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Sitecore Experience Manager

Sitecore Experience Manager

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…

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Sitecore Experience Manager has been widely adopted by various organizations for its diverse range of use cases. With its efficient …
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Best CMS Product

9 out of 10
May 25, 2021
Incentivized
Implementations have been multi-business unit implementations where the business units across the whole organization and individual …
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Sitecore the Core of our Website

10 out of 10
September 15, 2016
We primarily use Sitecore for marketing our products. Each group is able to update their own content pages, while the web marketing team …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 16 features
  • Role-based user permissions (19)
    9.0
    90%
  • Code quality / cleanliness (18)
    9.0
    90%
  • Admin section (18)
    9.0
    90%
  • WYSIWYG editor (19)
    8.0
    80%
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Pricing

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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…

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

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Square Online (formerly Weebly) is a basic content management system with blogging and eCommerce features. It can be utilized for building standard websites or specialized webpages for online stores.

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Product Demos

Sitecore Experience Manager (Publishing) in 300 seconds

YouTube

Sitecore Experience Manager (Publishing) in 300 seconds +

YouTube

XM Cloud Deploy Demo

YouTube
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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.

9
Avg 8.0

Platform & Infrastructure

Features related to platform-wide settings and structure, such as permissions, languages, integrations, customizations, etc.

8
Avg 7.7

Web Content Creation

Features that support the creation of website content.

8.4
Avg 7.6

Web Content Management

Features for managing website content

8.4
Avg 7.3
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Product Details

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 Print Experience Manager Introduction

Sitecore Experience Manager Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Cascade CMS, Crownpeak CMS, and Elcom Platform are common alternatives for Sitecore Experience Manager.

Reviewers rate Role-based user permissions and Code quality / cleanliness and Admin section highest, with a score of 9.

The most common users of Sitecore Experience Manager are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(130)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Sitecore Experience Manager has been widely adopted by various organizations for its diverse range of use cases. With its efficient content management capabilities, authors have been able to easily update and publish site content at any time, resulting in streamlined content management processes. Additionally, Sitecore's ability to host multiple sites on a single instance has led to cost savings on maintenance and license fees.

The analytics features of Sitecore have proven invaluable in tracking visitor engagement and providing out-of-the-box dashboards and reports. This has allowed organizations to gain valuable insights into their website performance and make data-driven decisions. The Webform marketers module has enabled the creation of offline registration pages and seamless integration with external systems, empowering marketers to generate leads and improve customer interactions.

Sitecore's Web Content Management functionality has been highly effective in managing websites, enabling regular updates, new page additions, and edits. The user-friendly interface has made it accessible for non-technical employees to manage content and documents, including marketing and pricing functions. By consolidating assets into a single repository, Sitecore has also improved turnaround times for managing multiple websites.

For digital marketing teams, Sitecore has proven to be an indispensable tool. It has facilitated lead generation forms, product promotions, and event pages, allowing marketers to effectively engage with their target audience. Furthermore, the platform's robustness and ease of use have made it a popular choice across different brands, enabling customization and building custom layers on top of the out-of-the-box code.

In the realm of e-commerce applications, Sitecore has excelled in managing products, partner networks, training, and services. Its seamless integration with backend membership databases has provided users with a smooth experience for event registration and community engagement. Moreover, as a content entry point for websites, Sitecore has offered initial orientation and ongoing support from organizations.

The versatility of Sitecore is further showcased in its ability to address challenges such as updating webpages, customizing web content, and automating SEO requirements. It has allowed businesses to meet their CMS needs while providing the flexibility for customization based on unique business requirements. Both marketing and IT users have relied on Sitecore for editing pages and content on organization websites.

One of the standout features of Sitecore is its ability to deliver contextual marketing and content experiences. This fosters customer loyalty and drives business value by tailoring user journeys based on customer preferences. Through functionalities like A/B testing and personalization, organizations can optimize their customer experiences to increase conversions and build lasting relationships.

