Plone vs. Sitecore Digital Experience Platform

The larger your organization, the more appropriate Plone will be. This is not to say that Plone is a worse choice for small websites, only that the minimum investment for a Plone site is certainly higher than for other platforms. If you already use Plone for your site and are looking for a redesign or an overhaul, I would only advise switching to a different platform such as WordPress or Drupal if your organization is downsizing. For any other situation, Plone is the natural choice for your growth.

Having worked with other DXP platforms, I find Sitecore to be the most suitable for enterprise-level clients. The platform is highly flexible - both customizable and extendable - making it adaptable to any customer needs or requirements. The platform focuses on the success of both marketing and technical teams, which I don't see on other platforms.

Incentivized

• Rock-solid technology stack. The python/Zope/Plone stack is as solid as anything else out there.
• Highly customizable TTW, if needed, via the Zope Management Interface, or Diazo XSL-transform theme design.
• Good support from core developers, lots of solid add-ons which address just about any needs.
• Amazingly customizable workflow, permissions and security management.

Incentivized

• Customer Profiles - the ability to identify key features on the site and flag those interactions to tie customer visits back to specific persona types.
• Lead Scoring - the ability to establish a funnel for leads and use this funnel to assign a score or qualification within the sales funnel.
• Personalization - the ability to tailor experiences to unique customer segments based on their needs, identifiying and optimizing the experience in real-time.

Incentivized

• Bullets and formatting sometimes make it difficult to add text to an existing paragraph. The 'code' button is useful in those cases, but only to those who know html.
• Sometimes the pages don't save correctly and you use information.
• Uploading and displaying images is a bit too much work.

• Sitecore is complicated. Software developers need (costly) training to get the most value out of it and business users do not find it intuitive to use. Concepts like the content tree can be difficult for the business users to grasp.
• Despite everything being possible in Sitecore, virtually nothing comes out of the box - you need to develop every component and do so within a defined process and framework, which can be a fairly big development overhead.

Incentivized

Plone has been used for more than ten years and it already has an interesting roadmap for its future. I do not know any other open source CMS with the same story of continuous evolution and security track. Interesting new features are added at each release and new modules are created continuously

Sitecore has proven that it can deliver on its promise of a robust, reliable enterprise CMS solution with plenty of features. Also, they keep updating it with more and better features. Now that we are highly trained on it we have started on getting the most out of it and we plan to keep doing more of that in the future.

Compared to the amount of Plone sites, users and customizations we have in our organization, the amount of support requests and training needed is really small.

The new user interface in Plone 6 is even better, it is super fast, has lots of different blocks for enhancing the page, has flexible layout system and is easy to extend with more features.

Once you learn how to use the platform and can put a solid strategy in place to manage it long-term, it becomes a lot easier to use. The tricky part is working with resources who are familiar with the platform to navigate some of the common implementation and configuration pitfalls. Although Sitecore has worked very hard to overcome some of these from their earlier product versions by creating wizards and improving their support documentation, at the end of the day it is still a very complex and powerful system that needs to be implemented carefully in order to foster the best possible user experience for authors. So it could be rated very usable or not usable at all based on how much planning took place and the quality of the implementation.

Incentivized

Our Plone sites are very robust. We have critical systems on Plone and we have been running sites on Plone for over 20 years with very little unexpected downtime.

Plone is very intensive in its operations, and if not configured well it can be slow. However it is designed and built with speed in mind and with proper use of coding, templates and caching can perform extremely well under high loads. It is capable of scaling to very high load availability environments with no specific coding requirements.

There are not too many Plone companies in the world. But the ones who are, are high level professionals

1. Customized software development & maintenance. 2. Technology Consulting - Consulting-based services for technology solutions data engineering or cloud solutions. 3. Used for tapping into multiple data sources such as CRM and marketing automation systems and, creating automated data extracts with a high-end visual representation of data. 4. Implemented for scheduling an existing report to automatically refresh and be delivered to specific users at a specific regular interval.

Incentivized

I have been participating Plone training and the trainers have always been professional. Materials were good and the instructions clear

Well organized, professional training with good materials and instructions

Sitecore captures and remembers every single interaction your customers and prospects have in any part of the system, allowing you to build comprehensive, ever-learning profiles of each individual. From email marketing, to social media, to online shopping, Sitecore remembers where each interaction left off so you can automatically continue the conversation. Sitecore helps you manage your content for each and every experience your customers enjoy. Customize what content you want and the system will take care of how it's displayed.

We implemented Sitecore on an Agile project team, which worked very well. We worked closely with the stakeholders for each feature and all features and user stories were prioritized outside of the development team. Anyone trying to implement a website of this magnitude should definitely attempt to do so in as much an Agile fashion as possible.

Plone is much harder to learn then Wordpress. Development in Wordpress is learnt in day's, where development in Plone really takes years to get to the full depth. That said, once you're able to develop in Plone, is it a rock solid system, with readable code. In my experience Wordpress websites need to be updated so often, and the code feels bad organised. I have been building Wordpress websites, choosing Wordpress only when the client has almost no money. But I can never deliver the quality I want to deliver when using Wordpress. Plone does offer the possibility to deliver professional websites. As for Joomla, in the past I have done some Joomla development, but the whole CMS-paradigm could not settle in my brain. Being a web developer for over 15 years now, Joomla always felt contra-intuitive. Let alone the task of teaching this to my clients. Plone is now my only choice. It gives me a fast development-cycle, a user-friendly CMS and a rock stable and very secure system.

Adobe Marketo Engage is a fantastic product for managing campaigns and audience segmentations syncing with Adobe Audience Manager. It also has OOTB connectivity to very popular CRM platforms. Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target are pretty similar to Sitecore CDP/Personalize. Any custom/extension implementation required in the Adobe space has the same complexity as Sitecore.

Incentivized

Plone has no limits. We have massive sites and can run them just fine

• We thought that tapping into the user/content management tooling of Plone would be a good and useful thing, however it turned out to be a major pain to tie into those parts of Plone.
• I wish we would have built the extra functionality completely outside Plone and found a way to integrate it. It would have been much easier.

• Headless capabilities have enabled us to use our favorite frontend framework for rapid development and faster feature rollouts.
• Our team's productivity have improved significantly and we have no hassle to deploy new features.
• We are able to extend the feature set as per our own needs which gives us great flexibility and competitive advantage.

Incentivized