IBM Digital Commerce vs. Umbraco CMS

I think WebSphere Commerce is well suited for customers looking to sell products online that need robustness and scalability as a priority. It provides a complete order cycle out of the box, or you can integrate with your existing order fulfillment. Online shopping models like digital subscriptions or a marketplace are not well suited as it requires a lot of customization

Incentivized

Umbraco CMS is the perfect tool for a company that is looking to keep their website updated. The simple to use tools and templates means updating and creating new pages is easy. The WYSIWYG editor is a nice feature, however, for accessibility, there should be some more guidance on what is suitable to be used on the CMS.

Incentivized

• Websphere commerce provides efficient contract based pricing. Contract based pricing greatly helps in handling prices for different business
• Catalog filtering is one other strength of websphere commerce, as it helps to filter the show only those products that the customer is entitled to
• Extended site model is one other strength of WCS as it greatly helps in having multiple e-commerce sites for different demographics, for branding etc

Incentivized

• Quick to learn. For most if cases, developer needs to know Razor coding.
• Doesn't require back-end programming.
• Has build in users management (developers, content managers) and members management consoles (users of the site).
• Clear admin tool (especially in version 7)
• Fast.
• Creating code from scratch, so it is easier to create clean code.

• The e-Marketing spots contain content associated with marketing activities to target customer segment - needs some improvement. The algorithm to set up the priority of each of the Web Activity with in eMarketing spot is little bit confusing.
• The catalog load can be simplified.
• WebSphere Commerce is a huge application - someone needs to spend at least 5-6 years to learn about the whole application.

Incentivized

• Speed for older sites - Umbraco content can load slowly if you have thousands of pages of content. Of course, this would not be a problem for simpler websites
• Complexity - since the product is free out-of-the-box, it will take technical expertise to get Umbraco setup properly

Incentivized

The scalability and various configurations of the product allows for a wide range of e-commerce site features. It provides a storefront to begin with so it helps with speeding up development.

Incentivized

Umbraco CMS effectively addresses enterprise content management needs. It's quite mature .NET based CMS, standing out as a leader among its competitors. Websites built with Umbraco are blazing fast. Extensive customization capabilities, and user-friendly content publishing interface makes it an ideal choice for businesses looking for a mature CMS solution.

Incentivized

Occasionally, errors will appear in the admin that make it impossible to work without developer support.

Incentivized

Working in the admin panel (adding / reviewing / editing content) is very slow. The public facing site speed is dependent on what the pages are doing and how well the code was written (whether it is optimized for speed).

Incentivized

Support for Umbraco-owned paid plugins is nonexistent.

Incentivized

Online training is often based on older versions of the platform. So, you'll have to fill in the gaps on your own.

Incentivized

Spend the time to wireframe the content structure prior to diving in. This helps speed the process of implementation and it serves as documentation for end users.

Incentivized

IBM Digital Commerce was a lot more customizable and had a good engine for us to make enhancements. We were not locked down to certain integrations and we were able to utilize a lot of the features outside of the box vs using a prescribed set of features and functionality that other tools would force us to use

Incentivized

Umbraco's templating is far superior than WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, but it's update process is WAY behind those platforms. The release schedule of Umbraco is way to often and most releases are to fix something missed in the previous release and not an improvement or new feature of the CMS

Without significant development, the product does not scale well.

Incentivized

• For our clients in the apparel industry, the flexibility that WCS provides to scale up really helped their online business to grow tremendously.
• Our client in the restaurant industry can't quite leverage what WCS has to offer though as it doesn't really fit their shopping model.
• Another positive impact is that it allows our clients to streamline their commerce system in interacting with their backend.

Incentivized

• Has helped us to create more engaging pages that push people to complete the online forms
• We have seen more people buy from us since we launched our new look website
• We can easily update the content without waiting for the development team to make changes

Incentivized