Honest review from someone who has been managing sites from 20 years
August 08, 2019

Honest review from someone who has been managing sites from 20 years

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review

Overall Satisfaction with Progress Sitefinity

Currently using this as our corporate website, but have also recommended and developed websites for 3 other organizations. It is being used primarily by the design/technology departments for marketing to update our company brand and presence online.
  • Once templates and custom data has been defined, it is very easy for CMS authors/editors to manage content on the site without knowledge of HTML programming.
  • Programming templates and custom module and extending the CMS is fairly straightforward for our development team.
  • Security is in the forefront, with regular updates and enhancements to the product.
  • Working with support is great, they have extensive knowledge on the product are able to assist if called upon.
  • Product utilizes .net standards, and also integrates well will standard front end tools such as jquery/bootstrap.
  • I wish there was more sharing in the community of user-generated scripts/tools (like the word press community and the vast amount of plugins)
Against WordPress, Sitefinity is easier for content authors to manage content on the site. Against ektron, seems like the application and administration tools were hacked together, and has poor ongoing support. Sitefinity has a simple approach to managing/organizing pages, content, and media assets, and customization is easy. Against Shopify, they don't let you customize the checkout process, and theme programming uses their own "scripting language", Sitefinity uses standard .net .cshtml and razor language which is simple to modify and update. This is accessible from the Admin backend so the site does not have to taken down to update simple views.
Well suited where the site content authors/editors do not have extensive knowledge of web programming. User needs to know the basics of cropping/optimizing images for the web, but those tools to crop images are also available in the CMS. Advanced users can extend the data structures, and update module themes, views easily without requiring a dedicated development team in-house (compile in VS). CMS administrators can choose data storage (file vs database), but wish there was out of box functionality to connect with external CDN - S3 storage. Custom Development, and enhancement of the CMS out-of-the-box functionality is straightforward for development teams, easy to customize the product, themes, and custom modules. You will need to have access to Microsoft .net developers to be able to extend beyond out-of-the-box functionality.

Progress Sitefinity Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG editor
10
Code quality / cleanliness
10
Admin section
9
Page templates
9
Library of website themes
7
Mobile optimization / responsive design
7
Publishing workflow
9
Form generator
10
Content taxonomy
9
SEO support
8
Bulk management
7
Availability / breadth of extensions
7
Community / comment management
7
API
6
Internationalization / multi-language
8
Role-based user permissions
9

Using Progress Sitefinity

Very easy to use, and can setup roles and workflow so that non-technical staff can manage the site content and not mess anything up.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
None
  • site content management
  • change workflow
  • assignment of roles/permissions are good and can customize as well
  • easy to extend custom content/data types
  • Updating the software, still requires development/staging environment. Wish there was a rollback.