Ibexa, headquartered in Oslo, helps B2B companies to stay relevant and succeed by transforming traditional sales strategies into frictionless buying experiences, with their eponymous digial experience platform (DXP).
$15,000
per year
WP Engine
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
WP Engine is a website hosting service built to host WordPress for companies of any size, with features such as daily backups, firewall,SSL, and proprietary caching technology.
Ibexa is very good if you deal with content. It can be easily connected to other platforms. Also, the client support is awesome. You can easily reach out to Ibexa directly and they will listen to your needs and provide help.
New users to WordPress can rejoice with a very hands-off hosting approach. If 100% uptime is not essential, you can get breakneck speeds with minimal tinkering using their platform. If you need to get up and running quickly and scale as required, the cost-benefit is here, although you need to pay a lot to get the most from it.
Block technology is by far one of my favorite features of the tool. This allows us to quickly layout content in a unique manner with a variety of display options.
Micro Shareable content blocks allow users to quickly share our content across the web and drive more relevant traffic back to our site.
Reusable content blocks allow for better management of content throughout the site, ensuring accuracy with a simple update.
I love the database backups and how quickly & easy it is to restore from an old backup point. This gives me & my clients confidence that any change can be rolled back.
The built in caching & CDN mean that I have to spend less time worrying about the speed of the server & site. The caching has some side-effects that take getting used to (on-page dynamic PHP code sometimes needs to be moved to API endpoints), but this is true for most caching systems.
They have really good support for multiple environments. It's very easy to have separate production & staging environments. It's also very simple to deploy from staging to production, making product launches and large scale website copy changes much easier to coordinate.
Small number of development partners in North America.
We find the editorial interface still a bit simplistic. Our editors are accustomed to very sophisticated “drag and drop” wysiwyg editing tools. Ibexa DXP still has a way to go to meet their expectations.
Set up is bit complex. Spinning up a new site takes longer than you'd expect.
The user interface is not very intuitive, which means new staff members require more training than I'd like.
The way they manage production/development servers and FTP access is somewhere between nebulous and tragically unique.
Their premium pricing is surely worthwhile, but it is significantly higher than virtually all of their competitors, without much obvious distinction in feature sets.
Some very basic features like spinning up a second instance require a PHONE CALL to their BILLING department to enable. What is this, 1990?
I was in a situation where I had to bolt Wordpress on to an existing infrastructure that could not support it. If I ever end up in that situation again, please kill me. Other than that reasonably common use case, I don't think it offers a lot of value over robust shared hosting, virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated servers.
A lot of great features, easy to jump in and use for experienced CMS editors. However, the more "page builder" type features are not up to par with other, newer and more modern CMS's. They receive an A for the effort to bring modern features into an older system, but they could have been handled better.
It took very little time to learn their dashboard for managing WordPress sites. Their built-in tools are really well done, and the addition of security and CDN tools is great.
They are directly reachable and help you to deal with other services, e.g. if would like to set up a CDN for China or if you would like to integrate a tool like HubSpot. If there is anything you are missing, they help you to find a workaround until they can deliver such items - like local language versions.
Support is generally great. Enterprise support is fantastic, with little to no wait times. I find that chat support can almost always take care of the problem without escalating to a ticket for a higher level of troubleshooting. The chat support for many other hosting providers can only handle basic issues. This is a big bonus for us to get quick and helpful answers.
For Acquia and AEM the major differentiator was the cost for WPEngine was significantly lower and we could use the more common WordPress CMS. AEM is better for large marketing sites that integrate with the Abobe Marketing Cloud and we didn't feel we could support Drupal on Acquia. AWS EC2 is a viable option if you are going to self support and maintain your own WordPress experts. We felt that the value from WPEngine was they handled the support and the WordPress security patches and knowledge beyond simple theme usage. Pantheon was the closest in matching but we felt with our large installs that the hosting model for WPEngine was more cost-effective than the Container architecture for Pantheon