ExpressionEngine Educational Services Reviews & Insights

Score10 out of 10

88 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for ExpressionEngine are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Reliable Performance: Many users have praised the product for its reliable performance. Several reviewers mentioned that the product consistently meets their expectations and performs well in various scenarios. Ease of Use: The ease of use is a common pro mentioned by several customers. Users appreciate how intuitive and user-friendly the product is, making it easy to navigate and operate without any hassle or confusion. Great Customer Support: Some users have expressed their satisfaction with the great customer support provided by the company. They have found the support team to be responsive, helpful, and efficient in resolving any issues or inquiries they had.

Reviews

7 Reviews

Educational Services

ExpressionEngine - the CMS of Choice

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 15, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I worked at an advertising agency that used ExpressionEngine for all their client websites; it was their CMS of choice. All of the developers installed it, set up custom fields and made it meet the client's requests, each site is fully customized for the client. We had a boilerplate set up that enabled us to set up a new install quickly.

Pros

ExpressionEngine manages content and users extremely well and with ease.
ExpressionEngine is reliable and scales for small websites to enterprise websites.
ExpressionEngine has a large community following and many reliable plugins.

Cons

ExpressionEngine makes a ton of calls to the database, so caching is extremely important.
ExpressionEngine has a learning curve when learning to set up templates properly.

Likelihood to Recommend

ExpressionEngine is a good option for a CMS for many people. It scales easily, is reliable and has plenty of plugins to extend functionality. I've used it on small websites and enterprise websites, receiving roughly 15,000 requests daily. It's easy for end users to navigate and easy to manage user roles.

Verified User

Employee in Marketing (Education Management company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

ExpressionEngine, Affordable Comercial CMS

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

February 19, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use ExpressionEngine as our enterprise CMS solution for the entire university. We host over 10,000 pages, support over 75 departments, train and manage over 200 editors, and serve over 4 million page views per week. After evaluating many commercial CMS solutions, ExpressionEngine was selected for several reasons. First, it was far more affordable than other choices presented to us. Second, our in house skill set was in php development in a LAMP stack environment. Third, it is easily extensible, allowing us to develop custom solutions in house and not be reliant on only solutions provided by the vendor. Out of the box, ExpressionEngine is extremely flexible in regards of how you decide to display cont in the presentation layer.

ExpressionEngine's affordability and flexibility have allowed us to continually enhance our web presence and use the system to build several stand alone web applications.

Pros

Extremely flexible and extensible
Fabulous user and developer community on Twitter, Facebook and Slack Chat.
Wide range of third party add-ons that solve many challenges. Ranging from calendars to special field types.
Cost of entry is extremely affordable compared to other commercial solutions.
Runs on any LAMP server setup. Though, larger installations will require something with more horsepower. We run on a load balanced, 3 server setup.

Cons

Running Local, Staging, and Production environments takes a bit of work.
The Control Panel set up and theme are not great. We usually swap out the theme. Though once you become familiar and set up quick links, it becomes much easier to use.
It can be a little resource heavy on large, high traffic sites without some additional caching.

Likelihood to Recommend

It functions well for a small blog, a catalog site, or a large high traffic site. Some notable sites are Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Garmin, and Pizza Hut.

Jim Wyse

Web Services Manager in Information Technology at UMass Boston (Higher Education, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

9 years of experience

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ExpressionEngine: The Flexible Content Management System.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

July 17, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ExpressionEngine powers our college's main web site as well as online training modules, event and ancillary sites. ExpressionEngine's flexibility allows us to publish a variety of content types and designs to our web site and other internal systems. User control and access to manage, update, and approve content changes is also a great benefit.

Pros

ExpressionEngine has no preconceived ideas about how your content should look or what code is generated.
A robust template engine makes integrating designs and content a breeze.
The control panel can be customized to control what content managers have access to.

Cons

The upgrade process can be tedious if your site uses more than a couple of add-ons.
Back ups must be managed manually or by a third party system/add-on.

Likelihood to Recommend

ExpressionEngine can literally be used for any type of site, but for a very basic site with just a few pages or if the site will primarily be used for blogging, there are better tailored solutions.

Also, you will need a developer and/or someone very familiar with content management systems to install and configure the software. There is nothing like the "WordPress famous 5 minute install" that will give you visible results very quickly.

John Dezember

Web Developer in Marketing at Cleveland State Community College (Higher Education, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile

The best f you want to create templates to have a lot of independent subsites

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

July 7, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It was mostly used to create sub sites of each medical department.

Pros

Customizable
Independent subsites
Easy to use and to learn (it took me a little bit to learn about this CMS and start doing my own plugins)

Cons

The variety of plugins is not that big, besides the database is the best one in performance

Likelihood to Recommend

So far it's one of my favorite CMS [products], especially if you want to create templates to have a lot of independent subsites.

Juan Bolivar

Database Analyst in Information Technology at University of Miami (Higher Education, 5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

ExpressionEngine - A highly recommended CMS.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

June 30, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use ExpressionEngine for our main website at the University System of Georgia and 70+ sites throughout the organization. It allows our content owners to publish and edit their own content throughout the site. ExpressionEngine is very customizable on the backend and allows us to fine tune what our users see and have access to. This makes the backend much more user friendly for our content owners.