Sitecore's collaborative capabilities have

Seamless Integration with External Systems: Multiple reviewers have praised Sitecore Experience Manager for its ability to seamlessly integrate with external systems such as CRM platforms, email platforms, and social platforms. This integration has allowed users to easily create personalized experiences on their websites, enhancing customer engagement and satisfaction.

Robust API for Custom Solutions: Several users have been impressed by the robustness and depth of Sitecore Experience Manager's API. They have found that this feature provides maximum flexibility for developers to implement custom solutions and integrations. This level of customization has enabled businesses to tailor the software according to their specific needs, resulting in a highly adaptable and efficient solution.

Suitability for Enterprise-level Requirements: Many reviewers have highlighted that Sitecore Experience Manager is designed to meet enterprise-level requirements. This indicates that the software can handle heavy loads and perform reliably even in demanding environments. The scalability and reliability of Sitecore Experience Manager make it suitable for high-traffic sites, ensuring a seamless user experience regardless of the volume of traffic or complexity of operations.

Challenging and non-intuitive user interface: Several users have found the user interface of Sitecore to be challenging and not user-friendly, especially when dealing with complex features and functionalities.

Maturing email marketing capabilities: Some users have expressed that the email marketing capabilities of Sitecore are still maturing, with limitations in terms of volume capacity and advanced features.

Difficulty finding suitable e-commerce solutions: Many users find it difficult to determine the most suitable e-commerce solution for their specific business needs among the multiple options offered by Sitecore and its partners.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 27)
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May 25, 2021

