Best, Most Balanced CMS
May 02, 2017

Best, Most Balanced CMS

Brett Whittington | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Progress Sitefinity

Sitefinity is what we use to host our current website. It is mostly used by our marketing department to keep our website fresh and up to date with new content. Most of the users had issues maintaining their own content and Sitefinity has solved that problem for them. As a developer, some of the most boring tasks when it comes to developing websites is making content changes such as updating photos and changing copy. CMSs solve this problem by taking these changes out of a developer hand's and give the power back to content managers. Many CMSs while attempting this try and fail, and developers end up making the changes anyway. Not with Sitefinity, it has the easiest UI for content managers to change. Drag and Drop controls and rich text editing have never been easier.
  • Sitefinity does a great job of making it easy for content managers to drag and drop content into a given page template without the help of developers.
  • Sitefinity makes it easy to create new types of content with its built in dynamic content generator. Tasks that used to take a couple of weeks and a developer or two can be accomplished within hours instead.
  • For developers, it also takes a lot of scut work out of making changes and lets them get back to more interesting problems. I've not run into a problem I have not been able to solve with Sitefinity yet.
  • The biggest thing I dislike about Sitefinity is the price. It's clearly not meant for smaller businesses which has priced many of my clients out of the market.
  • Another negative for me is that the product's base is Web Forms. However, they have made some headway into the MVC space, it still not a purely MVC product.
  • In the last few editions of Sitefinity have been mostly focused on marketing initiative that many organizations do not need. So the price keeps going up but the features are necessarily useful to justify the costs.
Content Managers have full, easy, control the content on the site and when content gets released.
  • IT should only be required to help with new features but not with content updates.
  • Usually contain support contracts and decent sized development communities.
  • Fully customizable with some work.
  • When implemented correctly can do great things for all involved.
  • When implemented incorrectly (which is often) make it a pain for everyone involved
  • Very expensive which mean they are only feasible to mid-size and larger business.
  • When implemented incorrectly, IT is often in charge of making content updates for content managers because they are frustrated with the system.
  • Business should be dedicated to the CMS and spend time on training and making sure the CMS is worked on right
  • Developers tend to not like working on most out of box solutions.
  • Sitefinity is definitely now for mid-sized business and enterprise businesses due to its price. It is also not a great solution if the place looking to buy it doesn't have someone somewhat familiar with CMS or Sitefinity in general. Like many other CMS, Sitefinity when implemented improperly struggles to solve the issues that it was meant to do.

    Progress Sitefinity Feature Ratings

    WYSIWYG editor
    9
    Code quality / cleanliness
    6
    Admin section
    10
    Page templates
    10
    Library of website themes
    Not Rated
    Mobile optimization / responsive design
    4
    Publishing workflow
    9
    Form generator
    4
    Content taxonomy
    10
    SEO support
    10
    Bulk management
    5
    Availability / breadth of extensions
    Not Rated
    Community / comment management
    4
    API
    7
    Internationalization / multi-language
    9
    Role-based user permissions
    10