Plone vs. Salesforce CMS

The larger your organization, the more appropriate Plone will be. This is not to say that Plone is a worse choice for small websites, only that the minimum investment for a Plone site is certainly higher than for other platforms. If you already use Plone for your site and are looking for a redesign or an overhaul, I would only advise switching to a different platform such as WordPress or Drupal if your organization is downsizing. For any other situation, Plone is the natural choice for your growth.

When managing a team of 30 or more technician the tools available for a scheduler are incredible. The system sync's quickly so all schedulers can be looking at the same Gantt and see what changes have been made or need to be made. If you have too small of a team this service would be overkill especially given the cost.

Incentivized

• Plone is a folder-based system, organising content in a similar way desktop-users are doing for the last two decades. No need to teach non-tech customers some relational-database like paradigm for content management.
• Plone is secure. It is the most secure CMS you can get your hands on.
• Plone is flexible, and makes fast development easy.

• It has a very smooth integration with Salesforce and third-party tools, ensuring easy tracking of policies and assets.
• It also has impressive security features like used-based permissions and encrypted data.
• Everything can be managed from a centralized place which saves a lot of time.

Incentivized

• Not everything is configurable or editable by Plone, and when you need to adjust or add custom pieces in, you need to deal with Zope. Zope has an ugly, confusing and difficult UI and structure as a backend.
• Using 3rd party products is difficult to do - there are a few different ways to get them installed, all of which take a bit of luck to get right.
• Building custom products for Plone is not fun. You've got to deal with an archaic framework to tie in that is not well documented (there is documentation about many things, but not great documentation and there are a lot of holes in the documentation).

• I find that the more complex you make things it starts to hit load times quite hard.
• Additional tracking and analytics for the pages/emails would be nice.
• Version control with autosaves and regular saves so you can tell the difference with 15-minute intervals.

Incentivized

We have critical systems running on Plone so will need it in the future.

Free to use since its Open source, so we don't have to worry about licence costs.

We know how to use and develop Plone and it has no limits.

It will be too difficult to change to a different software. We are fully integrated, and if things are not working well, it would be way worse to try to move to a different platform.

Incentivized

Compared to the amount of Plone sites, users and customizations we have in our organization, the amount of support requests and training needed is really small.

The new user interface in Plone 6 is even better, it is super fast, has lots of different blocks for enhancing the page, has flexible layout system and is easy to extend with more features.

Strengths: - Intuitive for Salesforce Users – If you’re already working within the Salesforce ecosystem, the Salesforce CMS is easy to navigate, with a clean UI, drag-and-drop content management, and reusable assets for quick updates. - Seamless Integration – Since it connects natively with Experience Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and CRM, it allows for efficient multi-channel content distribution without needing extra third-party tools. - AI-Powered Personalization – The ability to deliver dynamic content based on user profiles and engagement data is a huge plus, making content delivery more relevant and impactful. Challenges: - Learning Curve for New Users – If you're not already familiar with Salesforce, the interface can feel overwhelming, requiring training to fully leverage all features. - Limited Customization & Workflow Automation – While it works well for structured content, advanced approval workflows and deep editorial customization are limited compared to enterprise CMS platforms like Adobe Experience Manager. - Media & Design Limitations – Salesforce CMS is not as robust for managing rich media-heavy content, which can be frustrating for teams needing more flexibility in multimedia presentation.

Incentivized

Our Plone sites are very robust. We have critical systems on Plone and we have been running sites on Plone for over 20 years with very little unexpected downtime.

Seen very least outages and it would took more time hardley not more than 10 mins that to with prior advance notice

Incentivized

Plone is very intensive in its operations, and if not configured well it can be slow. However it is designed and built with speed in mind and with proper use of coding, templates and caching can perform extremely well under high loads. It is capable of scaling to very high load availability environments with no specific coding requirements.

Its very quick and not facing any issus in loading if we have good internet bandwidth then it works very well and doesnt gives any issues

Incentivized

There are not too many Plone companies in the world. But the ones who are, are high level professionals

I've never really had to contact support. It's at the point where we have people in the organization that are our specific go-to inhouse support teams for Salesforce. Again, that goes back to what I said about there being a point where just too much is added to Salesforce that you have to hire someone to be the go-to person of Salesforce. There is only so much their support team can do for you. I wouldn't expect Salesforce Support to have any sort of understanding of the weird issues I deal with!

Incentivized

I have been participating Plone training and the trainers have always been professional. Materials were good and the instructions clear

Since I attended training from one of our senior resource in organizations I didn't face any issues

Incentivized

Well organized, professional training with good materials and instructions

N/A. I wasn't present for vendor-provided training.

Incentivized

I joined post the installtion so not aware much of it but as per feedback its not that hard to setup

Incentivized

Drupal: Plone is cheaper, so with Drupal is more complex to reach the required ROI. However, Drupal has a lower learning curve WordPress: For our necessities it has a more expensive learning curve than plone. Joomla, is easier to use. However, it have some issues on security and web content where Plone is much better

Incentivized

As our business heavily relies on Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud, we need a CMS that works natively with our existing Salesforce Data. Other platforms would require third-party connectors or custom API development, making integration more complex and expensive. Salesforce allows us to manage content once and distribute it across multiple touchpoints. It also delivers personalized marketing content based on CRM data.

Incentivized

N/A. I did not help purchase Salesforce and am unaware of our contract details.

Incentivized

Plone has no limits. We have massive sites and can run them just fine

Its highly reliable when it comes to usage with high availability and robust infrastructure

Incentivized

N/A. I've never used Salesforce professional services.

Incentivized

• The impact Plone has had at the University of Oshkosh is as follows: this software allows student workers to learn about IT departments and CMS's in a user-friendly way. It gives many students great jobs that look great on their resumes.
• Since there are great training manuals for Plone, there is increased employee efficient in the workplace. Training doesn't take long, and if there's ever a question, the Plone manual is a great tool to refer to.
• If an employee using Plone quits, its easy to find someone to replace them with quick training and great resources.

• It allows me to keep a close eye on all of my performance metrics through the Dashboard Reporting, ie what my sales pipeline looks like, how much it's changed in the last 60 days, new opportunities created in the last 7 days, # of emails sent for the week, etc. The ease of the design and output make it really easy to check my progress throughout the day to find where I have holes and am falling short on my personal and work goals. It's resulted in greater transparency with my Mgmt Team and shorter 1-on-1 mtgs with my boss as he can see exactly where I am at all times (to be fair, I'm a senior sales rep, so he pretty much lets me do my job completely unfettered), but it does prove that I am continually producing which recently resulted in a raise I didn't even ask for.
• The SF repository is so detailed that I don't have to spend tons of time finding frequently used websites attached to a client or see what all interactions with the company look like. Even though I don't use SF for my bulk emails and email sequences, SF provides me with an email to use in the bcc of these emails which links everything back to SF. I find that extremely helpful. This really impacts my efficiency and I can honestly say that once I started using all the functionality of data management, it saved me about 20% of my time/week that I could then allocate towards other revenue-generating tasks like prospecting and account management. The more time I have for those, the better. My year-over-year on accounts 1 year and older just grew by 17% this last year.

Incentivized