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Superior CMS for custom websites
April 12, 2018

Superior CMS for custom websites

Ben Seigel | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Overall Satisfaction with Craft

Craft is our preferred CMS for small business and org websites. Craft provides superior flexibility, extensibility, and ease of use for both developers and users.
  • Design-agnostic templating system. No themes. This means you can use whatever HTML, CSS, JS you want, and integrate it with Craft.
  • Versatile field types, with 3rd party plugins providing a bunch more. Everything from plain text to address, color picker, date/time, file assets, one-to-many relationships, and more.
  • Control panel with clean, responsive UI makes content updates easy for clients.
  • Could use a more robust implementation of rich text editor.
  • Some functionality that requires plugins, for example, advanced field management, should be part of the core install.
  • It should be a bit easier to brand the control panel w/logo and color scheme.
  • We don't have hard numbers on Craft's impact on our ROI, but we recognize that its feature set, ease of use, and integrated ECommerce allows offering a superior product to clients.
Craft was originally developed in response to ExpressionEngine's shortcomings. While ExpressionEngine has caught up in some regards, it still looks and feels a bit unpolished by comparison. Additionally, ExpressionEngine's vendor has never gotten UI right - not on their website, nor in their CMS. Craft remains easier to use, more polished and provides a wider feature set in its base install (without needing plugins).

As for WordPress - while I recognize its massive popularity, I find its reliance on themes, third-party plugins, along with security shortcomings, make it a poor fit for the larger custom projects we build. On the other hand, if you want to throw up a passable website in a day, you can't beat WordPress.
Suitable for mid-size to large websites (20 pages+). If you have a massive project with dozens or hundreds of content contributors, complex editorial process/workflow, are tied to a non-Linux platform (Microsoft Server), you may want an enterprise CMS like Episerver. If you need a small, cheap, theme-based, basic website with 5-15 pages, you'll probably go to WordPress.