Adobe Business Catalyst (Discontinued) vs. Sitecore Digital Experience Platform

The service provision is good the accounts customer service is poor so I would struggle to give BC a better than average review, if only they could offer customers a better accounts service then the value would be much higher.

Having worked with other DXP platforms, I find Sitecore to be the most suitable for enterprise-level clients. The platform is highly flexible - both customizable and extendable - making it adaptable to any customer needs or requirements. The platform focuses on the success of both marketing and technical teams, which I don't see on other platforms.

Incentivized

• The Web Apps element of Business Catalyst is unique among hosted CMS systems. It helps us solve unique challenges without involving heavy-duty programmers.
• As a Hosted CMS, it has a lot of great features without a ton of cost or liability being taken on which is important to us.
• BC has a growing developer community and has made significant upgrades over the past few years, which don't end up costing us more, and would be very expensive or time consuming in a traditional CMS
• Our client's like that it is from "Adobe" and that it has Dreamweaver integration. This provides them with a level of comfort that helps us sell the project.

Incentivized

• Customer Profiles - the ability to identify key features on the site and flag those interactions to tie customer visits back to specific persona types.
• Lead Scoring - the ability to establish a funnel for leads and use this funnel to assign a score or qualification within the sales funnel.
• Personalization - the ability to tailor experiences to unique customer segments based on their needs, identifiying and optimizing the experience in real-time.

Incentivized

• I love web apps but it can be time consuming to get the bulk import file just right the first time
• Support is good, but the effort to research can be massive for unusual issues
• Metadata on blog posts and pages can require lots of content editing at a slow pace

Incentivized

• Sitecore is complicated. Software developers need (costly) training to get the most value out of it and business users do not find it intuitive to use. Concepts like the content tree can be difficult for the business users to grasp.
• Despite everything being possible in Sitecore, virtually nothing comes out of the box - you need to develop every component and do so within a defined process and framework, which can be a fairly big development overhead.

Incentivized

Actually with Business Catalyst there is no renewal; once you are a partner, you are a partner for as long as you like. It is an investment in your business not simply a product you purchase...and as an investment in partnership with Adobe, both are committed to each other's success.

Sitecore has proven that it can deliver on its promise of a robust, reliable enterprise CMS solution with plenty of features. Also, they keep updating it with more and better features. Now that we are highly trained on it we have started on getting the most out of it and we plan to keep doing more of that in the future.

Overall it is a "plug and play" interface. The majority of the work is done in other software interfaces. Managing billing, user roles and custom reports are all that you need to manage in the actual BC user interface. For my business this is an incredible benefit as I have to leave my preferred software less.

Incentivized

Once you learn how to use the platform and can put a solid strategy in place to manage it long-term, it becomes a lot easier to use. The tricky part is working with resources who are familiar with the platform to navigate some of the common implementation and configuration pitfalls. Although Sitecore has worked very hard to overcome some of these from their earlier product versions by creating wizards and improving their support documentation, at the end of the day it is still a very complex and powerful system that needs to be implemented carefully in order to foster the best possible user experience for authors. So it could be rated very usable or not usable at all based on how much planning took place and the quality of the implementation.

Incentivized

very few issues with availability

Incentivized

Very few issues

Incentivized

The support provided by Adobe is excellent. Though the knowledge base, forums, blogs and online chat questions most all answers can be found. In the event that you are unable to find an answer or you have a unique situation simply post a question to the forums. These forums are regularly monitored by Adobe and its users.

1. Customized software development & maintenance. 2. Technology Consulting - Consulting-based services for technology solutions data engineering or cloud solutions. 3. Used for tapping into multiple data sources such as CRM and marketing automation systems and, creating automated data extracts with a high-end visual representation of data. 4. Implemented for scheduling an existing report to automatically refresh and be delivered to specific users at a specific regular interval.

Incentivized

bcgurus.com kiyuco

Incentivized

Sitecore captures and remembers every single interaction your customers and prospects have in any part of the system, allowing you to build comprehensive, ever-learning profiles of each individual. From email marketing, to social media, to online shopping, Sitecore remembers where each interaction left off so you can automatically continue the conversation. Sitecore helps you manage your content for each and every experience your customers enjoy. Customize what content you want and the system will take care of how it's displayed.

Pretty easy to do

Incentivized

We implemented Sitecore on an Agile project team, which worked very well. We worked closely with the stakeholders for each feature and all features and user stories were prioritized outside of the development team. Anyone trying to implement a website of this magnitude should definitely attempt to do so in as much an Agile fashion as possible.

I would say that all things considered Adobe Business Catalyst is an excellent product. It does have some short-comings, but it is fantastic all around. It has a nice way of tying everything in your digital presence together nicely. If you do not have a ton of money to spend on a company website, and want things like e-mail marketing, analytics, a reliable web-site, then this is probably a very real option that should be considered. If you want a website that can grow with your company, this is also a great possibility. For smaller companies with less technical resources, I don't know if you could ask for a much better all in one solution. If you want something that can be completely customized, then there are better options out there, but they will be more expensive and require more technical knowledge to use well.

Incentivized

Adobe Marketo Engage is a fantastic product for managing campaigns and audience segmentations syncing with Adobe Audience Manager. It also has OOTB connectivity to very popular CRM platforms. Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target are pretty similar to Sitecore CDP/Personalize. Any custom/extension implementation required in the Adobe space has the same complexity as Sitecore.

Incentivized

It's easy to build small sites or large sites and there is lots of templating.

Incentivized

• Surprisingly enough and despite having a second, less expensive hosting solution, a majority of our clients prefer to use the Adobe Business Catalyst solution. We are then able to enjoy the commissions that are returned as we sign up new customers for annual contracts.
• Being able to store and utilize data that comes from web form submissions has been very helpful in customer retention since we became a partner in 2011. Since that time, we have only lost two clients. That's 3 times better than our other hosting solution.
• Our largest negative impact has come from having only one choice in SSLs. For example, we had a great client in a local and growing bank. We spent 2 months getting the web site built to their specifications and we were very clear on the SSL situation. However, once the site went live, problems arose. In the past they had submitted their site to search engines with their secure URL and that was all that was indexed. Then when their customers searched for their site and clicked on the secure URL, it either showed that the site could not be found OR it said that they were entering to a site with an unverified SSL. People would then call the bank and complain. We then had to quickly move their site to another solution costing us days of re-development time and resources.

Incentivized

• Headless capabilities have enabled us to use our favorite frontend framework for rapid development and faster feature rollouts.
• Our team's productivity have improved significantly and we have no hassle to deploy new features.
• We are able to extend the feature set as per our own needs which gives us great flexibility and competitive advantage.

Incentivized