Likelihood to Recommend If you want to choose a quick start template and fill in the fields with your content, Ion will be fantastic for you. We've done this with whitepapers and quizzes and it's been great and extremely easy to use. If you have an exact idea of what you want, and a background in web development, you may get frustrated. Ion has some quirks that make it tricky to fully customize - everyone once in a while I really just want to go into the HTML and make some changes, but can't. If you are looking to reuse a piece of content for specific targeting (industry or account-specific), Ion is great. The dynamic substitutions are great and very helpful.
Read full review Titan CMS is a good full featured CMS if users are fairly tech savvy. It is under active development and has added significant features through the years.
Read full review Pros Quick Starts make it so easy to get started. Real-time updates are awesome and save a ton of wasteful process. The combination of user friendliness for simple things and the flexibility to do more complex things is great. Chat support is excellent and deeper-dive support has been super helpful. The ability to use these tools in the cloud or embedded has given us tactic flexibility. Read full review Utilizing a Filter to determine what shows on a page saves countless hours of configuring content that should be displayed on a page - it's been a lifesaver how easy it is to set up too. Smart Search takes the search box and makes it magical. Common misspellings and alternate names can still send a user to the proper page! Data nodes and filters can also be configured to Find a Dealer, Doctor, Location etc. It puts the power into a users hands and makes is easy to use. Read full review Cons Ion University, while stacked with a wealth of information, is difficult to navigate from a troubleshooting perspective. The tutorial videos are all very helpful, but they are also very long. Sometimes I would want to search for how to address a particular issue I was struggling with and it would be a two-minute segment buried in a 45-minute video. Again, getting back the self-guidance side of things. I think a lot of the tutorials are set up in a way that makes sense to Ion, but not as much to the end user. I think the controls admins use when creating new users could be a bit more straightforward. Read full review I would love to see a "View this Page" button after a page has been updated/published. Every time I publish a new page, I have to open a new browser window, navigate to a different tab, copy the page url "example/example/example" and paste it after "www.mywebsite.com" in order to preview the new page/content. If Titan and WordPress were in a beauty competition, there is no way that Titan would win. Titan's dashboard, buttons, etc are dated and bland, and is in dire need of a refresh. A drag and drop to upload feature would be very helpful. Creating forms is very cumbersome and the pop-up window in which the form is created needs to be revamped. The font-size is much too small and it is not as customizable as it could be. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We use it for every landing page and we plan on only doing more dynamic content creation. We dont see that option coming in-house any time ever in the future. ION has a very robust platform for us to work with that really allows us to do more for our customers in regards to having the one-to-one conversation.
Laura Medley Interactive and Digital Strategy, Production and Marketing Consultant
Read full review Titan CMS had a great support system and they helped make my experience go smooth. They offer courses to help people get acquainted, offer support over the phone and are more than willing to make your experience a great one. Once I was familiar with Titan I always found myself wanting to learn more and do more to improve upon the website. Titan makes CMS fun and exciting!
Read full review Usability Usability is straightforward, with extensive documentation and tutorials provided to ensure landing pages are built to specifications and can be optimized for performance. Built-in platform funnels give insight into customer dropoff, success/failures, and conversions (at a glance). Setting up a landing page can be done quickly and easily, with numerous integrations (CRMs like SalesForce, for instance) supported
Read full review Everything we've needed to accomplish, Titan CMS has been able to accomplish. From multiple levels of user rights, document rights, tagging pages and documents to make filters do the work of content displayed on a page - it's all easy to set up too. Creating a content rich product detail page template and customizing a ecommerce cart to work for those using a dealer network - needing a request for quote, to go to dealers instead of a self checkout.
Read full review Performance Sometimes the editor can be a little slow.
Read full review Support Rating The ION support team is amazing. There has not been a single issue they they could not solve for me. If there is a feature or request that they do not have, they have even, on occasion, created custom scripts for our team. *Update 6/5/17 - ION has continued to delight on multiple occasions. I appreciate their attention to detail and ability to solve whatever issue I have. After 3+ years of use and support, ION still has my full endorsement.
Read full review I understand that our Web Development Team is very busy, however, sometimes there is a delay in response and a followup email is needed to determine the progress of the issue/question
Read full review In-Person Training It was customized to include screen shots of our site and how users can access the content that only pertains to them as well as advanced training sessions for admin duties and everything that goes along with it. Training is in small groups and can be private (your company only) if you like too.
Read full review Online Training They offer a great amount of online training, videos, articles, etc. There is usually an answer available if you run into an issue. I would recommend taking advantage of the online training they offer. I wish I would have done it sooner.
Read full review Implementation Rating There were a lot of things we learned about the tool once we really got in and got our hands dirty. Being hands-on was essential for our team to be able to utilize ION in the most effective manner.
Read full review Talk to your project manager for Titan early on in development about minimalizing customizations. It seems obvious, but many times they do what you ask in the respect of "This is how we do it now, make that happen in Titan" vs. think of how Titan can deliver the same results within the confines of the base software. It's not a fault, just human nature.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I was not the decision maker to choose this over
Uberflip , but the UI is much more appealing to me. It's incredibly easy to use, clean, and from a backend standpoint, it requires little to no tech savvy'ness. Our team has really enjoyed using it and has required no training what-so-ever.
Read full review Clients have access to the online and PDF documentation, also tips and how-tos for the most current versions of Titan CMS in the market. Check out our full documentation library! unlimited Dev/ QA/ Server install. Load balancing, and cluster support included. Upgrade options included free of cost along with unlimited CPUs per server.
Read full review Scalability Separate client portfolios enable scalability, however, some elements are still grouped for all accounts so it's difficult to scale for an ad agency with multiple clients. Would prefer totally separate sections of the platform for all clients with each element housed separately.
Read full review Return on Investment Though we have not had the service long enough to see any measurable outcomes, we've been able to create interactive web content faster than ever before The speed with which we can build interactive pages and re-use assets has been critical as projects we've done with Ion have made their way around and more and more internal clients have said "me too" for their own projects It is very pricey at $28K for the base annual subscription (dropping to $24k after the first year), so depending on your budgetary situation, that may make no sense for your team--but we had contract money set aside for a company to build us a microsite for around the amount, so we just used it for Ion instead and will now be building the microsite ourselves using it Read full review Positive ROI by allowing content contributors embedded within departments with the department domain knowledge to update the site directly. More efficient and less centralized spending. Requirement for investment in training users of CMS cuts into ROI. Would recommend a two-step workflow where department content contributors enter information into CMS and then approval step is done by webmaster team to ensure content meets standard formatting guidelines. This workflow functionality exists in the Titan CMS. Positive ROI experienced during projects such as moving to a responsive design because much of the content can migrate untouched. Also positive when updating graphics in template to give site new look. Read full review ScreenShots Ion, by Rock Content Screenshots