Overview
What is Sitecore Experience Manager?
Sitecore Experience Manager is an enterprise-grade CMS competing with Oracle WebCenter, IBM Web Content Manager and Adobe. It presents a fairly wide and comprehensive swath of inbuilt features. In Sitecore WCM editing takes place from within the page with its…
Best CMS Product
Highly capable, but complex and expensive for when you need a custom solution
Strong CMS for Personalized, Contextual Experiences
Sitecore--Business/End User Assessment
Works well for managing larger websites
Heavy implementation not for everyone
Sitecore web content management
Sitecore - you have to dig for the gold, but the gold is there!
Sitecore and its altenatives
One Stop Shop for Customer Engagement Platform - Sitecore
Sitecore the Core of our Website
Sitecore review
Sitecore CMS top notch marketing partner
Great Balance Between Functionality and Usability
The Core of an Enterprise-Level Marketing Technology Stack
Awards
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Popular Features
- Role-based user permissions (19)9.090%
- Code quality / cleanliness (18)9.090%
- Admin section (18)9.090%
- WYSIWYG editor (19)8.080%
Pricing
What is Sitecore Experience Manager?
Sitecore Experience Manager is an enterprise-grade CMS competing with Oracle WebCenter, IBM Web Content Manager and Adobe. It presents a fairly wide and comprehensive swath of inbuilt features. In Sitecore WCM editing takes place from within the page with its inline editor, allowing editors and…
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Product Demos
Sitecore Experience Manager (Publishing) in 300 seconds
Sitecore Experience Manager (Publishing) in 300 seconds +
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Features
Security
This component helps a company minimize the security risks by controlling access to the software and its data, and encouraging best practices among users.
- 9Role-based user permissions(19) Ratings
Permissions to perform actions or access or modify data are assigned to roles, which are then assigned to users, reducing complexity of administration.
Platform & Infrastructure
Features related to platform-wide settings and structure, such as permissions, languages, integrations, customizations, etc.
- 8API(16) Ratings
An API (application programming interface) provides a standard programming interface for connecting third-party systems to the software for data creation, access, updating and/or deletion.
- 8Internationalization / multi-language(14) Ratings
The software supports multiple languages, countries, currencies, etc.
Web Content Creation
Features that support the creation of website content.
- 8WYSIWYG editor(19) Ratings
What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editing tool allows users to build pages without writing code.
- 9Code quality / cleanliness(18) Ratings
Code generated by WYSIWYG editor is clean and validates according to W3C standards.
- 9Admin section(18) Ratings
The admin page is easy to navigate and use.
- 8Page templates(16) Ratings
The CMS has standard webpage templates or types of web pages (e.g. homepage, article page, interior page, blog page, etc.); users can also build custom templates.
- 8Library of website themes(6) Ratings
A library of website frameworks or themes is available as a starting point for building a website.
- 8Mobile optimization / responsive design(16) Ratings
The CMS helps users build webpages that work well on mobile devices – whether m-dot pages or responsively designed pages.
- 8Publishing workflow(17) Ratings
The software allows users to set up a custom workflow for updating the website, including approval processes.
- 9Form generator(17) Ratings
Users can build website forms for visitors to fill out.
Web Content Management
Features for managing website content
- 9Content taxonomy(16) Ratings
Users can create multiple levels and types of content categories including tags.
- 8SEO support(14) Ratings
The CMS helps users create the right website infrastructure (pagination, page headers, titles, meta tags, url structure, etc.) to increase the site’s visibility in search engine results.
- 8Bulk management(12) Ratings
Users can change an attribute on a group of documents or sites all at once through features such as global search and replace, making bulk changes easier.
- 8Availability / breadth of extensions(17) Ratings
There is a broad library of extensions, plug-ins, modules or add-ons that allow users to easily customize their websites without building custom code.
- 9Community / comment management(14) Ratings
Users can put post/page comments through an approval process, auto-approve commenters based on their email addresses, block commenters by IP address, delete comments, etc.
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Sitecore Experience Manager?
Sitecore Experience Manager is an enterprise-grade CMS competing with Oracle WebCenter, IBM Web Content Manager and Adobe. It presents a fairly wide and comprehensive swath of inbuilt features. In Sitecore WCM editing takes place from within the page with its inline editor, allowing editors and authors to create display rules and content within the context of the page in an integrated process. It allows the creation of blogs, wikis, polls, integrates with social media, and is mobile-accessible for end users so as to provide a varied and tailored environment that is sensitive to visitor characteristics. Localization and regionalization allow the end user to see content in their home language. Analytics track visitor behavior, which aids in the generating of marketing reports and facilitating rule-based targeting. Experience Profiles give a rich understanding of single or groups of similar individuals, to give customer insights. The Sitecore Experience Database contains customer data and can draw additional data from CRM connected to it, for profiling visitors. Sitecore also has an AppCenter, where features can be augmented and expanded.
