Innovaxis Marketing Review of Adobe Business Catalyst
Updated December 09, 2014

Innovaxis Marketing Review of Adobe Business Catalyst

Sean Parnell | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review

Software Version

WebCommerce

Modules Used

  • E-Commerce, Blog, Contact Forms, Web Apps, Custom Development

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Business Catalyst

As an Adobe partner, Business Catalyst is our preferred website content management system for the vast majority of websites we design, develop and implement. We also use Adobe Business Catalyst for our website as well as CRM. We became a partner because Business Catalyst is the easiest web CMS I have ever used over the past 20 years - easiest to develop to, easiest to build out new websites, and easiest for our clients to maintain their own website and add content.
  • It's easy for my design team to turn Adobe InDesign or Photoshop files into HTML and CSS
  • It's easy for my production team to build out the whole site in terms of content and on-site search engine optimization (SEO)
  • It's easy for our clients to log in, add new pages, update the navigation, blog, and add contact forms
  • Some clients really like the email marketing capability, especially as this functionality usually doesn't cost them anything extra
  • Our e-commerce clients really like how easy it is to set up and maintain
  • Adding unique page titles and meta descriptions to the blog has been challenging especially relating to tags and the "pages" that are automatically generated for them - we'd like this to be a lot easier
  • In-context editing is kind of cool but is really slow loading and it's difficult for my design team to set this up properly
  • You cannot redirect certain pages that no longer exist, so our clients get dinged in Google Webmaster Tools for pages no longer there - e.g. database-created pages with question marks in the name, .apsx pages and some other funky file types
  • When uploading contacts from an email list, we have to contact Adobe directly to get them to manually "verify" each contact so we can email them - we've already gotten permission from them and don't want to have to email them just to get there permission again to satisfy Adobe
  • When editing a page, it sometimes loses its formatting after saving in the viewer - the changes are still there, it just doesn't display properly. This used to happen on every save and now happens intermittently
  • Has allowed us to develop websites about 25-50% faster when compared with WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Umbraco, Modx, Miva, etc.
  • Has eliminated the need to manually updated the content management system, which is the main weakness of WordPress
  • Has become our default web content management system, which has led to website development driving growth for our business in addition to our strategic marketing consulting and research services
Adobe Business Catalyst is our favorite web content management system - it has everything built in and, being in the cloud, never needs manual updating like the open source stuff out there. It's contact database isn't as robust as SalesForce or Sugar, but it works and is convenient. The email marketing capability is "light" but does the job and saves our clients $50-$100 per month if they don't email more than 1,000 people per month and, even if they do, it still costs less.
Adobe Business Catalyst is our go-to web CMS and, until something comes along that is a lot better, we're going to continue using it to develop our lead-generating websites.
Adobe Business Catalyst is easier to use than WordPress and is infinitely better than other open source platforms like Joomla, Drupal, Umbraco, and Ruby on Rails. This holds true for both website developers to build new websites as well as for end-users to write blogs, edit website content, upload images, embed videos., etc. As a result, Adobe Business Catalyst is ideal for about 90% of websites out there: from business-to-business (our focus as Innovaxis) and small to medium business-to-consumer sites. It's not as useful for large consumer e-commerce sites that need a high degree of customization (where a lot of people use Magento), but Business Catalyst is good for just about everything else. Our clients are very happy with it.