Paligo vs. RWS Tridion Sites

Paligo is particularly well suited for developing similar document sets for multiple products or product lines. It is not a page layout application, so don't expect the same capabilities as popular applications for graphics-heavy documentation. With some up-front time developing good layouts, however, Paligo does manage to create very usable PDF output for customer-facing documents.

Incentivized

SDL Tridion works well for organizations with a large website with a lot of content to continuously create and manage. The use of page templates and component presentations makes creating new pages fairly straightforward. It can be a little cumbersome when it comes to trying to "break from the norm" and build web pages that are outside of the template-driven format; however, there are ways around this to create pages that break away from the normal page-template format of the website. In this regard, SDL Tridion can be pretty flexible, allowing us to create a lot of custom functionality to keep up with constantly changing web trends.

• The review mode is super convenient. Comparing a snapshot of the previous versions with the current one clearly outlines the respective changes and reduces the necessary content to review tremendously.
• The option to reuse text fragments is another handy feature. Text fragments will be updated whenever the original text fragment is altered is also extremely helpful.
• Managing a content's structure was never easier. An intuitive drag & drop functionality allows you to design your document's structure however you like.
• You can also fork content, in addition to reuse text fragments. This is another helpful option that no longer requires you to create repetetive chapters over and over.

Incentivized

• Makes it easy to spin up a new site quickly
• Allows for numerous users to work on the same site without conflicting with each other's changes
• Allows you to unpublish changes or revert to old versions if you make a mistake
• Allows you to time publishing actions (for example, you can set it to happen overnight)

Incentivized

• The amount of CSS/JS required to customize a site's appearance can be cumbersome
• Product documentation can be lacking, specifically with integrations; in some cases, support offered no real help when trying to solve a problem with an integrated service
• Some features require extensive development experience to use, which can sometimes be an obstacle to less-experienced team members

Incentivized

• If you are hoping to orbit the planet with a CMS, Tridion is built to leave the solar system. It is a very very powerful solution built for very serious enterprise businesses in hope of robust capabilities, which could be good or bad.
• Supporting business users is a hefty lift and requires significant training and regular retraining, and support.
• It's a niche solution that originally came out of Europe and was largely unknown in America. But today it's growing in popularity across the United States.
• Finding capable support, and developers specializing in Tridion capabilities isn't always easy. And 8 years ago it was nearly impossible, involving finding European developer support shops in order to get the assistance needed. This is changing though and American developer firms are becoming more widely available.

Incentivized

Paligo single-sources beautifully. Allows for customization. Has the best translation features. Has the best support services.

Incentivized

I am giving this a semi-high rating because we have already got Tridion up and running and we are still in the process of moving the sites over to Tridion. It is unlikely we will be moving things to a new CMS AGAIN in the near future as the cost to get Tridion was high.

Generally, I'm very happy with Paligo and the productivity gains that I get from using it. There are a few arbitrary limitations on structure, and when applying conditional formatting, that I don't really understand. Unlinking / editing reused text uses this broadly inscrutible colour-coding that I just hate. It would be nice to double-click a component, make edits, then respond to a popup asking if I want to confirm the edit for all linked content, or unlink this instance. Likewise converting from an informal topic insertion to duplicates of its raw contents.

Incentivized

The editor user interface is very user friendly and in-site editing makes simple updates fast and easy. The extensibility of Tridion is a big plus and the ability to add our own options into the default Tridion interface helps us integrate with external systems. Finally, the user permissions and security system helps us deploy it within our large organization.

So far, support has been excellent. They reply very quickly and give in-depth replies. Solutions advisors and account managers have also been very responsive and clearly focused on creating the best experience for implementation. And that's only when the answers can't be found in excellent product documentation. The online training class and tutorials are also very good.

Incentivized

Everything went well

Incentivized

Paligo gives you the benefits of a fully integrated XML content database, making the whole package much easier to setup and use than a system using Oxygen. It's much easier to set up and far less expensive than Adobe's XML offerings. The cost is comparable to MadCap, but all our content was already in Docbook, so the transition to Paligo was nearly seamless.

Incentivized

Interwoven teamsites, Documentum, Adobe - teamsites and documentum are old and limited. Adobe rocks but I like where I am and Tridion does a lot of the same things. No need to reinvent the wheel or move to a lateral product.

• Positive - has allowed us to create templates for integration documentation. this has greatly sped up our process for creating articles for each of our integrations, which we haven't had up to this point.
• Positive - has created greater alignment between the self-service content team and the marketing team.
• Positive - has introduced a review and feedback workflow for our content creation that was not available in ZenDesk. The feedback directly in the app allows me to pinpoint comments about text and other elements so my writers can address them directly and become better writers in the long term.
• Negative - long ramp up time due to a completely different approach to creating content. My team was training in early August and we have not yet published our new help center (though, to be fair, it is a lot of content that had to be completely rewritten)
• Positive - any UI updates only require updating a single image, which has saved us dozens of hours of updating already.

Incentivized

• SDL is a very complex system. Creating custom components by external vendors turned out to be expensive.
• The learning curve is very slow, so training takes a lot of time and cost.
• The revamped corporate site looks clean, modern, and is mobile-friendly.

Incentivized