ExpressionEngine vs. Salesforce CMS

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.

Incentivized

If you have a large customer base and a large amount of data on each of your customers, it is really strong in creating personalized content that your salespeople can use in their pitch meetings—and then setting up workflows for automated for lifecycle journey creations to automatically go out to customers.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Easy to use, just like Salesforce's other products. Many users can sit down and figure it out in no time, and with a little training become power users.
• Fast and secure - Salesforce is a leader in the cloud world so you get consistently fast results and security that is top notch in the industry.
• Accessible from anywhere - if you use cloud CMS already this is a no-brainer, but for those that do in-house CMS still, this is a major difference. Mobile access from anywhere on the planet without a VPN is something you just can't do without the cloud.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Organizations that are new to Salesforce need to be prepared for report building and other configurations. Customization is a great feature, but it can be overwhelming if not impossible for a brand new user.
• Salesforce Trailhead is robust but can be confusing and overwhelming.
• I'm currently comfortable with only using Salesforce CMS or any iteration on a desktop.

Incentivized

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.

It will be too difficult to change to a different software. We are fully integrated, and if things are not working well, it would be way worse to try to move to a different platform.

Incentivized

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.

Strengths: - Intuitive for Salesforce Users – If you’re already working within the Salesforce ecosystem, the Salesforce CMS is easy to navigate, with a clean UI, drag-and-drop content management, and reusable assets for quick updates. - Seamless Integration – Since it connects natively with Experience Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and CRM, it allows for efficient multi-channel content distribution without needing extra third-party tools. - AI-Powered Personalization – The ability to deliver dynamic content based on user profiles and engagement data is a huge plus, making content delivery more relevant and impactful. Challenges: - Learning Curve for New Users – If you're not already familiar with Salesforce, the interface can feel overwhelming, requiring training to fully leverage all features. - Limited Customization & Workflow Automation – While it works well for structured content, advanced approval workflows and deep editorial customization are limited compared to enterprise CMS platforms like Adobe Experience Manager. - Media & Design Limitations – Salesforce CMS is not as robust for managing rich media-heavy content, which can be frustrating for teams needing more flexibility in multimedia presentation.

Incentivized

Never experienced an issue like this with it

Incentivized

Seen very least outages and it would took more time hardley not more than 10 mins that to with prior advance notice

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Its very quick and not facing any issus in loading if we have good internet bandwidth then it works very well and doesnt gives any issues

Incentivized

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

I've never really had to contact support. It's at the point where we have people in the organization that are our specific go-to inhouse support teams for Salesforce. Again, that goes back to what I said about there being a point where just too much is added to Salesforce that you have to hire someone to be the go-to person of Salesforce. There is only so much their support team can do for you. I wouldn't expect Salesforce Support to have any sort of understanding of the weird issues I deal with!

Incentivized

Since I attended training from one of our senior resource in organizations I didn't face any issues

Incentivized

N/A. I wasn't present for vendor-provided training.

Incentivized

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.

I joined post the installtion so not aware much of it but as per feedback its not that hard to setup

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Salesforce CMS is way better with both optimization and reporting both of which Sonar Scheduling lacked. Our ability to skill technician or prioritize was lacking with Sonar. The API was very delayed with Sonar so changes on the Gantt had a delay that would throw off other team members. Sonar was cheaper but Salesforce CMS is way more capable.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

We've never run into issues no matter how many concurrent users!

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It has a smooth integration with Salesforce CMS application which can make it a positive for enhanced performance.
• It may require extensive training for new joiners and that can become costly for the organization.
• It also has automation features that reduce the distribution time by a significant number.

Incentivized