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Freedom CMS

Score9 out of 10

13 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Freedom CMS?

Freedom is a cloud-based content management system from Accrisoft Corporation.Accrisoft Freedom specializes in membership and events management, social media, online marketing and e-commerce. Freedom is notable for its highly customizable databases, providing full control over HTML layout and complex filter and search capabilities.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Freedom CMS has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 13 ratings of Freedom CMS's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Role-based user permissions

    Permissions to perform actions or access or modify data are assigned to roles, which are then assigned to users, reducing complexity of administration.

    Category average: 8

  • Publishing workflow

    The software allows users to set up a custom workflow for updating the website, including approval processes.

    Category average: 8.2

  • Code quality / cleanliness

    Code generated by WYSIWYG editor is clean and validates according to W3C standards.

    Category average: 8.3

Areas for Improvement

  • Bulk management

    Users can change an attribute on a group of documents or sites all at once through features such as global search and replace, making bulk changes easier.

    Category average: 7.8

  • Mobile optimization / responsive design

    The CMS helps users build webpages that work well on mobile devices – whether m-dot pages or responsively designed pages.

    Category average: 8.5

  • Library of website themes

    A library of website frameworks or themes is available as a starting point for building a website.

    Category average: 6.7

Reviews

What users are saying about Freedom CMS.
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Accrisoft Freedom will free you from the worries of open source CMS tools.

Incentivized
Chris TheisenView profile
Director of Digital Communication in Marketing at FlexPAC (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • The new all in one image editor is nice. You can upload images and then handle all of the editing needs within Freedom or through their connection with Pixlr. It makes it much more streamlined than managing outside of a CMS.
  • Freedom is set up so you don't have too much access to the backend, which for a majority of users is a good thing. Whereas you can break a lot of things within Wordpress or other open source tools, Freedom ensures your site keeps working because you can't fool with it too much.
  • The ability to change the colors and branding on a page based on the page settings is nice. For companies with sub-brands within an umbrella it helps carry the branding through better than a site that only offers a static header section for each page in the site.

Cons

  • Their preview setup for reviewing page changes prior to pushing them live is not good. You basically have to push things live to see how they will look, then go back and tweak it, while the changes in progress are live on the site. They need a sandbox, or a better preview feature within the backend so you dont have to keep pushing changes live to test out functionality.
  • Integration with outside tools is non existent. Instead of trying to force people to use their modules or features it would make much more sense to more easily integrate with leading tools in niche spaces.
  • The UI is pretty old. It could use a big refresh. Things like drag and drop builders and functionality should be standard these days. This is also a plus for non tech savvy users as it keeps their page structures to what works without letting people tinker. But if you want to tinker and be a higher end user Freedom isn't the best bet.

Return on Investment

  • This was the first CMS we had at our company so hard to say positive or negative impact.
  • Prior to this CMS there was a static site that html files had to be ftp to a company to have the site updated. So from that standpoint it made updating the site much less expensive.
  • Compared to a tool like Wordpress this is much more secure and easier to manage, but since we outsource that portion of it to the company that built the site we dont realize those gains.

Other Software Used

Octiv (formerly Tinderbox), Formstack, Google Drive, Right On Interactive, Lesson.ly

Accrisoft or WordPress?

Mark A. Buckawicki
Internet Marketing Specialist in Information Technology at The Law Office of Amy L. Klingler, PC (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Easy to create new pages
  • easy to update existing pages
  • very easy to learn

Cons

  • I did not find any flaws or shortcomings.

Return on Investment

  • We wrote web content.
  • People read our pages.
  • Hopefully our conversions rates went up

All your (and your clients) CMS needs addressed. The Freedom you need.

