During the evaluation, Episerver was by far the most flexible as far as features and implementation go. Some of the more SaaS-based products don't allow for the level of customization needed for our clients, clientele. While the other platform boasted similar features, they left our team feeling a little empty-handed. Meaning they demoed well but did not seem to implement as seamlessly as shown in the demos.
Episerver did not have a headless CMS offering when we implemented. They may offer one now, but they are very late to the game in offering an API-based CMS experience. If you use an Angular or React front end, and you want to communicate with this incredibly expensive product you've purchased and are paying a hefty yearly fee for, you are going to have a difficult time.
All of the CMS/commerce solutions I have used were easier to integrate and customize than Episerver has been. Prismic and Contentful are light-years ahead with their apis.
Just depends on the use case. Some clients are more heavily weighted towards a marketing CMS and don't need a ton of complex technical functions of their eCommerce platform. For these we recommend Episerver.
Episerver was by far the most user friendly content platform allowing our business to easily manage the content with ease resulting in an overall productivity increase and time for the team to spend less time doing content management and more time managing the personalization benefits the platform represents.
Episerver's plug and play architecture is the winning factor comparing to AspDotNetStorefront. We did not choose Magento because it was not built on .Net.
Coming from a Software Engineering background, Episerver was the preferred system as it was an attractive platform from a developer's point of view. Today, I consult solely on Episerver solutions and still prefer the platform for multiple reasons (some already covered earlier in this questionnaire).
Overall, Episerver seemed easier to use from a user perspective and easier setup. There was also preexisting resources with Episerver experience. Factoring in costs it became an easy solution.
I did evaluate other products in addition to Episerver. The other finalist was Magento, which has a very robust cart and a large market share. I have used that platform in the past and overall had been happy with it's performance. I ultimately selected Episerver because it was .NET (versus PHP) and had very strong commerce and content components. Magento would have required an integration with another (second) platform to build out non-commerce content in the way that was necessary for the project's needs. Episerver had that out of the box. Plus Episerver's evolution and road map showed solid growth and innovation while at the same time Magento was well behind their plans to launch Magento 2.0 after already significant delays.