Sitecore is a paid platform for businesses of all sizes, and pricing varies accordingly with implementation and scale. Its licensing models is based on the number of Sitecore server installations and simultaneous users. When it is implemented as an Intranet pricing varies according to number of employees with access to it.
Sitecore Experience Manager Video
Sitecore Experience Manager Competitors
Sitecore Experience Manager Technical Details
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
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Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(128)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 27)Best CMS Product
- Sitecore Experience Manager has a capable UI for editing content. Though some competition may do better in this regard, Sitecore's editing interface is fully capable.
- Its easy to learn how to use Sitecore. I've used WordPress in the past. While they feel more modern, I actually think Sitecore is more straightforward for a new user.
- Manages many categories and subcategories of content.
- Implementing it is very expensive from a software and development point of view.
- Sitecore Experience Manager does not work well in Google Chrome. Not a deal breaker, but a little annoying. I have the best luck running Sitecore in Firefox.
- We've had trouble scheduling publications
- The price falls more to the premium side of things.
Integration of our leads form with SalesForce.com helped to streamline the process.
However it was very expensive to implement and maintain.
- Manages many categories and subcategories of content.
- Handles user accounts and is an all in one solution.
- Implementing it is very expensive from a software and development point of view.
- Developers complained that it was difficult to learn to program for.
Strong CMS for Personalized, Contextual Experiences
- Customer Profiles - the ability to identify key features on the site and flag those interactions to tie customer visits back to specific persona types.
- Lead Scoring - the ability to establish a funnel for leads and use this funnel to assign a score or qualification within the sales funnel.
- Personalization - the ability to tailor experiences to unique customer segments based on their needs, identifiying and optimizing the experience in real-time.
- A/B Testing - the user experience for setting up a new test is a little clunky and doesn't make experience creation very intuitive.
Sitecore--Business/End User Assessment
- Engaging out-of-the-box analytics tools
- Ability to interface with underlying database as needed
- external resources are easy to add (information pages, videos, etc.)
- Sometimes slowdowns in the processing of transactions (links, running tasks, etc.) -- not always clear whether the fault here lies with the product versus network versus database activity, maybe some way to graphically represent that?
- Logs should provide more detailed (what manual tasks were executed, and by who)
- Availability of a site-map or equivalent resource to more easily navigate the administrative side
Works well for managing larger websites
- Storage -- we have a robust website, with hundreds of pages. Sitecore can house it all quite easily.
- Organization -- I love how easily we can set up a folder based structure for naming conventions, etc. It makes it really easy to find what I need.
- I wish Sitecore had better staging and publishing options. In the version we currently use, we're unable to preview a post before it goes live.
- The video embed widget can be a little wonky. I wish the support of multimedia was a bit more robust. This is where a CMS like WordPress gets the edge.
- From my experience, Sitecore does not work well in Google Chrome. Not a deal breaker, but a little annoying. I have the best luck running Sitecore in Firefox.
Heavy implementation not for everyone
- Content and styling separation
- Customizability of the platform
- Work flow of publishing
- For good authoring experience for content authors, heavy development to customize the interface is necessary
- Learning curve for developers and users is very high
- A/B testing is hard to set up
- Personalization is hard to setup
Sitecore web content management
- Good customization
- Easy integration with API
- Helps with exact customer needs
- Learning curve
- Less support
- Personalisation of advertising banners based upon knowledge of the customer, like location or previous searches enables us to target customers with products and offers that they are more likely to engage with, which has been done to good effect.
- The use of Sitecore for content management enables the business and design team to perform changes to things, like images, content and page structure, which would otherwise have required a code release, which is costly in terms of man power.
- The A/B testing in Sitecore is good because it allows us to statistically verify minor changes to the site - like advert changes or component ordering on the page - as to whether or not they positively impact conversion.
- Sitecore is complicated. Software developers need (costly) training to get the most value out of it and business users do not find it intuitive to use. Concepts like the content tree can be difficult for the business users to grasp.
- Despite everything being possible in Sitecore, virtually nothing comes out of the box - you need to develop every component and do so within a defined process and framework, which can be a fairly big development overhead.
Sitecore and its altenatives
- Content authoring capabilities, which allow authors to update the site content on an as needed basis and publish it anytime.