Incentivized
Verified User
Professional (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Users and Access. Freedom has a great system setup to create unlimited users for the back office & full control over access. Do you want someone to only be able to access News, Events & Web Pages? - No problem. Do you want someone to be able to access everything except the Billing Module - No problem.Do you want someone to be able to access/edit ONLY the "Volunteer" category of Web Pages - Great! No Problem.
  • Custom Modules. Freedom has a great amount of pre-built modules that do a lot of great things. Custom Modules, however, takes that to the next level. Anything you can dream of for your client's needs, can be created as a custom module. You, as the developer, have full control over what fields should be created for a custom module, what types of fields are they (text, radio buttons, WYSIWYG editor, image, etc), and how those field values are used in a lister of ALL items added to that Custom Module & how they are used in a detailed view of one specific item in that Custom Module.
  • Hosting & Security. All Freedom sites include the licensing & hosting with easy to update Domain module for us developers to change the virtual host domain at any time.
  • Features and Usability. All of the modules offered (including custom) & the whole interface of the CMS as a whole is hands down one of the easiest to use & intuitive CMS's that I have come across. Our clients (and us) love it.

Cons

  • Cost and Licensing. Personally, we've never had a problem with this with our clients - we sell the value and our clients understand the value of using Freedom over other CMS options. We also will only work in Freedom - so our clients don't have an option. However, there is a monthly cost to license the CMS - which also includes the hosting. Yes, there are free options for CMS's out there - however even with those you have to find hosting. Accrisoft has different tiers of server sizes and monthly costs accordingly depending on you or your clients needs.
  • Minimal Themes. Accrisoft only has a small amount of themes available to deploy with your site. They probably have around 10-15, pretty modern and responsive themes that you can use to start a new Freedom installation with, however, if you typically deploy and install themes for your clientele - instead of custom sites, Freedom may not be for you. As you know some other CMS's can have hundreds or thousands of themes. With that said, they allow their solution providers to create themes and use site backups to transfer exact copies of existing sites to another Freedom server. So if you create your own starting templates you can always deploy and start with something - not completely from scratch. I personally don't think this is a problem at all, but am mentioning it for others to know about.

Return on Investment

  • Better Customer Service. Everything in Freedom is standardized & easy for our clients to use. It's also easy for our support team to handle any support tickets because there's not a thousand different plugins for one thing, e.g. 1000 different form plugins, there is just ONE forms module that is identical to all of our clients.
  • Increased Employee Efficiency. All of our development team is unified within Accrisoft Freedom. Any one of us can jump into another's project at any time and know how it's built and how to update or edit anything. Even with custom modules that one developer might not have known another created. Freedom is very intuitive and for example, to continue with custom modules point, all custom modules are built using the same process, so it's easy for developers to edit and know exactly how it's working in minutes - even if they haven't seen it before.
  • High Client Retention Rate. We have only lost a handful of clients throughout the many years we've been using Freedom CMS with our clients. And the majority of those that we did lose, were for reasons not related to the website - or beyond their control - e.g. a parent company insisting to use the parent company's CMS solution, even though our direct clients/contacts wanted to stay with us and told us later that they wished they could go back to Freedom because of how much easier and better it was.

Other Software Used

Google Analytics, Google Drive, Basecamp, Hotjar

Accrisoft Freedom - It does work, in some cases

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Hosting and maintenance is taken care of. Due to it being proprietary software, everything is built to work together.
  • Simple to use. Basic functionality for websites is built in without having to dig through thousands of potential options.
  • Development is straightforward...no backend languages required. So if someone wants a unique layout for a portfolio, it's very simple to add a new content type and build the new layout using basic html and css.

Cons

  • Creating layouts could be simpler. For example, if you have a sidebar on different interior pages, it isn't very intuitive to have something different on each one. Having the ability to control what is in different regions of pages would be beneficial.
  • The Commerce modules aren't quite there yet. We have had issues with reliability and if it's not built in by default, you can't use it.
  • Documentation could be better organized. There has been a lot of mixed articles from past features that no longer exist, and for some things there just isn't any documentation at all. I have had to create complex layouts that had I known a shortcode existed, it would have made my life much easier.

Return on Investment

  • Without knowing the limits of the software, projects tended to go out of scope easily, especially since the client would expect functionality that simply wasn't available.
  • The custom modules made it very simple to create something reusable. So, when we found a feature that clients liked, we could replicate it very easily.
  • Backups and migration are very simple within the Accrisoft platform. Sites could be moved from one location to another in under a minute.