Pros

Allows our content owners to easily edit and publish their content.
ExpressionEngine has a large amount of community provided add-ons allowing you add the needed functionality you need to your website.
The user base is large and very helpful. You can usually find your answer to a question quickly in the Ellislab forums.

Cons

Upgrading ExpressionEngine can be a hassle especially when you have MSM sites.
Add functionality to be able to easily export and import your MSM sites.

Likelihood to Recommend

I feel ExpressionEngine handles our large website very well. However, we have found there is a limit to how many websites you can run on one install of ExpressionEngine due to a limitation in MySQL. We have fixed this shortcoming by dividing up our website into several installs of ExpressionEngine on our server.

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (Higher Education company, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

Easy to use; difficult to develop

Rating: 6 out of 10

May 2, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ExpressionEngine is being used by our entire office, which houses five separate sub-offices and a handful of initiatives. Each of these requires its own web presence, but still operating under our office domain name. ExpressionEngine helped give us an easy to use solution for allowing each department to take some of the responsibility over their own content.

Pros

Easy to use. We can train up new employees on how to use the system to perform all basic tasks in under 30 minutes.
Effective interface design. The interface is surprisingly uncluttered and makes navigation easy. Additionally, they provide easy ways to customize the navigation and options available to each user.
Secure. There are far less vulnerabilities using ExpressionEngine than the other CMSs we considered, such as WordPress or Drupal. We have never had an issue with security on our site.

Cons

Convoluted development. Starting developed is a bit tricky, as the idea of channels, fields, field groups, etc. is not very intuitive. Takes building a site and then rebuilding to fully get the hang of.
Poor support. Since there are many free alternatives, ExpressionEngine often lacks documentation that you'd expect it to have since there is not as large of an online community.
Lacking default features. ExpressionEngine allows you to customize and expand it a lot, but out-of-the-box it has a lacking set of features. It is usually better to install plugins to help meet your needs. For instance, Structure is an almost required module if you plan on having to manage many pages.

Likelihood to Recommend

The questions to ask are based on its strengths and weaknesses. If you are looking for a secure, easy to teach platform for simple content management and are able to have dedicated staff to learning the platform and maintaining it, this is for you. If you do not have a dedicated person to administer the site and troubleshoot issues, it would be better to go with an alternative platform, like Wordpress.

Trent Willis

Webmaster in Information Technology at Grooveshark (Education Management, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

High-end CMS features, great community!

Rating: 9 out of 10

April 19, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ExpressionEngine (EE) is being used for our two major brands, The Human Element® and LIFO®, training and occupational development systems we market in the US and manage worldwide. We use it for both public websites, http://thehumanelement.com, and http://lifo.co. We manage mostly static pages, with some dynamic elements that take advantage of EE's database underpinnings.

Pros

Content management: very easy to log in and add pages or make changes.
Managing global elements and implementing them site-wide. Need a new logo or sidebar element? Change one "embed" and it's implemented throughout your site.
Dynamic content that needs sorting by date. From the obvious such as blogs, to the less so, such as event listings, EE's extensive category management, display options and sorting make it relatively easy to flow dynamic content into your pages.
Simple commerce: yes, it's unsophisticated, but it's a breeze to set up and manage.

Cons

Image management isn't as effortless as other solutions, but it's getting better ... plus, there are a myriad of third-party tools that add more features in this area
Updating to the latest version of EE involves a lot of technical work in FTP, and can get messed-up easily if not done exactly right. It is a far cry from a typical OSX or Windows update experience, to be sure.
This is not an in-page editing scheme, such as Barley — you will be managing content from a separate, back-end admin site, and so it feels less "hands-on" than the in-page CMS's out there. That said, there is way more power to EE than these other offerings.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are able to provide training in the use of EE's control panel, then I would recommend it wholeheartedly. The person you train will need to have some technical proficiency, so I feel that this product self-selects based on that skill level. If you want a quick page editing tool for a small website without any dynamic content such as a blog, EE is not well suited, though Ellis Labs offers a simpler solution for that scenario, too.

Antony Gravett

V.P., Marketing & Technology in Marketing at The Schutz Company (Professional Training & Coaching, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

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High-end CMS features, great community!

Rating: 9 out of 10

April 19, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Content management: very easy to log in and add pages or make changes.
Managing global elements and implementing them site-wide. Need a new logo or sidebar element? Change one "embed" and it's implemented throughout your site.
Dynamic content that needs sorting by date. From the obvious such as blogs, to the less so, such as event listings, EE's extensive category management, display options and sorting make it relatively easy to flow dynamic content into your pages.
Simple commerce: yes, it's unsophisticated, but it's a breeze to set up and manage.

Cons

Image management isn't as effortless as other solutions, but it's getting better ... plus, there are a myriad of third-party tools that add more features in this area
Updating to the latest version of EE involves a lot of technical work in FTP, and can get messed-up easily if not done exactly right. It is a far cry from a typical OSX or Windows update experience, to be sure.
This is not an in-page editing scheme, such as Barley — you will be managing content from a separate, back-end admin site, and so it feels less "hands-on" than the in-page CMS's out there. That said, there is way more power to EE than these other offerings.

Likelihood to Recommend

Antony Gravett

V.P., Marketing & Technology in Marketing at The Schutz Company (Professional Training & Coaching, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

View profile