All your (and your clients) CMS needs addressed. The Freedom you need.
Updated January 07, 2016
All your (and your clients) CMS needs addressed. The Freedom you need.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Overall Satisfaction with Accrisoft Freedom
Accrisoft Freedom is used by our entire organization, both internal and externally for our clients. We build all of our websites on the Freedom CMS platform.
Accrisoft constantly is upgrading and improving features in Freedom and always eagerly helps if any support issues arise. Freedom allows us to offer our clients, blogs, news, events, unlimited webpages and forms, menus, membership login areas and so much more - all easily updated and maintained by our clients. The greatest feature I believe is the custom modules that we can create to have any field(s) we want and to display those field values however we want for our clients. Freedom might not have a pre-built staff directory module, but it's a name field, bio field and photo/image field away for us to easily create one for our client - and allow the client to easily input and update.
The other great thing about Freedom is we never have to worry about open-source-style plugins that break when upgrading the CMS or developers that no longer support their plugins. All of Freedom's modules, including the custom ones, always work on every CMS version update. Freedom allows us to put our client's minds at ease with their website and focus on what they do best - running their business.
Accrisoft constantly is upgrading and improving features in Freedom and always eagerly helps if any support issues arise. Freedom allows us to offer our clients, blogs, news, events, unlimited webpages and forms, menus, membership login areas and so much more - all easily updated and maintained by our clients. The greatest feature I believe is the custom modules that we can create to have any field(s) we want and to display those field values however we want for our clients. Freedom might not have a pre-built staff directory module, but it's a name field, bio field and photo/image field away for us to easily create one for our client - and allow the client to easily input and update.
The other great thing about Freedom is we never have to worry about open-source-style plugins that break when upgrading the CMS or developers that no longer support their plugins. All of Freedom's modules, including the custom ones, always work on every CMS version update. Freedom allows us to put our client's minds at ease with their website and focus on what they do best - running their business.
- Users and Access. Freedom has a great system setup to create unlimited users for the back office & full control over access. Do you want someone to only be able to access News, Events & Web Pages? - No problem. Do you want someone to be able to access everything except the Billing Module - No problem.Do you want someone to be able to access/edit ONLY the "Volunteer" category of Web Pages - Great! No Problem.
- Custom Modules. Freedom has a great amount of pre-built modules that do a lot of great things. Custom Modules, however, takes that to the next level. Anything you can dream of for your client's needs, can be created as a custom module. You, as the developer, have full control over what fields should be created for a custom module, what types of fields are they (text, radio buttons, WYSIWYG editor, image, etc), and how those field values are used in a lister of ALL items added to that Custom Module & how they are used in a detailed view of one specific item in that Custom Module.
- Hosting & Security. All Freedom sites include the licensing & hosting with easy to update Domain module for us developers to change the virtual host domain at any time.
- Features and Usability. All of the modules offered (including custom) & the whole interface of the CMS as a whole is hands down one of the easiest to use & intuitive CMS's that I have come across. Our clients (and us) love it.
- Cost and Licensing. Personally, we've never had a problem with this with our clients - we sell the value and our clients understand the value of using Freedom over other CMS options. We also will only work in Freedom - so our clients don't have an option. However, there is a monthly cost to license the CMS - which also includes the hosting. Yes, there are free options for CMS's out there - however even with those you have to find hosting. Accrisoft has different tiers of server sizes and monthly costs accordingly depending on you or your clients needs.
- Minimal Themes. Accrisoft only has a small amount of themes available to deploy with your site. They probably have around 10-15, pretty modern and responsive themes that you can use to start a new Freedom installation with, however, if you typically deploy and install themes for your clientele - instead of custom sites, Freedom may not be for you. As you know some other CMS's can have hundreds or thousands of themes. With that said, they allow their solution providers to create themes and use site backups to transfer exact copies of existing sites to another Freedom server. So if you create your own starting templates you can always deploy and start with something - not completely from scratch. I personally don't think this is a problem at all, but am mentioning it for others to know about.
- Better Customer Service. Everything in Freedom is standardized & easy for our clients to use. It's also easy for our support team to handle any support tickets because there's not a thousand different plugins for one thing, e.g. 1000 different form plugins, there is just ONE forms module that is identical to all of our clients.
- Increased Employee Efficiency. All of our development team is unified within Accrisoft Freedom. Any one of us can jump into another's project at any time and know how it's built and how to update or edit anything. Even with custom modules that one developer might not have known another created. Freedom is very intuitive and for example, to continue with custom modules point, all custom modules are built using the same process, so it's easy for developers to edit and know exactly how it's working in minutes - even if they haven't seen it before.
- High Client Retention Rate. We have only lost a handful of clients throughout the many years we've been using Freedom CMS with our clients. And the majority of those that we did lose, were for reasons not related to the website - or beyond their control - e.g. a parent company insisting to use the parent company's CMS solution, even though our direct clients/contacts wanted to stay with us and told us later that they wished they could go back to Freedom because of how much easier and better it was.
Compared to every similar products/CMSs I have used, nothing competes with Freedom CMS. It's far more intuitive, far easier to use as a developer (and as the client), easier to customize and better to maintain and assist our clients. Hands down the best CMS solution I've found for me, my work and our clients.
The only 2 in this list I might recommend over Freedom would only be circumstantial: if you are an medium to large e-commerce business (or your client is). ShopSite & Shopify (or Magento, etc) would probably be a better option. Freedom does have some e-commerce included, but I would recommend Freedom for small e-commerce businesses, or businesses where e-commerce is not their main focus, but they'd like to include some on the site.
The only 2 in this list I might recommend over Freedom would only be circumstantial: if you are an medium to large e-commerce business (or your client is). ShopSite & Shopify (or Magento, etc) would probably be a better option. Freedom does have some e-commerce included, but I would recommend Freedom for small e-commerce businesses, or businesses where e-commerce is not their main focus, but they'd like to include some on the site.
Freedom CMS Feature Ratings
Accrisoft Freedom Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
Yes - New updates, new versions, new patches can occasionally come with bugs. Accrisoft is great at immediately fixing these issues & releasing new patch updates. Before they release a new full version or new patch version of Freedom, they will also manually fix the specific server/site in which you are experiencing the bug.