Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization (formerly Salesforce CMS) is a hybrid CMS allowing users to author content once and deliver it anywhere, in or out of Salesforce. Users create content, define content access, and define channels so they can share content and limit access to appropriate contributors. For an experience built with Salesforce, users can choose from two of the company's “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” (WYSIWYG) tools: Experience Builder and Commerce Page Designer. If the user…
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WordPress
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Wordpress is an open-source publishing platform popular with bloggers, and a content management system, known for its simplicity and modifiability. Websites may host their own blogging communities, controlling and moderating content from a single dashboard.
Salesforce CMS is well suited for anything sales. If you need information on an account, want to touch your old accounts, need to get a better idea of ownership by vertical, or want to estimate revenue from your pipeline, it is very A-OK. We use Salesforce to open, close, and study prospects to later convert them into closed deals. There is a section for notes to detail about each and every account. You can add contacts in, complete with their title, email, cell phones, and other additional info, and since our program is sync'ed up with Outreach.io you can make an immediate call from the Salesforce page. It's a must if you are growing your company and want to stay organized within multiple departments.
If your business relies heavily on content creation, and particularly on blog posts, then WordPress is really the best option you have. But if you don't have a blog, you only need static pages, or you want to build an eCommerce site, then you might want to explore other alternatives.
Easy to use, just like Salesforce's other products. Many users can sit down and figure it out in no time, and with a little training become power users.
Fast and secure - Salesforce is a leader in the cloud world so you get consistently fast results and security that is top notch in the industry.
Accessible from anywhere - if you use cloud CMS already this is a no-brainer, but for those that do in-house CMS still, this is a major difference. Mobile access from anywhere on the planet without a VPN is something you just can't do without the cloud.
WordPress is incredibly easy to set up and get running with little to no technical knowledge. Most web hosts will do it for you, since it's so easy.
With thousands of themes available for free and for low cost, WordPress can accommodate any design you can imagine.
The community behind WordPress is generous, and there are loads of educational opportunities both online and in person to learn and connect with other users.
WordPress breaks often so you need to have someone who understands how to troubleshoot, which can take time and money.
Some plugins are easier to customize than others, for example, some don't require any coding knowledge while others do. This can limit your project if you are not a coder.
WordPress can be easily hacked, so you also need someone who can ensure your sites are secure.
My rating is based on the knowledge I have of the community that WordPress has had built around it for years now. It's as solid as it comes when you talk about community involvement and expansion. There's no other CMS out there that can match-up with it, hands down.
It's super awkward if you aren't familiar with it. I have several years' experience in both my organization's salesforce as well as others and there are still things that trip me up. I think Salesforce can get to a point where it's TOO bloated with all this information, all these integrations, what-have-you, that it can be difficult to find what you need in a timely manner or it creates a hiccup in workflows that you then have to work around. On the other hand, once these issues are identified, there is the possibility to manipulate Salesforce into creating automated workarounds. So, at least it allows for that. I think it's an issue of having so many options for bolt-ons that you start to lose perspective and functionality. You tend to lose focus on usability for users.
It's a sophisticated but easy to use piece of software. Many of the content addition pieces are familiar from other pieces of software so there isn't a huge learning curve. And for new areas, there is a lot of info on WordPress.org as well as other WordPress help sites.
Anyone can visit WordPress.org and download a fully functional copy of WordPress free of charge. Additionally, WordPress is offered to users as open-source software, which means that anyone can customize the code to create new applications and make these available to other WordPress users.
Mostly, any performance issues have to do with using too many plugins and these can sometimes slow down the overall performance of your site. It is very tempting to start adding lots of plugins to your WordPress site, however, as there are thousands of great plugins to choose from and so many of them help you do amazing things on your site. If you begin to notice performance issues with your WordPress site (e.g. pages being slow to load), there are ways to optimize the performance of your site, but this requires learning the process. WordPress users can learn how to optimize their WordPress sites by downloading the WPTrainMe WordPress training plugin (WPTrainMe.com) and going through the detailed step-by-step WordPress optimization tutorials.
I'm not sure - we have hired a person/team that are Salesforce Admin so when I have a question or need support I go in-house. But, I know Salesforce has incredible L+D and trainings available for free to help users develop in their skillsets.
WordPress itself only has community service so your experience will depend on where you turn. Online, through forums and community boards, support is rudimentary but effective. You can easily turn to your local community and find exceptional individuals who know and use WordPress regularly for more advanced, inexpensive, support. I'm rating this less than 10 because of the lack of any formal support provided by a company.
Varies by the person providing training. High marks as it's incredibly easy to find experienced individuals in your community to provide training on any aspect of WordPress from content marketing, SEO, plugin development, theme design, etc. Less than 10 though as the training is community based and expectations for a session you find may fall short.
WordPress is not a great solution if you have: 1) A larger site with performance / availability requirements. 2) Multiple types of content you want to share - each with its own underlying data structure. 3) Multiple sites you need to manage. For very small sites where these needs are not paramount, WordPress is a decent solution
Salesforce has a wide variety of services and its user interface was easy to understand and use. Our teams [thought] Salesforce to be better. When we were comparing the features as per our Marketing and Branding teams needs and uses, Salesforce came out on the top.
We have considered and operated within Shopify and Squarespace. Both serve their purpose for niche clients, but we do recommend WordPress as being the superior option. We find that WordPress is easier to use and offers maximum scalability while the others are more challenging to design, code, configure and launch.
WordPress is completely scalable. You can get started immediately with a very simple "out-of-the box" WordPress installation and then add whatever functionality you need as and when you need it, and continue expanding. Often we will create various WordPress sites on the same domain to handle different aspects of our strategy (e.g. one site for the sales pages, product information and/or a marketing blog, another for delivering products securely through a private membership site, and another for running an affiliate program or other application), and then ties all of these sites together using a common theme and links on each of the site's menus. Additionally, WordPress offers a multisite function that allows organizations and institutions to manage networks of sites managed by separate individual site owners, but centrally administered by the parent organization. You can also expand WordPress into a social networking or community site, forums, etc. The same scalability applies to web design. You can start with a simple design and then scale things up to display sites with amazing visual features, including animations and video effects, sliding images and animated product image galleries, elements that appear and fade from visitor browsers, etc. The scaling possibilities of WordPress are truly endless.
