Acoustic Content vs. ExpressionEngine

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Acoustic Content
Score 1.2 out of 10
N/A
Acoustic Content (formerly Watson Content Hub) gives business owners the power to create, robust and consistent brand experiences using cloud-based, cognitive content management capabilities. Marketing and merchandising professionals can quickly select content to create relevant offers delivered across multiple channels, such as mobile, web-based or email. Acoustic is an independent spun off from IBM Watson Marketing in 2019.N/A
ExpressionEngine
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
ExpressionEngine is a content management system from EllisLab in 2002, a successor to pMachine Pro, a blogging system, which is written in object-oriented PHP and uses MySQL for data storage. ExpressionEngine is their flagship Content Delivery Platform.
$299
One Time Fee
Pricing
Acoustic ContentExpressionEngine
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
License
$299.00
One Time Fee
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Acoustic ContentExpressionEngine
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Acoustic ContentExpressionEngine
Features
Acoustic ContentExpressionEngine
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Acoustic Content
8.4
Ratings
4% above category average
ExpressionEngine
10.0
Ratings
21% above category average
Role-based user permissions8.40 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Acoustic Content
8.4
Ratings
10% above category average
ExpressionEngine
9.4
Ratings
21% above category average
API8.30 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language8.40 Ratings9.70 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Acoustic Content
8.6
Ratings
11% above category average
ExpressionEngine
8.9
Ratings
14% above category average
WYSIWYG editor7.40 Ratings9.10 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness8.30 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Admin section8.30 Ratings9.10 Ratings
Page templates8.30 Ratings8.10 Ratings
Library of website themes9.00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design9.00 Ratings9.80 Ratings
Publishing workflow9.40 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Form generator9.40 Ratings9.40 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Acoustic Content
8.8
Ratings
18% above category average
ExpressionEngine
9.4
Ratings
24% above category average
Content taxonomy8.30 Ratings10.00 Ratings
SEO support8.40 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Bulk management8.90 Ratings9.10 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions9.40 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Community / comment management8.90 Ratings9.90 Ratings
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Acoustic ContentExpressionEngine
Small Businesses
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Score 10.0 out of 10
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Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
RWS Tridion Sites
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Score 9.0 out of 10
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Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
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Score 9.0 out of 10
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User Ratings
Acoustic ContentExpressionEngine
Likelihood to Recommend
8.3
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.2
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
5.3
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
2.8
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
6.2
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
6.9
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
1.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Acoustic ContentExpressionEngine
Likelihood to Recommend
It is advisable to create custom designs that call for specific programs and content without giving direct access to those programs. We still have to meet the proposed use case where it should not be used.
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For someone with a limited budget, it's hard to recommend ExpressionEngine simply because of the cost of the license and any add-ons just to get up and running. As a developer, the budget needs to be a certain amount before I can even consider ExpressionEngine - no matter how appropriate it is for the site. Besides that, I recommend ExpressionEngine for those who have a lot of content, have a need for a certain level of flexibility, or who have special feature requests. There are a number of ExpressionEngine add-on developers who are willing to help build (for a fee) custom add-ons to fulfill that need.
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Pros
  • Ease of use of the tool
  • Fast results for sales from automated merchandising
  • Great insight into top performers
  • Good support
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  • ExpressionEngine has no preconceived ideas about how your content should look or what code is generated.
  • A robust template engine makes integrating designs and content a breeze.
  • The control panel can be customized to control what content managers have access to.
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Cons
  • Application is less user friendly as some of the commonly used functions even hidden inside menus.
  • Community support is very low as Acoustic Content is not widely used by many people.
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  • Can be too cumbersome for smaller projects, takes time to pair down the built in functionality so our clients have to sift through unused features
  • Large queries take significant processing power, recommended use of a cache module to store this data and speed up page load
  • Backend can be overwhelming for clients, lots of things to manage in the control panel
  • No way to repeat custom page fields or groups of fields, meaning page layout must be pretty established and not customizable from the control panel
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
I'm satisfied with the way that my site runs on EE. My primary concern is that support is now a profit center for EE's publisher and so they've consequently gutted their community support boards. However, a good EE community is developing at StackExchange. At this stage, I don't think that EE is a good choice for an individual site owner. WordPress or SquareSpace would be a better choice unless you have a budget for support.
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Usability
No answers on this topic
ExpressionEngine is very powerful and flexible. With this flexibility comes a bit of a learning curve. There are some great online resources for getting up to speed with EE, but the control panel can be a bit daunting. A lot of EE's installation process involves settings, configurations and flipping of switches. It is tedious, but well worth it as you ultimately have a very robust, secure and scalable CMS. Also, as of version 2.9.2, the control panel isn't responsive natively. You'll want to have a big enough screen to see the full control panel UI. Personally, I think the control panel would benefit from a major overhaul. It would be nice to see the colors and UI controls "modernized" and be able to more effectively customize the layout. Yes, some of this is built-in, and there are third-party add-ons to help, but maybe we'll see more refinement in future versions.
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
Never experienced an issue like this with it
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Performance
No answers on this topic
The admin section would slow to a crawl the larger the tag section grew. There were many areas where better pagination would've helped improve performance. Nothing complicated, which made the lag so frustrating
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Support Rating
No answers on this topic
I have personally never found any complications when trying to receive support from EllisLab in regards to ExpressionEngine when using the support plans they offer. I have always been responded to promptly and received satisfactory help with whatever my needs were in an extremely timely manner. This makes rating the support offered an easy job for me
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
After installing the system a few times, you can see a pattern of things that have to be done to work the way you want them (settings, paths, etc.). By knowing what you want, you can put together some scripts that prepare the file system for installation, adjust post installation configuration settings, and install initial templates.
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Alternatives Considered
Acoustic Content stands out mainly in 3 areas, Digital Asset Management system AI Based metatags More secure CDN and REST API to share content All these three features play a huge role in Acoustic Content CMS in terms of finding matching images for our content, categorize and sort our content automatically and finally secure way to publish our content.
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ExpressionEngine outweighs most all of its competitors by being so flexible. If you can imagine it, then you can build it with EE (ExpressionEngine). Most competitors lock you in with certain ways to build your website or use only their tools; ExpresionEngine gives you the freedom to build how you would like and decide how you want your site to run and operate. The ease of use for clients to go in and edit their content is great, and I am able to control the way they edit that content to make it the easiest for them. The feature set and plugins for EE are great, and I am able to provide top service for my clients by using EE.
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Scalability
No answers on this topic
Maybe it's scale-able from the content user perspective, but it was very limited from the programmers perspective. So many custom hacks were necessary that it reached a point it would be impossible to upgrade to a newer version
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Return on Investment
  • Freed up user time to call a variety of applications quicker.
  • Allowed developer an easier tool to integrate other applications for end users.
  • Allowed us to have a single method of application implementation and usage that is easier to debug, saving time.
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  • Being able to be recognized as a leader within the ExpressionEngine development community has led to us being sought out by those customers seeking expert guidance.
  • We tend to specialize in using ExpressionEngine for our customers, so it has been easier to ramp new resources up on our development process, as well as be able to seek out independent experts to use as sub contractors or freelancers.
  • As we have been using ExpressionEngine almost exclusively for a number of years, we have built a reusable repository of proprietary code that makes our development process much more efficient and decreases the effort required for our projects.
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ScreenShots

Acoustic Content Screenshots

Screenshot of Cognitive TaggingScreenshot of Flexible, Easy EditingScreenshot of Automatic renditions createdScreenshot of Card-based Asset Library