Best CMS Product

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Implementations have been multi-business unit implementations where the business units across the whole organization and individual marketing departments were using Sitecore Experience Manager to power their external sites and allow for digital marketing across business units for their end users.
  • 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.
We're able to have unlimited users in Sitecore Experience Manager at any given time, increased knowledge of customers and unique behaviors among personas.
Integration of our leads form with SalesForce.com helped to streamline the process.
However it was very expensive to implement and maintain.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sitecore is being used as the main website for customers to access paid digital content. It keeps track of all the user accounts, manages access to content, and organizes content for end-users.
  • 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.
The main reason to use Sitecore is if you want to develop something completely custom. It can be a fit if you have a large budget and a specific vision that can't be achieved with a more off-the-shelf solution. It also has good features for controlling the publication of new content through multi-step in-ouse approval processes. Sitecore is very capable, but I would try to avoid Sitecore if you can because it is a beast to work with and is very expensive to implement.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Sitecore with our clients to help them deliver contextual marketing and content experiences to their customers, cultivating customer loyalty and ultimately driving value back for the business. We also use Sitecore's experience management and analytics platforms to understand how users are interacting with our websites so we can learn and tailor experiences according to each person's needs.
  • 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.
Great for companies that are looking to create customized, tailored content solutions and be willing to put in the hard work and effort to maximize the value out of the tool. If your company is just looking for very basic content management without all the bells and whistles, I'd recommend looking elsewhere for less [money].
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sitecore is currently used as the backbone behind a website our practice offers to our clients as part of a suite of financial planning resources. Our current use of Sitecore has engendered interest in other areas in our Firm. The platform offers team members the ability to easily test, add, and manage content, allowing what we share with end users of our product to review current, relevant, and meaningful information and resources.
  • 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
Publishing items for site updates allows for a quick turnaround to view live in production (well suited for the frequency of updates we'll do). No feedback on where it may be less appropriate.
Erica Marois | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our team uses Sitecore for all our website content management needs. I work on the editorial team and primarily use Sitecore to publish daily articles and blog posts. Our marketing and product management teams use Sitecore to build lead generation forms, product promotions, event pages, and more. Almost every department in our organization uses Sitecore every day. It's the way we build and store our web content.
  • 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.
  • Ease of use -- it's easy to learn how to use Sitecore. I've used WordPress and Wix in the past. While they feel more modern, I actually think Sitecore is more straightforward for a new user.
  • 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.
I think Sitecore is best suited for very robust, multi-page websites. If you're trying to set up a simple blog, Sitecore is not for you. If you need to build out a website that supports multiple product lines, Sitecore could be a good option. I appreciate the back-end user experience and the level of organization available. E-commerce can be a challenge. If you're looking to sell products from your website and don't have an in-house IT team, you may need to consider a more plug and play option.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Sitecore to manage all our web content that gets used in large venues such as airports as well as military bases to sell and provide wireless services.
  • 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
From talking to other users of Sitecore (SC), the experience they have with SC varies a lot. It seems what all the users who like SC have in common is a strong development team who knows how to execute and customize Sitecore the “right” way. When SC is executed by a team of less experienced developers, the results can be very negative and counterproductive to operational efficiency.
Pooja Sawant | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have used sitecore in our company. It was used for helping clients with CMS needs and allows for better customization. It helped us with the business requirements of our clients.
  • Good customization
  • Easy integration with API
  • Helps with exact customer needs
  • Learning curve
  • Less support
This is a good CMS with good customization which may solve your varied business needs but it has a learning curve. It is not as simple as other CMS tools in the market.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sitecore is used for all elements of content management, like updating advertising banners, descriptions, terms of service, etc, for our airline booking path. However, where is comes into it's own is giving the ability to move around components of the page to ensure certain changes can be made to the site without the need for software development or code releases. Other benefits that we make use of are the A/B testing of the changes mentioned above but most significant is the ability to personalise the user journey through the booking path (and visual elements) based on what we already know about the customer - for example location, search preferences and such like.
  • 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 really isn't suited to smaller companies as it is relatively expensive and not all of the features are easily used without proper support and training, at some cost. It is however, very powerful and flexible - in fact it's flexibility is it's strength - as long as you can consume the development overhead that comes with it. I'm glad we're using it, although if you don't do things "right" then features that should be simple to utilise can be tricky. It's best suited to a traditional webshop or content site, our booking path is dependent upon previous decisions made, which definitely complicates things a lot.
s c | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sitecore is being used in my organization across different brands. Most of the brands are using Sitecore just for CMS and some of the brands use end to end Sitecore capabilities.
  • 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.
If you have a small to medium size business and moderate consumer traffic on the sites (not like a million hits per day), then you can just go ahead and start using Sitecore with all features, with a small developer base. This saves a lot of costs as you don't need to depend on any third party for analytics, personalization or A/B testing etc. But, if you are looking for a solution for an enterprise, a proper assessment needs to be done on the team structure and [you need to] establish processes to better manage the Sitecore platform.
Laxmi Srinivas Samayamantri | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sitecore is being used in my organization across different brands. Most of the brands are using Sitecore just for CMS and some of the brands use end to end Sitecore capabilities. A few of the use cases are:
  • 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.
If you have a small to medium size business and moderate consumer traffic on the sites (not like a million hits per day), then you can just go ahead and start using Sitecore with all features, with a small developer base. This saves a lot of costs as you don't need to depend on any third party for analytics, personalization or A/B testing etc. But, if you are looking for a solution for an enterprise, a proper assessment needs to be done on the team structure and [you need to] establish processes to better manage the Sitecore platform.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We primarily use Sitecore for marketing our products. Each group is able to update their own content pages, while the web marketing team for the whole company is able to specify required items and set layouts. This gives our regional directors the ability to own their content while the national marketing team is able to apply a common interface.
  • 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.
Large scale websites that have large teams are very well suited to use Sitecore. It is especially good when the marketing team wants to provide a customized user experience based on previous user interactions. For example if it is October and I am shopping for tents also recommend warm sleeping bags. If I already have a sleeping bag in my shopping cart recommend a camp stove. All of this can be done without any outside ad targeting platform being integrated in your environment. This keeps your user's interactions on your site private for you alone.
August 09, 2016