- Allows them to host multiple sites on a single Sitecore instance, which avoids extra maintenance and license cost.
- Webform marketers module allows them to create offline registration pages and integrate them with external integrations through action commands.
- You need to have a strong Sitecore certified developer base to manage the Sitecore platform (if you are using all features). It's the same case with others. But, finding a Sitecore certified (costs $$) developer is tough in the market. Now the market is growing (thanks to Sitecore promotional events) and Sitecore is gaining popularity. It may be easy to find such developers in the future. If you want to leverage most out of the Sitecore community you need to be a Sitecore certified developer.
- Sitecore comes with lots of built-in features and marketplace components. I feel this puts it in a little tricky situation. It gives an opportunity for a normal developer to use some of the free marketplace module, which may or may not be supported in a future version of Sitecore. Which may put the entire platform at risk to upgrade to the latest Sitecore version. You need to have a proper process to control and validate the marketplace components before using them.
One Stop Shop for Customer Engagement Platform - Sitecore
- Content authoring capabilities, which allow authors to update the site content on an as needed basis and publish it anytime.
- Allows them to host multiple sites on a single Sitecore instance, which avoids extra maintenance and license cost.
- Sitecore analytics which helps track the visitor engagement with the site and provides out of the box dashboards and reports.
- Webform marketers module allows them to create offline registration pages and integrate them with external integrations through action commands.
- Learning: If you are a .net developer, learning Sitecore is very easy and even customizations are simple.
- Authoring: In previous versions of Sitecore < 7.0 inline content editing was tough. I would say nearly impossible. But, with Sitecore 8.1 experience editor. Sitecore made it so simple for authors to update and publish the content on the page itself.
- Analytics: Sitecore Analytics helps you track the user engagement and also provides an out of the box analytics dashboard which can be shared.
- Personalization & A/B Testing: Content personalization and multi-variant testing is very simple with out of the box features.
- Scalability: Sitecore has robust caching features which you allows to do component based caching that varies by different parameters. It also provides the ability to have multiple content delivery servers in a production environment and you can add as many n content delivery servers as you want (depending on the license).
- Sitecore is Customer Engagement Platform. It comes with lots of features (e.g. Authoring, Analytics, personalization, A/B Test, Webforms for marketers etc), But, most of them are not being used by many clients. If you are really looking for just CMS (only authoring and publishing), then I don't think Sitecore is a way to go.
- You need to have a strong Sitecore certified developer base to manage the Sitecore platform (if you are using all features). It's the same case with others. But, finding a Sitecore certified (costs $$) developer is tough in the market. Now the market is growing (thanks to Sitecore promotional events) and Sitecore is gaining popularity, It may be easy to find such developers in the future. If you want to leverage most out of the Sitecore community you need to be a Sitecore certified developer.
- Sitecore comes with lots of built-in features and marketplace components. I feel this puts in a little tricky situation. It gives an opportunity for a normal developer to use some of the free marketplace module, which may or may not be supported in a future version of Sitecore. which may put the entire platform in risk to upgrade to latest Sitecore version. You need to have a proper process to control and validate the marketplace components before using them.
Sitecore the Core of our Website
- The ability to build and extend Sitecore so that it does exactly what you want is a key selling point to our organization.
- Building custom reusable blocks while difficult at first has helped us to leverage code to shorten time for subsequent improvements.
- The user level permissions help us keep section administrators from accidentally taking down the entire site.
- Publishing workflow ensures that we present a consistent message, and saves us from "accidental sales" where we advertise products for $1 instead of the $200,000 we expect.
- Requires a well trained Sitecore development team (difficulty of 8 on a scale of 1-10), also the entry level content author has a pretty steep learning curve (probably a difficulty of 4 on the same scale).
- Sometimes it is hard to find the right place to make a site-wide change. Making a change that looks good in one place may be overriding the default behavior for only that one place. Experience will help developers spot these situations without pulling out too much of their hair.
- Production requires very robust infrastructure to ensure the site performs at its best. In addition Sitecore developers need higher end machines than normal developers do to keep tests running smoothly.
- Structural changes are completed using zipped xml files called packages. This requires careful ordered installation, last I checked there was no way to merge all changes for a release into one package. This could mean in a very large deployment, a release admin would need to run through 200 or more upload and install commands through a web browser.
Sitecore review
- Sitecore is very extensible. It gives you a very good foundation out of the box for content management, while also allowing you to build or add modules and frameworks on top of it.
