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

6 Reviews

Engineering

Great Product, Getting Better All The Time...

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

June 18, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ExpressionEngine is our go to solution for building custom websites. The native template engine uses a syntax that is simple to learn and comprehend, which allows our developers to stand up sites faster, and easily maintain them over the long haul. ExpressionEngine includes a comprehensive set of fieldtypes that will meet the majority of needs for simple to complex content models. If not, there is an addon store with plenty of options to add functionality to a site.

Pros

Easy to learn
Enables rapid development
Secure by default

Cons

In my opinion, mediocre support for block type page builders (Bloqs addon is the best option currently)
Doesn't use a PHP framework under the hood (and no Composer support)
Lacking database migration support

Likelihood to Recommend

ExpressionEngine is particularly well suited for small to medium size brochure sites.

I do not currently recommend ExpressionEngine to clients for websites that require E-Commerce. Part of that is not wanting to be responsible for the cart, and checkout functionality that currently seems half-baked within the existing ecosystem.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Marketing & Advertising company, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

ExpressionEngine, not the worst but not my favorite

Rating: 4 out of 10

Incentivized

February 20, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My husband and I are software developers. We work for companies with websites built in Drupal, ExpressionEngine, Wordpress or any php based platform. There is one company using ExpressionEngine for their website. They have forms, user registration, and data display.

Pros

Simple admin interface for the end user.
Generates clean markup for front-end theming.

Cons

Not flexible enough to create a really custom website.
Source control can be a mess since it's mostly database.
Data migration even core updates or server migration are not easy to make.
Is not an open source license.

Likelihood to Recommend

Dynamic validations or complex conditionals are hard to accomplish.

Claudia Lorena Aguilar Ayala

Software Developer - Drupal, Rails, JQuery, ExpressionEngine, PHP, Coldfusion, MySQL, Rubymotion in Engineering at Eaglepeak Consulting (Non-Profit Organization Management, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile

Great For Novices

Rating: 2 out of 10

Incentivized

July 8, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used ExpressionEngine to manage the CMS of one of our smaller sites. It was to be used by a team of writers to collaborate on various topics. They needed to be able to upload images and edit in an efficient manner. We needed a quick way to get a site up that had a built in blog tool and user management.

Pros

The blog tool was decent.
Managing users was easy.

Cons

It was difficult to alter functionality in the admin section. For example, we needed multiple-file uploading and in order to do this the templates had to be directly altered. This direct manipulation of templates makes it hard to upgrade the version without losing custom changes. Same goes for implementing custom file storage.

Likelihood to Recommend

ExpressionEngine is better for a company that doesn't have a huge user base or any previously existing database/file storage in place. It's better suited for a company more novice than we are.

Lauren Merka

Senior Software Engineer in Engineering at Viumbe (Internet, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

ExpressionEngine: The BIG Reliable.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

June 30, 2015

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Here at Dative we build custom website solutions that will fit the needs of our clients both from front-end / back-end stand points. ExpressionEngine's biggest strength is the ability to add dynamic content tags into custom HTML markups. That's sounds trivial, but it allows our designs to be created unrestrained, while still being able to deliver fast page loads in a dynamic fashion.

Pros

Flexible Templating
Caching
Custom Content Types

Cons

Underlying framework based on codeigniter, could move to a more modern framework
Could make use of Composer
Better testing for add-ons.

Likelihood to Recommend

ExpressEngine is well suited for simple, one page websites. We used it when we engage in small projects where the client only really needs what we call a "mini-site", that would post a form to a third-party form service. It is also used in cases, where there is very little content management, where we can just have a static website built with a uri router.

Rodrigo Passos

Partner / Web Developer in Engineering at Dative (Internet, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

6 years of experience

ExpressionEngine: Ellislab's side project.

Rating: 3 out of 10

April 25, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our Agency has used EE in the past as the primary CMS for the majority of our projects. Unfortunately the implementation historically was done in a way that suits Developers. This is poor because the platform had Designers in mind when it was built.

This fact is important to remember because it's fundamental to how you implement and use it long term.

A few things to note:

Copy and Paste development is actually expected.
Versioning can be difficult.
Upgrading IS difficult.

We've stopped using it as of late in favor of things that scale better with normal sized teams of Developers (>= 5) who can work on the same project at once.

We migrated to Drupal and WordPress.

The community of EE has dwindled in recent months and with the announcement that the core framework is up for sale, it looks like the product is on its last legs.

It is still good for:

Design Shops.
People not maintaining it themselves.
Small companies.

It costs more to implement, to maintain and the evolution of the product and its extensions are slower than that of WordPress and Drupal because the community just isn't there.

* All of this is based on my experience with the product, my interactions with other developers with extensive experience, people that I respect and encounters in the field.

Pros

Once you understand the "ExpressionEngine way" of things -- it does what it set out to do, very well.
It's not widely used, so one COULD consider that to be a security strength. (Note: we have seen it hacked before.)
It's a common brand with design shops, so it's an easy recommendations as a solution to them.

Cons

The community, is just no longer there. With most projects, this is one of the most important areas.
Maintenance, upgrades, versioning, etc is a nightmare.
It is NOT for developers. Thinking that will set you up for failure.

Likelihood to Recommend

I'd only recommend it for the following:

Short lived projects.
Design shops.
Small companies.

