LightCMS (discontinued) vs. Sana Commerce Cloud

LightCMS is perfect for 90% of websites out there. It has all the basic modules like calendars, photo galleries, news/blog, or forms building built in. Small businesses to mid-sized businesses are perfect for LightCMS. We use other solutions when the requierments for the website include a lot of third party integrations or custom modules. As a hosted CMS it has the same limitations as others with server-side development.

Its suited more for B2B-focused or mid-size companies that want to have a more robust platform for their eCommerce and don't want to invest that much (like the case of Magento and other big names). If you want to make constant UX and design enhancements and tests, you'll have a couple of headaches. It's not that bad but; you wont be able to do it all without customizing and spending good money on it.

Incentivized

• LightCMS provides all the major functionality 90% of sites need. It keeps out of its own way by making these solutions intuitive and simple and not trying to solve every problem for everyone which would over-complicate the tool-set.
• This is the easiest to use CMS we have ever seen. I tell my client's that if they can make a Facebook post, they can manage their website, and it's true. Their UI is so easy and keeps getting easier to use. Untrained users get it in minutes and are able to manage their sites without our help.
• LightCMS's code is simple and light-weight. Sites are fast and the CMS doesnt get in the way of performance.
• You can do almost anything you want (except server-side programming) with LightCMS. So, we can create any design we want and it works great with Light CMS's tokens and editable regions concept (which is also simple to implement.)
• Constantly upgraded and fixed, the product is 1000x better after 10 years of working with it, but is still simple and not bloated.

• Quote Workflow--pretty simple and easy to understand and implement
• Easy-to-learn admin tools
• Very flexible/customizable initial configuration

Incentivized

• While keeping it simple is LightCMS's thing, some of the elements/modules could use deeper options or control for advanced users.
• Some content, such as calendars, cannot have data exported/imported easily.
• Support was amazing 10 years ago. We openly talked about how awesome they were... it isn't as good as it once was, but is still way above almost every support of other CMS systems we have used.

• The service could be much better. It's expensive and hard to monitor because they only check cases twice a week (if you don't have a pre-plan).
• The language and different time schedules have been an issue for tech problems. They're in Holland and Ukraine and we're in Mexico, and is really hard to find developers who know the platform to hire as an extra resource.
• You can't import SKUS to populate a landing page programmatically.

Incentivized

We have looked at hundrends of CMS's and LightCMS is a perfect entry-level system for most of our small to mid sized clients. LightCMS's feature set is less complex than almost every other system and the actual interface is miles ahead of most other CMS systems. It's simply thought out better. It lacks sensibility and an API as well as other advanced features many more expensive or more DIY systems have, but the simplicity makes up for it.

Sana Commerce is not as robust, flexible (or expensive) as Magento but is better (and more expensive) than Shopify. It is well balanced and you can customize according to your clients' needs. They are constantly upgrading their platform so you can keep your eCommerce up to date, but you must consider an extra cost to adapt it to the latest version.

Incentivized

• While I always think the price could be cheaper, LightCMS is incredibly inexpensive if you consider the costs of hosting, support, and upgrading is all included.
• As part of their partner program, we are able to control client accounts from our master account, making moving between clients easier and supporting them faster which ultimately makes our labor costs better.

• The ROI was 18% more than expected
• Our traffic has increased by 250%
• Some of our clients think our site is too complex

Incentivized