Sitecore review

Alex Lada | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I have implemented websites with Sitecore both at my current job and previous ones. At both places we acted as a digital agency building out Sitecore sites for our clients. It was selected for a variety of reasons across the different clients, including: robustness, easy of use, how easy it is to build layers on top of the out of the box code, .Net requirement.
  • 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 has proven to be the best and most powerful CMS option for clients that need more enterprise level solutions, while also having the budget to afford it. It readily adapts to any situation and any sized project. It also really excels in environments that require complex workflows and many user permission groups. Sitecore is less appropriate for smaller sized sites or clients with a more limited budget. The price can become prohibitive for smaller clients, but if they can afford it, Sitecore really outshines the competition.
Nancy Martineau | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use sitecore in our Web/Marketing Department to manage our main website and use it with our partner portal for training as well as our e-commerce applications. The CMS manages our products, partner network, training and services.
  • 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
Sitecore Web Content Management is well suited for multiple markets/product lines and product management across websites and addressing many types of customers in different languages.
Laura Bruss | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sitecore Web Content Management is used to manage our organization's website. It is used by our marketing and communications team. It allows us to update our website, add new pages, and make edits.
  • 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.
Sitecore Web Content Management is very well suited for a web team to use to manage an organization's own website because there are so many features and capabilities that a developer rarely has to get involved. You have a lot of flexibility to do many things you need, and there is only a small learning curve. However, I have worked in the past for clients that have very little technical experience, and this might be a little bit too complicated for someone like that to pick up.
Aaron Branson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
As a Sitecore partner since 2005, we help our customers solve digital marketing challenges by leveraging Sitecore experience platform. We also use the platform ourselves. Sitecore is typically the "hub" of the marketing technology ecosystem in that it provides 1) web content management, 2) multi-channel experience management, 3) user experience optimization/personalization/automation, and 4) rich data to fuel these capabilities and empower marketers. In brief, Sitecore provides a single platform that reaches across many needs without the need to piecemeal many applications together.
  • 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.
Sitecore is an enterprise-level CXM...not just a CMS. It is a great foundation for the marketing technology stack of an organization that has the resources and need for high-powered experience marketing. For organizations that just need a CMS, it is possible that Sitecore may be overkill. I liken Sitecore to a Ferrari. It is a high-performance machine, but to get the most out of it, you also need a professional driver (i.e. trained users), expert mechanics (i.e. an experienced partner), and invest in regular maintenance and performance tuning.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In my experience, a marketing department is the main stake holder in choosing a CMS such as Sitecore and relies on Executive and IT leaders approval. The user base is mainly in marketing, development obviously coming from of IT with executive analysis happening in upper management. There are always one-off company's that implement all aspects of the Sitecore CMS such as daily production usage, development and Analysis in IT or marketing .

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.
"Does my specific business fit within the Sitecore CMS toolset for my day to day users, developers and analytic's consumption."
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.
David Drinnon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Sitecore to manage our organization's public facing website, www.second.org. Sitecore provided us the opportunity to integrate our website with our backend membership database. As a result, we now have a seamless user experience for event registration, community
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.
Sitecore is well suited for enterprise sites that require integrations, multiple sites, or language support.
July 17, 2015

A Sitecore overview

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My organization sets up Sitecore for the client and configures the Sites according to business needs. The users use Sitecore as content entry point for their site. My organization helps with the initial orientation and we teach our clients how to use sitecore and also support them if they run into application issues. My whole organization deals with sitecore - developers implement/support it, marketers market the product. It addresses problems like how to make updating webpages easier and quicker for clients, provide client with data to customize web content for more customer acquisition, automate SEO requirements like sitemap generation, etc.
  • 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.
  1. How big is your organization (if small, do not use)?
  2. 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)?
  3. How much customized functionality do you have in your site like search, CRM, Newsletters (if more, do not use)?
July 07, 2015