Sterling Hamilton

Lead Developer in Engineering at Noble Studios (Internet, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

2 years of experience

View profile

Is ExpressionEngine the best form of expression?

Rating: 8 out of 10

April 12, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The job was for the site Monumentsmen.com, a marketing site to advertise the upcoming feature film directed by and starring George Clooney, as well as advertise the book The Monuments Men by Robert M. Edsel as well as his follow up book Saving Italy. The site was also set to feature a vast amount of historic information as well as a subscription restricted access section featuring lesson plans for University art programs. I was also given a deadline of two weeks to develop a stable release.

ExpressionEngine was also used as the CMS for a corporate presence site for a well known cloud storage company.

Pros

What you're given is a CMS with a strong database schema to group and deliver contextual data with fantastic ease of development. Accessing data from a table is an easy scripting language in which the results read like English language sentences yet still powerful enough to adapt to infinite design needs.
No need to amend a template system. Build the templates on the fly and let ExpressionEngine deliver them. This resulted in an easy front end development with no learning curve. It was like having a blank slate in which the CMS would exist to mainly feed the data to the front end.
ExpressionEngine can deploys the entire site as flat files for an extremely fast loading product which also pleases the SEO nerds.

Cons

At it's base, all of the site, HTML, CSS, javascript, data, etc... , are stored in a sql database. If you have a site that needs to be dynamic: IE a site that has a blog, or comments, or customer contributions, you'll find that each and every page load would result in thousands of database calls. Queries to a database is some of the slowest transactions a page load can have. If the entire site is loaded through said transactions you'll find it's impossible to break any speed records. ExpressionEngine would not be my choice if those are a requirement. Though there are work-arounds. As of 2.5.5 there was no option to render part of the site as flat file and part of the site as dynamic.
Because the development of the site is saved entirely in the database it became somewhat cumbersome save versions of the site to a git repository. The only difference between one install of ExpressionEngine and another is the database itself. You could make a SQL dump from one site and load it into another and have completely migrated the site. This sounds great if you need to migrate sites all the time, but backing up versions of an existing site meant backing up sql dumps.
In EE v.2.8.1 you can now export template files to flat files so that database connections will be reduced. This addition will help the CMS greatly.
This is actually in part and parcel with the last point. Being that git repository back up is difficult, collaborate development would also be a challenge. I was lucky to be the sole developer on my projects, but if you have multiple developers working on one product and they have branching code sets, the merging of this code would be time consuming, being that the developers would have to manually add the code to the same install rather than an easy deploy script. Why would this be? Because until the product is rendered to flat files it's all in the database. Of course this could all be overcome by having a dev environment that is shared by all developers. Then deploying to staging or production would just be the act of dumping then loading SQL files. But that is not the current work flow that developers have grown to appreciate.

Likelihood to Recommend

Best suited if the development time is short, and if the end product will be a website with few dynamic elements. The CMS itself is intermediate to learn for a lay person. Not a good choice for a large development team working on the same project. Not friendly for git repositories.

Frank Milne

Web Developer in Engineering at SoftLayer, an IBM Company (Internet, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

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Is ExpressionEngine the best form of expression?

Rating: 8 out of 10

April 12, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

What you're given is a CMS with a strong database schema to group and deliver contextual data with fantastic ease of development. Accessing data from a table is an easy scripting language in which the results read like English language sentences yet still powerful enough to adapt to infinite design needs.
No need to amend a template system. Build the templates on the fly and let ExpressionEngine deliver them. This resulted in an easy front end development with no learning curve. It was like having a blank slate in which the CMS would exist to mainly feed the data to the front end.
ExpressionEngine can deploys the entire site as flat files for an extremely fast loading product which also pleases the SEO nerds.

Cons

At it's base, all of the site, HTML, CSS, javascript, data, etc... , are stored in a sql database. If you have a site that needs to be dynamic: IE a site that has a blog, or comments, or customer contributions, you'll find that each and every page load would result in thousands of database calls. Queries to a database is some of the slowest transactions a page load can have. If the entire site is loaded through said transactions you'll find it's impossible to break any speed records. ExpressionEngine would not be my choice if those are a requirement. Though there are work-arounds. As of 2.5.5 there was no option to render part of the site as flat file and part of the site as dynamic.
Because the development of the site is saved entirely in the database it became somewhat cumbersome save versions of the site to a git repository. The only difference between one install of ExpressionEngine and another is the database itself. You could make a SQL dump from one site and load it into another and have completely migrated the site. This sounds great if you need to migrate sites all the time, but backing up versions of an existing site meant backing up sql dumps.
In EE v.2.8.1 you can now export template files to flat files so that database connections will be reduced. This addition will help the CMS greatly.
This is actually in part and parcel with the last point. Being that git repository back up is difficult, collaborate development would also be a challenge. I was lucky to be the sole developer on my projects, but if you have multiple developers working on one product and they have branching code sets, the merging of this code would be time consuming, being that the developers would have to manually add the code to the same install rather than an easy deploy script. Why would this be? Because until the product is rendered to flat files it's all in the database. Of course this could all be overcome by having a dev environment that is shared by all developers. Then deploying to staging or production would just be the act of dumping then loading SQL files. But that is not the current work flow that developers have grown to appreciate.

Likelihood to Recommend

Frank Milne

Web Developer in Engineering at SoftLayer, an IBM Company (Internet, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience