Plone vs. Whatfix

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.

Currently, we are only using Whatfix with Salesforce but are in the process of implementing on other systems. It is an excellent tool to organize and provide in-app access to training materials already created. It excels at providing guidance about tasks users don't complete often and, therefore, forget what they were trained about the process. The only sort of system it might not work well is one that provides its own robust in-app assistance. More than one type of tip icon being displayed, for instance, could be confusing.

• 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.

• Whatfix is a vendor that listens to their client, understands their business challenges, and works with them to achieve their goals.
• Feature enhancements are released every quarter, often with significant functionality improvements.
• The support and engineering teams are outstanding - responsive, helpful and nothing is ever too much trouble. Literally, second-to-none!

• 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).

• The possibility to select content/widgets at the time for "push to production" (some we would like to p2p for one single content, that is not possible at the moment).
• I wish the filters in the dashboard would stay when you choose a content, currently you have to filter again and again.
• In the analytics area, I would like the system to remember this for a certain time window after selecting the start date.

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.

[We feel like] even though Whatfix has its flaws, we are impressed by the speed of development [and] their openness about their future improvements, [but] most important their proactive customer service and customer success team. Whatfix acts more like a partner than a supplier of a 3rd party tool, and we welcome that experience.

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.

While they've made a lot of improvements in the last year, there are still challenges with walkthroughs and how beacons can be created. They are aware of these limitations and are actively soliciting customer feedback to help them remedy these shortcomings.

Incentivized

Invited by the Vendor

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

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.

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.

Sometimes there is a delay to showcase all whatfix elements

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

Whatfix is THE best vendor I've ever worked with when it comes to supporting their customers. The support team is friendly, helpful and always willing to listen to your suggestions and ideas. This also applies to the Engineering team who I've spent several hours on calls with debugging a few of the more challenging scenarios we have in place. Nothing is ever too much trouble for Whatfix and they are truly best-in-class when it comes to their support model.

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

Well organized, professional training with good materials and instructions

While helpful, the feedback from our employee was, that [they felt] the training was very high-level - sometimes confusing. It would be great to have some kind of sandbox environment for new users to train certain scenarios.

Although Whatfix make the process relatively straightforward (they will provide Group Policy Scripts to install a Google Chrome extension specific to your organisation) its important to ensure your network deployment teams (if you have more than one) understand their role and what they need to do to test deployment once they undertaken the work.

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

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

There is no comparison - Whatfix is the clear winner with us from the very beginning. As Whatfix continues to grow and innovate their product, engage with it's customers on a level beyond any I have every seen. They work as Partners with us, their teams from bottom to top are incredible - Customer Service, Collaboration Teams, Innovation, Sales, Success Mangers and everyone I missed are incredible. One team in particular I want to call out for there outstanding service, care and innovation to help us launch one of our systems is the Professional Services Team. Ganish, Joel, and everyone else who has been on our calls and worked behind the scenes to hit our incredible tight deadline in August - KUDOs for a job well done, You ROCK, THANK YOU words cannot describe how great you guys have been with us on this project, but on all of them. Whatfix's team definitely understands, the customer is first, they align with our values and we will continue to grow with them

Incentivized

Invited by the Vendor

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

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

• 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.

• Reduced Training Costs: By cutting traditional training time by 40%, Whatfix has saved significant resources while increasing learning efficiency.
• Improved User Productivity: Faster onboarding and fewer errors have led to a 25% improvement in user performance metrics, directly contributing to operational efficiency.
• Decreased Support Requests: Self-service guidance has reduced support tickets by 30%, freeing up teams to focus on strategic initiatives and cutting support costs.