Salesforce CMS vs. RWS Tridion Sites

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

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.

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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'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

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

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

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.

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

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

• 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