RWS Tridion Sites vs. TYPO3

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.

TYPO3 is great if you need to connect some systems in company to work together: like ecommerce + CRM + ERP + MRP and build an Extranet for partners/dealers where they can order your products, see particular BOM (bill of material), paid/unpaid invoices and use email marketing on top of it. You can do it but keep in mind that you will need a dedicated hosting, well organized admin(s) and some handwritten code. For simple blog TYPO3 is also a good choose, but WP would be better I think.

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

• open source - do what you want, and even if you dont know how to do it - someone will do it for you
• more secure than others (Joomla, WP, Drupal) - thanks to dedicated Typo3 Security Team
• modularity and diversity - a lot of plugins/extensions
• workflow and user roles - feel free to build a workflow templates ie. for documents routing
• assets management - no matter is it a video, audio or text file, you can REALLY manage it.
• typoscript language - sometimes JS is not enough

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

• compared do Wordpress - far less community support
• when you run a simple blog - it is simple as piece of cake. But if it is a large news site, with many user roles, extensions and permissions - it may be hard to find an admin that will organize and keep that stuff working.
• server resources: so you want performance and speed with all that modules enabled? make sure that you have dedicated server in most cases. WP works much better here.

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.

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.

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.

• more complex and elastic revoke system (undoing changes for multi-administrator systems) PHP/JS and TypoScript language
• LTS - long ter msupport (bugfixes and updates)
• usage rights and permissions (much more advanced thatn in WP/Joomla)
• separation of design and content (in WP also but here is complex)
• many plugins to integrate with external systems
• several portals may be operated from a single admin/install

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

• + 1 platform that handles connections to 11 external systems (CMS, CMR, ERP, MRP, accounting, controlling, email marketing etc.)
• + still lower TCO than commercial systems (Oracle, Microsoft)
• + LTS - long term support - can provide you an updates or bugfixes
• - resource consuming (forget about shared hosting in large projects)

Incentivized