Announcing the Top Rated Content Management Systems for 2018
Today, we awarded the 2018 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Content Management Systems. The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are unique in that they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user satisfaction scores. They are not influenced by analyst opinion, the vendor’s company size, popularity, site traffic, or status as a TrustRadius customer.
A Content Management System (CMS) allows a user to quickly manage and publish content for a variety of website types, including blogs, corporate websites, and ecommerce sites, without needing the expertise of a developer. Most CMS products offer a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor with pre-built templates, layouts, and themes, along with other features like search, tagging, SEO, content versioning, and scheduling. In reality, different CMS products require more or less technical skill, depending on the integrations/plugins, amount of custom styling, content types, and size of the website an organization plans to deploy. Reviews can provide helpful insight for buyers into ease of use versus website complexity, and what (if any) development resources were required with each CMS.
Here are the winners:
Overall Top Rated
Adobe Experience Manager
dobe Experience Manager is a business content management solution that supports multi-site content creation, management, and deployment. Users can connect Adobe Experience Manager with Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, and Adobe Campaign, as well as with third-party data and applications to track customer data and optimize the overall experience for site visitors, through localization and other forms of personalization. Reviewers commonly praise the user management permissions and the user-friendly interface, which are helpful for central management of a large scale web presence.
“Well suited to deploy multiple sites with a consistent look and feel with the forms, especially for global companies with multiple authors spread out within different regions. Easy for authors to publish content on a frequent basis.”
– Verified User | Engineer in Information Technology | Health, Wellness and Fitness Company with 5001-10,000 employees
WordPress
WordPress is a popular open-source publishing platform and content management system known for its variety of customizable themes and plugins. Website administrators can host content and manage multiple websites from a single dashboard. WordPress reviewers enjoy the quick implementation process and praise the breadth and availability of plugins and community expertise.
“WordPress is quick to implement and have up and running. The combination of the quick installation to the user-friendly interface of the back end, makes WordPress a great tool for experts and novices alike.”
– Benjamin Hale | Digital Marketing Analyst | Orbis Education
Kentico
Kentico is an all-in-one content management system (or “EMS,” as the vendor calls it) written in .NET that integrates ecommerce, web content management, online marketing, online communities, and intranet functionality. Reviewers acclaim the intuitive user interface and strong customization and integration capabilities. They describe Kentico as much more extensive than a product like WordPress, but more affordable than other options with a similarly wide breadth of features.
“I use Kentico for my website which includes a custom searchable product database, a custom event submission & display page, newsletter sign-up forms, a blog, and various templates. It enables me to easily create and edit website content without requiring a web designer or web programmer.”
– Verified User | Director in Marketing | Wholesale Company with 501-1,000 employees
Drupal
Drupal is a free and open source platform written in PHP that allows users to manage web content and digital experiences. Drupal provides a back-end dashboard that includes standard CMS features like a menu management system and the ability to customize layouts and themes. Beyond the core, there are over 30,000 available add-ons to expand Drupal’s functionality. Overall, it’s a more complex, developer-oriented platform than something like WordPress, though both are free and open source. Drupal reviewers praise its robust site building tools, flexibility, and scalability.
“Drupal separates data from presentation, which is very important when you are trying to build a website. It is great at letting the back end developers focus on data structure and the front end focus on presentation. […] Drupal works well when you have to build a website but don’t always have all the info on specs, or the specs change quickly. It allows the developers to write less code and use native Drupal features to get that type of work done.”
– Brian Nizinsky | Digital Marketing Manager | Paychex
Wix
Wix is a highly customizable free website builder, built in HTML and designed to be user-friendly with no coding skills required by the user. The tool features drag and drop functionality as well as an App Market with over 200 apps to further personalize websites and online store. Wix users frequently mention the ease and flexibility of design as a common benefit of the tool.
“If you know how to make basic design features in InDesign or even Microsoft Word, you can use Wix. The tools to add graphics, photos, buttons, and other content are easy to intuitively figure out and you can move them around easily.”
– Emily Westergaard | Executive Director | Des Moines “I Have a Dream” Foundation
Squarespace
Squarespace is a CMS that allows users to customize themes, fonts, and structural elements such as the layout for an ecommerce store. Squarespace appeals to many users within the visual art, music and creative industries based on their elegant templates and the ease of adding images and other graphic elements. Reviewers consistently enjoy the Squarespace templates and sleek design process.
“Squarespace has professional, appealing templates. It also allows you to change templates as well without affecting your live website while working on an update, which we are currently doing.”
– Kelly Troyer | Sales Support | Mrs. Miller’s Homemade Noodles
Weebly
Weebly is an inexpensive drag-and-drop website builder for bloggers and ecommerce sites. The tool allows users to build high-quality sites with little technical skill. Reviewers like the drag and drop feature, large selection of templates, and ease of getting started with Weebly.
“I like the drag and drop feature most, it makes the creation of websites quick and you don’t have to learn about HTML codes. It has so many templates in every subject, all you have to do is choose one of the templates and by using the drag and drop method add your contents to your site easily. You can choose to use a free subdomain of Weebly as .weebly.com. If you want more professional domains you have to buy them, but prices are cheaper than others.”
– Ramin Sultanov | Digital Instructor | Upper Education
In addition to overall top rated awards, we also recognize tools that are top rated in a specific market segment. Company size is one way to help buyers identify the right solutions for their use case. To qualify for these lists, at least 15% of the product’s reviews and ratings must come from that market segment.
Top Rated by Enterprises
Top Rated by Mid-Size Companies
Top Rated by Small Businesses
Congratulations to the winners of the Top Rated Content Management Systems Award!
Top Rated Criteria
Products included in the 2018 Top Rated Content Management Systems list must have been in the top tier of their category TrustMap on Jan. 26, 2018, to earn a Top Rated badge. To qualify for the Content Management Systems TrustMap, products must have at least 30 reviews and ratings on TrustRadius. Every reviewer is verified and every review is vetted before publication. Products are plotted on the map based on end-user data, including users’ likelihood to recommend scores as well as buyer research patterns. To learn more about TrustMaps and Top Rated methodology, check out this page.