- Sitecore provides a very robust set of admin tools for creating the data structures, content types, taxonomies, and permissions for websites. With regards to the competition, the tools, in my experience, I much more powerful.
- Sitecore allows for a diverse set of environment set ups. It is easy to set up something as simple as a 2 server (dev/prod) setup or a multi server setup with many workflow states in between.
- The templating system in place at the time of our using Sitecore (version 6) could be slow and clunky. We ended up modifying it to fit our dev needs.
Sitecore CMS top notch marketing partner
- Managing our partner network in many facets of training and selling
- Intuitive interface for all admin and marketing features
- Easy content management with the ability to customize for your individual company needs
- Marketing platform should be better marketed and explained
- I am very happy with the platform - no complaints
Great Balance Between Functionality and Usability
- Flexibility for Design: Sitecore has a lot of flexibility for changing the design of pages. You can select what will show and not show, switch out sidebar elements, etc. You can update navigation and change the ordering very simply.
- Publish Workflow: You can easily save versions and revert back. You can set locks on who can publish and require approval before publishing.
- Redirects: You can create redirects within the tool very easily.
- Easy to Use: Sitecore is very easy to pick up and use.
- For the most part, the editor works really well, but sometimes you need to get into the HTML to fix things.
- Sometimes things can get lost (probably more a result of my company's lack of organization), but if I want to edit a particular feature, sometimes it is hard to find out where that feature lives.
The Core of an Enterprise-Level Marketing Technology Stack
- Open and Scalable Content Management: At its root, the CMS capabilities offer complete customization while maintaining data integrity so that organizations can manage large amounts of content efficiently not just on the web presence but across email, social, mobile and print.
- Experience Marketing: On top of the CMS foundation, organizations can optimize the experience of their customers through multivariate testing, personalization and engagement automation. This improved experience can also be quantified by the analytics concept of Engagement Value that is baked into all tracked interactions.
- Application Integration: Sitecore enables organizations to create seamless user experiences across the entire enterprise by making it possible to tightly integrate other applications, whether they be ERP, CRM, E-commerce or any business-specific solutions.
- Ease-of-Use: This has greatly improved in version 8 but naturally when a platform offers an immense amount of features, the usability becomes more challenging. For those organizations that can truly take advantage of the enterprise-level capabilities, proper training and onboarding (organizational change management) is a must-have in order to see the vision fulfilled.
- Email Marketing: In particular, the email marketing capabilities are still maturing along with volume capacity. The basics are solid, but the more advanced features still have some caveats in their function. Version 8.2 of Email Experience Manager shows some potential in rounding out the capabilities.
- E-Commerce: While perhaps not a weakness in technical capability, there are currently multiple e-commerce solutions both directly from Sitecore and from closely-integrated technology partners, making it challenging to determine which is the proper solution for each business situation.
Marketing benefits are found in daily implementation of public content for absorption or horizontal integration with partners. This can be accomplished by a stable but performance driven IT implementation of a marketing vision. Greatly reducing daily tasks to provide an end company solutions. But this can be said for any correctly implemented CMS product.
- Solid Technical Mold: The technical side of the product is held together from version to version with a cemented API, development component and Interface. This does NOT include "marketplace" modules and only speaks to official Sitecore supplied and built products.
- Easy End User Interface: Sitecore relies on a Tree type of explorer interface or a WYSIWYG in site editing experience. If implemented correctly for the specific company a user will be proficient very quickly.
- Scaling and Performance: Even despite following best practices from Sitecore, Microsoft and development community an IT department can produce a successful website. The base rendering engine, end user tools and content delivery system will hide an enormous amount of bad design and coding before being noticed by management and web users.
- Analytics Bundled or Third Party: Bundled analytics system is very difficult to implement. But this is not entirely a systems problem but due in large part to the comparison to data from other already implemented, used and trust systems. Also implementation is likely put aside or given less priority due to focus on difficult website requirements, which is understandable. There is a gap in training and early inclusion of company analytic and optimisation departments. Sitecore has rebranded and drastically modified this DMS, OMS and Experience over and over out of frustration of low adoption.
- Core Database Exclusion: A certified developer is trained to use the system entirely through the provided official API's and content tree. Complex business requirement such as e-commerce and user to user interaction can be forced into tree structures and implemented with out-of-box API's, There are instances this fails and a more complex systems integration is needed, which becomes a better fit but in hind site make a Sitecore CMS expensive and unjustified.
- Page Editor is a powerful tool for editing content within a more user friendly environment but is not intended as an end all solution for all editing needs.
Moreover, does the purchase, initial learning curve, development and analytic needs require Sitecore's large foot print?
