HCL Digital ExperienceSitecore Experience Manager
Small Businesses
Kentico Xperience
Kentico Xperience
Score 7.2 out of 10
Divi
Divi
Score 9.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Tridion
Tridion
Score 9.0 out of 10
Image Relay
Image Relay
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
Tridion
Tridion
Score 9.0 out of 10
Tridion
Tridion
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
HCL Digital ExperienceSitecore Experience Manager
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(11 ratings)
9.0
(27 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
5.7
(6 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(2 ratings)
7.3
(4 ratings)
Support Rating
7.0
(1 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.0
(1 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
HCL Digital ExperienceSitecore Experience Manager
Likelihood to Recommend
HCL Technologies
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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Sitecore
Great for companies that are looking to create customized, tailored content solutions and be willing to put in the hard work and effort to maximize the value out of the tool. If your company is just looking for very basic content management without all the bells and whistles, I'd recommend looking elsewhere for less [money].
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Pros
HCL Technologies
  • 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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Sitecore
  • Personalisation of advertising banners based upon knowledge of the customer, like location or previous searches enables us to target customers with products and offers that they are more likely to engage with, which has been done to good effect.
  • The use of Sitecore for content management enables the business and design team to perform changes to things, like images, content and page structure, which would otherwise have required a code release, which is costly in terms of man power.
  • The A/B testing in Sitecore is good because it allows us to statistically verify minor changes to the site - like advert changes or component ordering on the page - as to whether or not they positively impact conversion.
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Cons
HCL Technologies
  • 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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Sitecore
  • Sitecore is Customer Engagement Platform. It comes with lots of features (e.g. Authoring, Analytics, personalization, A/B Test, Webforms for marketers etc), But, most of them are not being used by many clients. If you are really looking for just CMS (only authoring and publishing), then I don't think Sitecore is a way to go.
  • You need to have a strong Sitecore certified developer base to manage the Sitecore platform (if you are using all features). It's the same case with others. But, finding a Sitecore certified (costs $$) developer is tough in the market. Now the market is growing (thanks to Sitecore promotional events) and Sitecore is gaining popularity, It may be easy to find such developers in the future. If you want to leverage most out of the Sitecore community you need to be a Sitecore certified developer.
  • Sitecore comes with lots of built-in features and marketplace components. I feel this puts in a little tricky situation. It gives an opportunity for a normal developer to use some of the free marketplace module, which may or may not be supported in a future version of Sitecore. which may put the entire platform in risk to upgrade to latest Sitecore version. You need to have a proper process to control and validate the marketplace components before using them.
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Likelihood to Renew
HCL Technologies
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.
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Sitecore
Sitecore has proven that it can deliver on its promise of a robust, reliable enterprise CMS solution with plenty of features. Also, they keep updating it with more and better features. Now that we are highly trained on it we have started on getting the most out of it and we plan to keep doing more of that in the future.
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Usability
HCL Technologies
New versions has increased user experience facilitating usability.
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Sitecore
With any platform that offers so much capability, usability will naturally be more challenging. Sitecore does an admirable job and made massive strides in version 8, but at some times offers too many ways to achieve the same task allows users to sometimes take a path less efficient than the preferred path.
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Support Rating
HCL Technologies
We had some issues related with performing and the support was suitable and sucessful.
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Sitecore
Sitecore Support is very knowledgeable and helpful. We have raised a number of issues with them and they rarely fail to come up with an acceptable solution.
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Online Training
HCL Technologies
No answers on this topic
Sitecore
Sitecore captures and remembers every single interaction your customers and prospects have in any part of the system, allowing you to build comprehensive, ever-learning profiles of each individual. From email marketing, to social media, to online shopping, Sitecore remembers where each interaction left off so you can automatically continue the conversation. Sitecore helps you manage your content for each and every experience your customers enjoy. Customize what content you want and the system will take care of how it's displayed.
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Implementation Rating
HCL Technologies
Implementation was successful due to Websphere application server used.
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Sitecore
Make sure you work with a partner that can help you take advantage of the entire platform. Specifically we see a lot of customers not taking advantage of Sitecore DMS and thus missing a huge opportunity. Sitecore is a platform that is meant to be constantly optimized and improved upon.
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Alternatives Considered
HCL Technologies
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
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Sitecore
The decision to select Sitecore was not ultimately mine, but the fact that we were able to leverage in-house Microsoft .Net (C#) experience on a platform that had a library of extensions, but also allowed us to customize and keep private our confidential IP has been a big help. When you see a SharePoint site or a Drupal site you can usually tell "oh this is a MS SharePoint site", but with Sitecore the ability to customize and have different views even different components based on device type makes Sitecore a clear winner.
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Return on Investment
HCL Technologies
  • 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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Sitecore
  • ROI depends so much on implementation. Its would be difficult to comment in a positive or negative regarding CMS product to direct ROI. A non-technical user would be surprised at what a basic installation of Sitecore looks like. "Hello World" comes to mind. With that in mind we can look at two things, Sitecore Support and Sitecore Partners.
  • Certified Internal Developers and Sitecore Support: This depends on the qualifications of your existing departments regarding implementing a enterprise CMS. No experience to some experience, this is a no brainer, rigorously vet top and middle partners and hire one to lead this effort. If your experienced still hire a partner and vet them but hire a middle to small partner and have them help, not lead.
  • "Sitecore Window": You could equate Sitecore in some implementation as throwing expensive parts at a car problem. If your business requirements and data consumption needs are not within this cost window then in the end on paper it will be difficult to see ROI or that there just wasn't a return. Then it will be time to look at other lower cost alternatives The initial cost is just the start. Over engineering and expensive horizontal integration partners can cost someone a promotion or job.
  • If your content workflows are complex, sites rendering data requirements are large and performance and scalability are paramount. Sitecore should be in your top 3.
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ScreenShots