Likelihood to Recommend Jadu CMS is not currently geared toward the academic side, but more of the business/government types of organizations. Things can be tweaked to suit your needs, but sometimes there are limitations. The programmers are very helpful in assisting with that.
If you have some in house programmers, and you can get developer training, they will be able to program their own custom widgets to use on your website. We did not have programmers but managed to create a few simple widgets.
There's also a marketplace to look for other widgets that you could use on your site.
Read full review Well suited to an organisation who wants a real presence and a superior customer experience when visiting your website. Very modern look and feel and is great for hosting videos and specialist graphics. It is hard to fault the product and it is up there amongst the best in the market
Read full review Pros Reliability. The LAMP-powered server/software rarely has any problems and can handle hundreds of concurrent users without issue. It was developed with scalability in mind. Ease of Use. Our users find the backend GUI very easy to use. The layout is intuitive and follows the same format throughout the entire control panel. Powerful. Even if it doesn't do something you would like it to out of the box, the code is well formatted and easy to customize. Read full review A centralized UI to maintain multiple websites using a common entry point. Page types and blocks that can be highly customized using .NET code, but at the same time allows checks and validations when being created by Marketing/Content Users. A very good set of extra libraries/add-ons that allows to expand website functionality in a very short period of time (Content APIs, Personalization, A/B Testing, Social) Read full review Cons The custom HTML editor can be frustrating Does not provide advanced controls and looks as well as some competitors Menus to add media content are litigious and require many clicks Read full review On the technical side, Spire is all built on React Redux, so there's a React framework and then Optimizely built their own framework on top of that React implementation, which is, I'd say customized and non-standard. So learning that as a developer is usually a four to five month learning curve. So that is a con where it's not a standard React redux implementation. Read full review Likelihood to Renew I decided not to give it a 10 because I don't know what else is out there in terms of CMS products, and there's a bias when you've only been exposed to one product. At my current job, I used Jadu sparingly but it's easy to get reacquainted with the software and the look and feel of the CMS
Read full review Since I work on the implementation side of things, and do not directly own licensing for Ektron CMS, I have to base this rating off of how I think it will be received or presented to customers looking to start a new site deployment. I try to remain CMS agnostic, though my specialty is with the .NET and Microsoft stack. Because of the experience I have working with Ektron, I tend to be more forgiving with the shortcomings as I am familiar with how to work around them or past them from experience. Being familiar with the community available also helps, as you become familiar with the best approaches to find solutions to your issues. Each product has it's ups and downs and all of them are only going to be as good as the company or development team implementing them can make them. This is EXTREMELY important to remember when choosing a CMS, as it can make or break your expensive investment.
Read full review Usability For the common user, Jadu is very easy to use and to understand. For the more complex user/administrator, there's a lot of power to be harnessed in HTML editing, creating widgets, editing styles, creating workflows, and other advanced features Jadu can work up for the customer.
Read full review The Opti CMS is pretty easy to use once you get used to it. Setting up the experience editor takes some time and difficult to follow and do in a group setting. We found working one on one or in smaller groups works better
Read full review Reliability and Availability Unplanned outages or errors are fairly rare in our instance. And when there are issues, they're usually fixed fairly quickly
Read full review Support Rating I attended multiple trainings/tutorials early in the process. The vendor-supplied content about Optimizely was engaging for users/attendees (I often analyze training content, compliance programs, governance plans), which helps our OCM people by having good "word of mouth" about the product long before a rollout ever happens. I actually when the user-focused portion of the Optimizely Academy twice in 2022 to ensure I had a grasp on operability and to be able to support the training and OCM efforts
Read full review Online Training Ektron is one of the best solution for .Net platform. Over the years have improved the performance issues that the previous versions had. My only complain is right now you can't do Page builder pages if you choose to have a MVC architecture
Read full review Implementation Rating I was not fully involved.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Jadu is miles behind these and many other CMSs. The others are much more up to date with their code and ease of use. The ability to customize other CMSs is much easier and the code structure actually makes sense. Jadu was selected because it had a portal out of the box.
Read full review Optimizely CMS is part of a more composable suite when it comes to DXPs. With that, some other systems like
Sitecore Experience Platform are monoliths, which makes the development and maintenance of those products fairly complex (this includes system architecture). In our experience, Optimizely makes it simpler to implement solutions in a rapid manner and "tack on" additional products if needed as organizations grow and are able to leverage that functionality.
Read full review Return on Investment More modern design compared to our old website software solution. Much easier to navigate and find content, as well as searching. More reliable and efficient in terms of server resources. Read full review The positive is on ROI as we can get more done without needing to go through 3rd party or know Code to create and add content. Workflows could use improvement. I don't know that there are workflows that I'm aware of. Make it easier to connect to 3rd party software like Hubspot, Magento, email services, etc. Read full review ScreenShots — Optimizely Content Management System Screenshots