1) Does my company require a robust content delivery system. How complex are my workflow requirements. How much data does my companies website really have including physical and virtual assets.
2) How important is a enterprise rendering engine. How much confidence do I have in my IT department.
3) Will a complex analytic's system really be implemented and used.
4) How much integration with other system will there be, taking the load off Sitecore.
Integration, Integration, Integration....that's Sitecore!
groups, self-service portal for updating one's family information and more. The site also won an addy award from the Houston chapter of the American Advertising Federation.
- Integration Capabilities. The data integration layer gave us unlimited opportunities for Sitecore to pull data from a number of our back office systems.
- Approval Workflow. Sitecore gives us the ability to define our workflows for content review and approval.
- Sitecore Community. A community of developers who contribute to the product.
- Since Sitecore is primarily XML, it makes it difficult to create or generate reports using tools like SSRS or Crystal Reports.
- Performance. Newer versions may have addressed this, but navigating the Sitecore interface (as opposed to the public facing site) seems heavy....long page load times.
- Its packed with lots of features.....so the complexity of it can be overwhelming.
A Sitecore overview
- Marketers do not have to depend on developers to update web pages, add new pages/functionality.
- Marketers do not need to guess customer interest. With Sitecore Analytics, marketers know exactly how to veer the web content towards meeting more and more customer needs and also acquiring more and more customers.
- A lot of third party tools like Salesforce can be easily integrated to Sitecore.
- Sitecore requires bigger databases and they grow large very quickly. Not viable for smaller ecommerce establishments.
- Marketers are sometimes too much use to having a developer work with them, where they can change/update css or js along with page content. It becomes difficult to make them understand that they cannot update CSS/JS only through Sitecore without a code change.
- Need more analysis into the database and database management side of Sitecore.
- How big is your organization (if small, do not use)?
- How open are you to researching your customer data and investing time towards creating web content based on your research (if not too open, do not use)?
- How much customized functionality do you have in your site like search, CRM, Newsletters (if more, do not use)?
Sitecore
- Marketing Automation
- Personalization and Relevance
- Web Content Management
- Web Engagement Marketing
- Predictive Analytics
- Not a product for smaller companies
- blog
- e-commerce
Sitecore Web Content Management
- Very robust tool.
- Allows advances users to set up templates that less technical users can use to build pages.
- Easy approval process.
- Tool can crash unexpectedly and all unsaved work is lost
- Not user friendly for non-tech users
Why we recommend and implement Sitecore
- We use Sitecore for their ability to integrate well with external systems; IE CRM Platforms, Email Platforms, Social Platforms, etc...
- Because of the ease of integrations to platforms with lots of customer data it is easy to create personalization on your website with Sitecore
- We utilize the Sitecore ECM (Email Campaign Manager) because it allows us to build personalized emails inside of marketing automation
- Sitecore is working hard to improve their web analytics capabilities
- Sitecore is working hard to improve the volume of email their system can handle
- Sitecore is working with partners to improve their ecommerce story
Sitecore CMS: when platform extensibility is a must
My team (Web Team) supports the content editors by creating new page types and templates, as well as extending the default Sitecore behavior to more appropriately match the needs of the organization.
- Extensibility
- Performance
- User friendliness
- Developer community is still evolving and growing
- Learning curve for some operations (content editor or developer) can be steep
Sitecore is probably too much for a company that just needs a simple website with a few pages. If your pages are not changing frequently and you don't need automated integration to other systems or processes, Sitecore may not be the best fit.
Use Sitecore : Win Customers for Life
So currently I have 6 clients who are using Sitecore Content Management System as their primary CMS
- Fully Customizable because it runs on Microsoft Stack (.NET and SQL)
- Excellent Customer Engagement Platform called DMS
- Very Good Technical Customer Service
- Never felt that a must be aspect of CMS is missing in sitecore
- With my 6 years of Sitecore Experience I can say Sitecore is Perfect and ever evolving
- Sitecore seem to fit perfectly for CMS in any organization
Sitecore - Excellent enterprise level CMS
- Robust and in-depth API to offer maximum flexibility when implementing custom solutions
- Features designed to support enterprise level requirements and ready to be used in high traffic sites.
- Easy to use for content editors and highly flexible, robust and fully featured for developers.
- High learning curve if you want use its advanced features
- It can get overly complex if good implementation practices are not followed
- Deployments are fairly complicated
Useful for large organizations
- Allows multiple users to update content on a website.
- Fairly efficient in updating new content in a timely manner.
- Easy to learn system
- Some features could be more simple to use and implement