Sitecore

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Sitecore is a global software company committed to developing products that solve real world problems and deliver demonstrable results. Their customer experience management platform combines proven web content management with customer intelligence to create a single view of a customer that drives meaningful interactions, increases conversions and builds lifetime customers. Sitecore is at the core of our digital cloud service offerings – allowing us to build enterprise scale solutions for clients to implement, run and manage their entire digital strategy, from web > mobile > social > marketing automation.
  • Marketing Automation
  • Personalization and Relevance
  • Web Content Management
  • Web Engagement Marketing
  • Predictive Analytics
  • Not a product for smaller companies
  • blog
  • e-commerce
Build enterprise scale solutions for clients to implement, run and manage their entire digital strategy, from web > mobile > social > marketing automation. With this new emphasis on personality as a key brand attribute, traditional “mind-share branding” has given way to that of “cultural branding”. The object is to create compelling brand-related experiences that build on real activities rather than mental associations.
Greg Arnold | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Sitecore to build and edit our corporate website. We only use sitecore currently with marketing and IT users.
  • 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
Sitcore Web Content Management is a very powerful system but unless you have the right IT team to help set it up correctly it can be a waste. I don't think this is best suited for small organizations.
Chris Spears, CMTO | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
We have been a long time partner of Sitecore doing implementations for customers across the globe. The Sitecore platform has several major components. 1) CMS - The primary content management system, Sitecore has a robust publishing capability, multilingual capabilities, a great separation of presentation and content for easy control of design. 2) DMS/CEP - The Digital Marketing Suite and Customer Engagement Platform provide ground breaking capabilities to digital marketers. Focused on the ability to personalize the experience for each visitor this platform integrates into your existing CRM platform to allow for implicit (session based personalization) and explicit (data from your CRM personalization). In addition these components of Sitecore include analytics, AB testing, and content scoring. 3) ECM - The email campaign manager let's Sitecore close the loop between visitors across devices. The platform is at its core a strong marketing automation and email delivery solution. The best part about the way Sitecore handles everything is as a single solution. Not making you purchase multiple modules, saas solutions, etc...
  • 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
We believe in Sitecore as a product because the functionality is all part of the same package. Unlike other marketing technology vendors in the CMS space Sitecore as built all of their components to work together. Organizations that have acquired all of the "parts" of their platform have a Frankenstein's monster that is very difficult to implement and get the expected value from.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
At Promega, we use Sitecore as the content management system (CMS) for our public website (http://www.promega.com). The content management environment is used by a fairly diverse set of content editors who work together to create, manage, curate, and maintain our website content.

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 perfect for an organization that needs the ability to perform a lot of customizations to their website and the data that is exposed there. It allows for "chunking" of data, so that these smaller chunks can be reused across various areas of the site. In the hands of competent .NET and web developers, Sitecore is an amazing platform.

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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We are an CMS implementing agency where we suggest use of world class CMS which meets client requirements. Time and again we have suggested clients to use Sitecore and it has lived up to its expectations, Great Platform for anyone who is looking into CMS.

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
This product primarily runs on Microsoft Stack (MSSQL and .NET)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Sitecore is being used by the marketing department to provide content management capabilities to the company websites. It's a robust web platform that allows us to implement complex web solutions that comply with multiple requirements from the marketing department. It allows to manage web content by providing a complete set of tools like versioning, workflows, templates, among others.
  • 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
It's well suited for enterprise level websites with high complexity and a lot of traffic that need a robust solution with a lot of advanced features. It's not well suited for small/medium companies that want a quick/small website for their internet presence. You will need highly trained developers in order to take the most advantage of its features.
Rachael Williams | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Sitecore is used by employees who need to make edits to their pages and content on our organization's website. We are trained to do this through a webinar that covers editing text, how to create and update deadlines, links, linked files, photos, etc.
  • 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
It's well suited for large organizations that need to frequently update their content on their website.
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