ExpressionEngine 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.

ExpressionEngine Reviews

12 Reviews

Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees)

Website development that's simplified and streamlined

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 18, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ExpressionEngine has completely transformed the way we manage our website. This is our first CMS and it has been a life-saver when it comes to making instant updates or creating/editing content across all of the different pages. We have specific templates designed to fit our brand, our products, and our wireframe.

Pros

Editor contains preview windows to check work before saving changes.
Each section has a WYSIWYG which instructs users on the dimensions needed for images.

Cons

Sometimes, I'm unable to pull from the PDF folder when trying to link a file in the WYSIWYG.
Content boxes in certain templates do not expand, which makes it difficult to navigate where the cursor is and keep your place while editing.

Likelihood to Recommend

ExpressionEngine, for the most part, has a straightforward, user-friendly interface and is far more simplified than any proprietary software that I've used as a website administrator in the past. Sorting through the site structure and creating new pages is a fairly simple process. This CMS may be less appropriate for customers who require far more complicated templates (with a heavy dose of coding) to match their needs.

Verified User

Employee in Marketing (Banking company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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: 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

ExpressionEngine is a steam engine in a world of bullet trains.

Rating: 2 out of 10

Incentivized

July 7, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use ExpressionEngine as a CMS for our public website, http://bacterin.com. The biggest issue I have with ExpressionEngine is the lack of current documentation and third party module/plugin support. I find WordPress to be a much more simple solution to CMS with a much larger community. I do like how clean ExpressionEngine code is, but that simply can't outweigh the cons of the product.

Pros

Clean Code Output
Straight-forward CMS input
Simple page management

Cons

Session timeout/cookies suck
Needs much more community
Needs more current documentation.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you want a completely hand-coded website with a simple CMS backend, ExpressionEngine is fine. If you are looking for a site with easy-to-add plugins and a great community, use WordPress or even Drupal.

CJ Williams

Graphic Design / Marketing Specialist in Marketing at Bacterin International, Inc. (Biotechnology, 51-200 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

Get ready to commit some time!

Rating: 3 out of 10

Incentivized

June 30, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ExpressionEngine was used by the marketing department who is the business unit responsible for the company's web presence. The only users in the organization were myself and a few others in the marketing department. The others had access only to post and edit entries in certain areas of the site, where I had access to, and was in charge of all areas of the site and further development. It was used regularly for news releases and updating content.

Pros

It has very specific user-access controls. You can create custom categories of user access and assign users to any of them. It has the capability to grant very specific access to virtually any area of the site. Assigning new users and deleting old users is very easy as well.
The ability to customize the CMS is probably the most robust feature. No site is exactly the same and the live version shouldn't feel like a template. ExpressionEngine makes sure you are in charge of exactly what you need.
More and more, there are developers creating great new modules that add higher functionality and customization. Installing and removing modules is very easy.

Cons

Its no secret that ExpressionEngine is not for beginners in CMS's. While there is certainly a vast network of support available online, EllisLabs does little to help the average/new user. You get the feeling that you more or less need a coding background to understand how to use ExpressionEngine.
My particular experience with the install on my company's server had always been 'glitchy'. Whether or not it had to do with our hosting or something else, I will never know. But I think compatibility with different server types is something that EllisLabs could address.
It seems to me that on some level, ExpressionEngine could certainly automate template building. Building templates relies heavily on the user to code everything. The user must manually create their own templates, which is one of the better capabilities of ExpressionEngine, but on some level, there could be shortcuts to automating/generating ExpressionEngine code. This would be especially helpful for newer users to adapt to template building.

Likelihood to Recommend

If a particular site is going to be developed and managed by the same person, I would recommend. Specifically in in-house roles. Otherwise, learning ExpressEngine code is very time consuming in order to just get something up and running. When selecting ExpressEngine, you should ask yourself if this is something that will be utilized for years to come. In my opinion, the learning curve is so high, it really is a commitment for using long-term.

Verified User

Employee in Marketing (Marketing and Advertising company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Expression Engine fits me perfectly...and will probably fit perfectly for you!

