dotCMS Pricing, Features, Reviews and Alternatives

dotCMS is a developer's sandbox with lots of toys in it. It has a lot of built-in features and the custom content types and flexibility. There has been nothing we've wanted to do that we could not do using dotCMS.

With great flexibility comes great complexity. There are examples of how to do everything, but in the end you have to build out your own stuff. It doesn't theme, it doesn't one-click upgrade. You have to have a competent development wrapped around it.

This is an ideal CMS for an enterprise environment that needs a product that is flexible, highly customizable and reasonably priced.

There are bugs at times that are identified and either resolved via a hotfix or held for resolution in the next iteration. I have received emails saying that a bug was identified and proactively already fixed. However, other times I notice an issue that is documented as a feature yet doesn't work and you must wait until the next iteration is released. One example is an automatic sitemap generator tool. While the configuration of the module is in the documentation there are known reports that not all of the features work. Rather than prioritize it as a hotfix, it is idle until the next release. In the meantime, I have to defer to a third-party sitemap tool.

The ability to create widgets and place them in any container on the page allows for a ton of flexibility for pulling in and displaying content. The interface for content editors was generally easy enough for them to use effectively.

If you're not a developer who already knows the language, there's a long learning curve before you're able to code Velocity to do what you want. Also, some things that require little or no setup in other systems require customization. (Example: generating friendly URLs, which is automatic in something like Wordpress.) We also didn't like the strange URLs auto-generated for file assets. Permissions were buggy, partly because some of our files were so old ("legacy" assets).

Hey Bill, We completely understand your frustrations and valued having Oberlin College as a customer This feedback is representative of the why behind our investment in customer experience and customer success. We've built out a customer centric program over the last two years to ensure more optimal customer experiences. Since your departure, we've also built out a much more intuitive and...

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The main reason we chose dotcms over other products was its ability to be customized to fit our needs without being overly complex. We need a product that folks without an IT background can navigate and use. Dotcms fit the best of both worlds for us.

The biggest challenge for us is upgrading. We host our instance of dotcms and all our upgrades are done manually. It would not have been so bad if we didn't write custom plugins to begin with.

We appreciated that we could make tweaks and changes that we needed to get the platform to do what we need. Thanks to dotCMS, we are able to give our front end users an easy way to edit and add content to their pages no matter what their skill levels are. We also have the freedom to push to production without having to involve the System Administrators which gives us AMAZING turn around time. If there is a problem in production, we can fix it in minuted, which makes our client very happy and lowers their impact to revenue.

Sometimes it feels like the software falls short in some instances. Some UI bugs that we have encountered frustrate us as they seem to simple that with some UI/UX focus, shouldn't have occurred. Better documentation could also help us in leaps and bounds. When we have issues, it can be so frustrating to find the correct way to do things, or how to fix our problem. It is often found to be out of date or inaccurate.