Broadsign in Montreal offers a suite of digital signage products for various purposes including Broadsign Control for content distribution across a network of digital signs with content automation and scheduling. Broadsign Creator provides tools to support the creation of compliant brand content to be created locally or distributed across a network. Finally Broadsign Direct supports advertising sales and Broadsign Reach is the company's supply side platform.
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ExpressionEngine
Score 10.0 out of 10
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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
Broadsign
ExpressionEngine
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
License
$299.00
One Time Fee
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Broadsign
ExpressionEngine
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Broadsign
ExpressionEngine
Features
Broadsign
ExpressionEngine
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Broadsign
-
Ratings
ExpressionEngine
10.0
Ratings
21% above category average
Role-based user permissions
00 Ratings
10.00 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Broadsign
-
Ratings
ExpressionEngine
9.4
Ratings
21% above category average
API
00 Ratings
9.00 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language
00 Ratings
9.70 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Broadsign
-
Ratings
ExpressionEngine
8.9
Ratings
14% above category average
WYSIWYG editor
00 Ratings
9.10 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness
00 Ratings
10.00 Ratings
Admin section
00 Ratings
9.10 Ratings
Page templates
00 Ratings
8.10 Ratings
Library of website themes
00 Ratings
7.00 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design
00 Ratings
9.80 Ratings
Publishing workflow
00 Ratings
9.00 Ratings
Form generator
00 Ratings
9.40 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Very suitable for large networks and projects requiring enhanced functionality. less suitable for small networks as the learning curve might be considerable.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
We analyzed other solutions in 2008 but were convinced from the get go Broadsign would be a perfect fit for our needs in the long run. 15 years later our choice has been proven right.
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.
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
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.