Rating: 9 out of 10

May 3, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We were building a digital asset manager for our client. it was only being used in one department, but the whole company had access to the program. The business problems that it addressed were up to second updates on the DAM.

Pros

Updates with ease
Cookies for our site are easily added
Reusuable template

Cons

Depends on the department you work in and how quickly you will grasp it
Lacking in themes
Too many menus to distinguish between

Likelihood to Recommend

Definitely want to know the audience you will be working with because this may impact how you show the program to them.

Verified User

Account Manager in Marketing (Marketing and Advertising company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 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

ExpressionEngine: Effective Content Management for the SMB

Rating: 10 out of 10

April 30, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use EE for our public facing marketing websites to communicate company service offerings, news and industry insights. As the central comms department, we recommend it for other departments throughout the organization as well as our spin-off companies as a good platform on which to get their feet wet on the web.

Pros

Secure. Built on CodeIgniter, EE has very few vulnerabilities compared to similar content management systems (e.g., WordPress, Drupal and Joomla).
Flexible. The system is as strong or as weak as you make it.
Easy to use. I've found that little training is needed to get team members and clients up and running in the system. I can set and forget it.

Cons

Learning curve. The ideas behind EE can be confusing to some starting out building websites. And even for those who are used to using other CMS's, the terminology can be strange.
Navigation. Native EE functionality doesn't support navigation very well. I'm always hunting for add-ons to help. Structure works in some instances. Taxonomy works in others. And then in some instances, I end up just using the template/snippet system which isn't ideal for clients who need to edit.
Workflow and preview. Better Workflow as an add-on is really the only way to implement workflow in EE. It would be great if it could be natively supported at some point.

Likelihood to Recommend

For very large sites, EE will be difficult to maintain. If you're building an average corporate site, it's a good option. In order for EE to be strong, you need solid developers to build it. Don't rely on junior or inexperienced talent to build.

Ryan Bentz

Manager, Web Properties in Marketing at Intellectual Ventures (Venture Capital & Private Equity, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

User Review

Rating: 6 out of 10

April 25, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used it for our entire website. Marketing mainly used it, but other employees were granted access to make edits to web pages

Pros

I really enjoyed the future entries and expiration options. I mainly used ExpressionEngine for posting jobs, so it was very convenient to be able to post a job and have it go up and expire without me having to manually go in and take it down.

Cons

I wished sometimes that the clipboard function worked a little bit better; it seemed to get jumbled at times

Likelihood to Recommend

I think a small company would do well using ExpressionEngine for their website because the interface was easy to navigate.

Amanda Arias

Corporate Recruiter in Human Resources at Linq3 (Information Technology and Services, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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Get ready to commit some time!

Rating: 3 out of 10

Incentivized

June 30, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

It has very specific user-access controls. You can create custom categories of user access and assign users to any of them. It has the capability to grant very specific access to virtually any area of the site. Assigning new users and deleting old users is very easy as well.
The ability to customize the CMS is probably the most robust feature. No site is exactly the same and the live version shouldn't feel like a template. ExpressionEngine makes sure you are in charge of exactly what you need.
More and more, there are developers creating great new modules that add higher functionality and customization. Installing and removing modules is very easy.

Cons

Its no secret that ExpressionEngine is not for beginners in CMS's. While there is certainly a vast network of support available online, EllisLabs does little to help the average/new user. You get the feeling that you more or less need a coding background to understand how to use ExpressionEngine.
My particular experience with the install on my company's server had always been 'glitchy'. Whether or not it had to do with our hosting or something else, I will never know. But I think compatibility with different server types is something that EllisLabs could address.
It seems to me that on some level, ExpressionEngine could certainly automate template building. Building templates relies heavily on the user to code everything. The user must manually create their own templates, which is one of the better capabilities of ExpressionEngine, but on some level, there could be shortcuts to automating/generating ExpressionEngine code. This would be especially helpful for newer users to adapt to template building.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Employee in Marketing (Marketing and Advertising company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience