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Cascade CMS

Score5.5 out of 10

59 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Cascade CMS?

Cascade CMS (formerly Cascade Server) by Hannon Hill is a content management system, with built-in tools to help users eliminate stale content, increase digital outreach, and promote end-user adoption and accountability. Cascade CMS is designed for decentralized web teams in most major industries, including higher education, government, healthcare, and technology. Included is Clive, an engagement and real-time personalization tool for collecting information and using it to craft personalized web experiences. With it, users can build profiles and engage with audiences through targeted content delivery.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Cascade CMS has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 59 ratings of Cascade CMS's features
View all features

Top Performing Features

  • Page templates

    The CMS has standard webpage templates or types of web pages (e.g. homepage, article page, interior page, blog page, etc.); users can also build custom templates.

    Category average: 7.9

  • Publishing workflow

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

    Category average: 8.2

  • 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

Areas for Improvement

  • Availability / breadth of extensions

    There is a broad library of extensions, plug-ins, modules or add-ons that allow users to easily customize their websites without building custom code.

    Category average: 6.9

  • 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

  • Community / comment management

    Users can put post/page comments through an approval process, auto-approve commenters based on their email addresses, block commenters by IP address, delete comments, etc.

    Category average: 7.4

Reviews

What users are saying about Cascade CMS.
View all reviews

A robust CMS for all of your digital publishing needs

Incentivized
John DezemberView profile
Web & New Media Specialist at Cleveland State Community College (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

  • Cascade CMS makes no assumptions about your content. Templates control how the content gets displayed.
  • Workflows are intuitive and allow for one or more people to review content before it is published.
  • The published site is static (no database connection) which allows for faster page loads and reduced risk of attack.

Cons

  • Upgrades require some technical knowledge; there is not a one-button upgrade.
  • There is not an integrated backup/restore. Our IT department manages backups for this server.

Return on Investment

  • Cascade CMS can be pricey for organizations with small web budgets—especially when comparing to free CMSs like Wordpress or ExpressionEngine.
  • The cost is justified by the robust features, frequent updates, and top-notch support.
  • The Cascade CMS community is vibrant and full of very helpful members.

Alternatives Considered

ExpressionEngine and WordPress

A fully-baked enterprise web content management platform

Andrew BausermanView profile
Senior Web Architect at William & Mary (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Cascade CMS uses a simple folder–page paradigm that our content editors can quickly grasp, as it parallels the drive structures they find on their Mac and Windows computers and the URL paths within their sites.
  • A powerful and flexible Content Type system allows site managers and administrators to simplify complex page structures and user interactions into manageable fields and WYSIWYG content blocks our content editors can maintain.
  • Cascade CMS implements a fully-baked-publishing paradigm. This allows public-facing web pages to be served by an arbitrary number of front-end web servers, while isolating the CMS itself from any spikes in external traffic.
  • Cascade CMS provides granular control of permissions/actions pertaining to non-publishable (administrative) and publishable assets assigned to users, groups and site-specific roles. Additionally, optional workflows, asset-naming criteria, file-size limits, spelling and accessibility checks, and other restrictions/automations can be applied and enforced.

Cons

  • Cascade CMS is not an out-of-the-box pre-built system that you can install, turn on and expect to be serving sites and pages on day one. It's not a blogging system like WordPress, or a drag-and-drop system like SquareSpace (both of which I've used for their own purposes). You need to have someone tasked with management and system administration – and if you implement the on-premise self-hosted version, you ought to have several people. We have the university's IT shop handling infrastructure (server hardware, containers, clustering, operating systems, load-balancing, DNS, database servers, NAS/SAN drives), our Web & Design team managing Cascade CMS (system settings, sites, templates, permissions) and managers coordinating each respective academic unit (A&S, business, education, law, marine science).

Return on Investment

  • Prior to implementing Cascade CMS, the university had hundreds of sites with disparate designs maintained with a variety of tools. Since implementing Cascade CMS, the vast majority of sites are managed within a single system and have coordinated branding and designs.
  • Having a single enterprise CMS for the university affords us the opportunity to provide training and support across all divisions & departments of the university.

Alternatives Considered

TERMINALFOUR, CommonSpot and Drupal

Other Software Used

LibreOffice, Evernote, Gitlab, Teamwork Desk, Teamwork Projects, Dropbox

Usability

The Gold Standard in CMS Enterprises for Higher Education and More

Craig CampbellView profile
Director of University Web Communication in Marketing at University of Hartford (501-1000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Version upgrades on the cloud are lightning fast. Only took about half hour to convert our site, with about 50,000+ assets.
  • Setting permissions is very intuitive and easy to set up at a high or granular level.
  • CMS tracks assets and links when moved, deleted or renamed, and allows for relational publishing of all effected assets.
  • Integrates directly with many third-party products, including Google Analytics, SiteImprove, WebDam, and many more.
  • Great customer service!

Cons

  • There aren't many options in who can assist with developing sites, as there aren't many Cascade developers available. We contract most of our development work with third party vendors.

Return on Investment

  • The first phase of our Cascade experience brought our University's web users together, and united the look and feel of our pages. We are hoping our next phase will provide the tools necessary to transform the way we market ourselves on the web. More to come.

Other Software Used

Siteimprove, Dropbox, Microsoft Office 365, TeamSupport, Google Analytics

Scripps Research using Cascade for 9 years and still loving it!

Cary Thomas, MBA CMAView profile
Chief Information Officer in Corporate at The Scripps Research Institute (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Templates
  • Distributed authoring

Cons

  • Overall we feel that Cascade Server meets our needs with a wide variety of features.

Return on Investment

  • Cascade Server provides Scripps Research with tremendous value. When we look at enterprise-scale products, and contrast that to our utility/cost ratio, we are very pleased with the product.
  • Perhaps less frequently cited by other reviewers, information security for Scripps Research is a top priority, and we have been comforted with the security profile of Cascade Server, especially when contrasted to other products that are "easily hacked".
  • Another factor that impacts our "ROI" is the Cascade community and the training opportunities for our staff both for seasoned users taking advantage of new features, as well as new users to learn the basics.

Cascade Server rocks!

Incentivized
Verified User
Professional (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

  • Versioning
  • Multiple sites

Cons

  • More robust reporting and ability for end-users to create various reports.
  • The online help through the knowledge base is hit or miss. Some pages need to be updated, and some of them are hard to follow.

Return on Investment

  • Positive - time and effort saving
  • Positive - Overall, the money spent would need several software products to do what Cascade Server does and more people.

Alternatives Considered

DNN Platform

Other Software Used

Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Adobe XD, Microsoft Office 2016, Sketch, Trello, Slack, Sublime Text, Adobe Acrobat DC

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