Titan CMS vs. Umbraco CMS

Titan CMS is a good full featured CMS if users are fairly tech savvy. It is under active development and has added significant features through the years.

Incentivized

Umbraco is well suited for websites that are looking to do a wide range of activities that require complex technoligies. An example of this is a company with several different products or services. Umbraco would be overkill for simple sites that are mostly static. It is also difficult to find developers who have Umbraco experience, as it's market share is not all that high

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• It gets easier, after taking a couple starter courses and really digging into detail with what Titan could do, it became super user-friendly and I actually enjoyed learning new things about the product.
• The support group for Titan was extremely helpful. Whenever I had a question or needed some assistance they were always ready and willing to go the extra mile to make sure everything was accounted for.
• Titan made it super easy to be able to preview and save recent work before making it live on the website. This really helped in getting an idea of how to improve simple texts and pictures.

• Quick to learn. For most if cases, developer needs to know Razor coding.
• Doesn't require back-end programming.
• Has build in users management (developers, content managers) and members management consoles (users of the site).
• Clear admin tool (especially in version 7)
• Fast.
• Creating code from scratch, so it is easier to create clean code.

• Titan requires some training and users should have fairly good technology skills. Our organization has moved toward more central editing of web content because distributed staff using Titan struggled too much and so it was easier to have more centralized editing than distributed editing. The problem is that administrative staff didn't have enough technology skills. Titan could improve by having two level of editors... full editors using Titian as it is now and then basic editors that would interact with a page similar to interacting with a Facebook page.
• Can be slow at times when you want to quickly move between screens in Titan. This may be the result of our specific hardware that Titan is implemented on.
• Sometimes need to edit HTML directly to fix font/formatting problems.
• Wish CMS integrated Google Web Analytics to allow viewing of page analytics while editing.
• Wish CMS provided help during a responsive design migration by inspecting HTML and highlighting elements (such as tables) that require modification.

Incentivized

• Migration of data between servers. There are tools that you can pay for that help facilitate this, but like any CMS system, there are still some tricks to getting it to work correctly.
• Running as a Web Project instead of a Web Site. Umbraco does not run compiled code, but instead compiles it on the fly. I find this to cause some performance issues that would otherwise be resolved with a compiled code base.

Incentivized

Titan CMS had a great support system and they helped make my experience go smooth. They offer courses to help people get acquainted, offer support over the phone and are more than willing to make your experience a great one. Once I was familiar with Titan I always found myself wanting to learn more and do more to improve upon the website. Titan makes CMS fun and exciting!

Everything we've needed to accomplish, Titan CMS has been able to accomplish. From multiple levels of user rights, document rights, tagging pages and documents to make filters do the work of content displayed on a page - it's all easy to set up too. Creating a content rich product detail page template and customizing a ecommerce cart to work for those using a dealer network - needing a request for quote, to go to dealers instead of a self checkout.

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Umbraco CMS effectively addresses enterprise content management needs. It's quite mature .NET based CMS, standing out as a leader among its competitors. Websites built with Umbraco are blazing fast. Extensive customization capabilities, and user-friendly content publishing interface makes it an ideal choice for businesses looking for a mature CMS solution.

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Occasionally, errors will appear in the admin that make it impossible to work without developer support.

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Working in the admin panel (adding / reviewing / editing content) is very slow. The public facing site speed is dependent on what the pages are doing and how well the code was written (whether it is optimized for speed).

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I understand that our Web Development Team is very busy, however, sometimes there is a delay in response and a followup email is needed to determine the progress of the issue/question

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Support for Umbraco-owned paid plugins is nonexistent.

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It was customized to include screen shots of our site and how users can access the content that only pertains to them as well as advanced training sessions for admin duties and everything that goes along with it. Training is in small groups and can be private (your company only) if you like too.

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Online training is often based on older versions of the platform. So, you'll have to fill in the gaps on your own.

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Talk to your project manager for Titan early on in development about minimalizing customizations. It seems obvious, but many times they do what you ask in the respect of "This is how we do it now, make that happen in Titan" vs. think of how Titan can deliver the same results within the confines of the base software. It's not a fault, just human nature.

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Spend the time to wireframe the content structure prior to diving in. This helps speed the process of implementation and it serves as documentation for end users.

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I am a super fan of WordPress and would have suggested having our website built within that platform in a heartbeat, however, I began my employment here after the website had already been built within Titan. Essentially, Titan was chosen as our CMS because we needed something that could work in relationship with our CRM, and the Web Development Team needed to be local (within a reasonable distance). Titan and WordPress are very similar in many different ways, and I think that at some point, Titan could be as "smooth" as WordPress, but there are still a few other weaknesses that it needs to overcome

Incentivized

We previously used WordPress, however this was not easy to use, it was a complicated system and was limited in what we could achieve, there was a big outlay in buying bolts on and ensuring the system was safe. We found we where spammed loads, we tried to make it work however after a year we decided to leave WordPress behind. The company did evaluated Adobe but the dev team decided that Umbraco was the best tool to meet our own needs.

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Without significant development, the product does not scale well.

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• Positive ROI by allowing content contributors embedded within departments with the department domain knowledge to update the site directly. More efficient and less centralized spending.
• Requirement for investment in training users of CMS cuts into ROI. Would recommend a two-step workflow where department content contributors enter information into CMS and then approval step is done by webmaster team to ensure content meets standard formatting guidelines. This workflow functionality exists in the Titan CMS.
• Positive ROI experienced during projects such as moving to a responsive design because much of the content can migrate untouched. Also positive when updating graphics in template to give site new look.

Incentivized

• CMS is free
• Support form Umbraco HQ is not expensive, can include Courier or other functionality
• For most cases does not need back end developer
• For trained Umbraco developers (Razor coding, using admin tool), developing medium site, takes a few weeks max