Tag: cms

EPiServer and Umbraco are excellent .Net CMS platforms.

EPiServer is an enterprise level fully licensed product while Umbraco is an open source option driven by a passionate community of developers.

If you are choosing between these two options, there are a number of factors that you should consider and I want to touch on these without delving too deep into any particular topic.

Both EPiServer and Umbraco come with MVC versions which provide full control of rendered markup. They also support standard CMS features such as publishing pipelines, versioning, personalisation, reusable content blocks and forms. The extent to which these features are polished and customisable varies but the fact is that they are supported by both platforms.

So what are the major factors to consider when choosing between these platforms?

Budget

This is obvious so let’s get it out of the way first.

EPiServer is a very polished enterprise level CMS with a price tag to match. If your client does not have a budget to match the investment required, it is better to look at open source options and this is where you will invariably turn to Umbraco.

Admin UI

Think about the user personas who will be editing and approving content. How technology savvy are they and how intuitive will they expect the editing and administrative interface to be.

The UI of EPiServer provides the content editor with inline page editing. Would such an intuitive feature be viewed as a big win for your target audience?

What are the functional requirements for administration and how much customisation is required? Is there a requirement for advanced content approval workflows? Will the administrator need a strong level of control over the execution of scheduled tasks for example?

The UI of Umbraco is very functional and can be customised through custom page properties. However, it is not as customizable or polished as the EPiServer UI.

Personalisation

Personalisation provides the ability to personalise the content being served to particular users. It is a very powerful marketing tool when used to its potential.

CMS’s administrators can define sets of attributes that a user must fulfil to belong to a particular group of visitors and thus be served personalised content. The possibilities for defining this criterion are endless. It could be related to the profile of the user by attributes such as age or location. It could also be defined by external factors such as the day of the week, time of day or weather if we get more advanced.

There is a Personalisation Groups package for Umbraco which comes with a number of criteria you can use.

However, EPiServer is more powerful in the personalisation space and for me, this is where it starts to stand out from open source competitors. Personalisation comes out of the box and there is an impressive array of criteria included which allows you to create visitor groups for anything from number of site visits to the referrer or search key words.

The interface for defining visitor groups and ability to in page edit the configuration on a given page provide a very intuitive experience for editors.

EPiServer also has a simple programming interface so developers can quickly create custom criteria.

EPiServer is the clear winner on this feature. The question is that if an advanced level of personalisation is a pivotal requirement or if it may be in the future.

Commerce

Is e-Commerce either a requirement now or will it be in the future? If so, what scale of commerce do you need to plan for?

Umbraco has a number of both paid and licensed e-Commerce packages with Merchello being an open source option I have experience with. While there is an initial learning curve from a developer perspective, it does a solid job at providing single market e-Commerce capabilities. It also provides a nice interface for catalogue, customer and sales management. If you need a CMS application with basic commerce, I do recommend checking out the Umbraco and Merchello combination.

EPiServer Commerce is an enterprise commerce add-on and a whole different beast. By enterprise commerce, I mean that it has the power to cope with multi-market solutions where each market is customisable in terms of products, pricing, warehouse integration,  ERP integrations, sales, payment providers, tax and all the complexities this level of solution brings to the table.

In essence, these options are competing at totally different sides of the commerce market and it should be quite obvious which end of the market the solution you are scoping is veering to as you delve into your business requirements.

Systems integration

Neither Umbraco or EPiServer come with integrated analytics or CRM. This, in my opinion, is a good thing because I want the flexibility to use the best solutions out there for my requirement rather than use a half-baked implementation that comes bundled with a CMS.

Both products have connectors which are sometimes free and sometimes licensed to connect to your platform of choice. Although it is possible to develop your integrations on both platforms, using to a suitable connector can drastically reduce the cost of development.

If there are custom implementations required on an internal system such as an ERP, the EPiServer service API is developer friendly providing the tools do this efficiently. The Umbraco API is not as powerful so there will be more leg work for the development team which can impact project costs.

Localisation

Both CMS’s have single site multi-lingual localisation capabilities.

EPiServer has very strong localisation support and does not add significantly to the development cost. It’s UI is very clean ensuring that it can be very easily managed by an administrator. On certain projects, this can be a very real cost saver.

If localisation is not a core requirement, Umbraco may well be sufficient. It does require more developer work and does not have the intuitive UI of EPiserver but it may be enough.

Deployments

Think about the roadmap of the application after initial build. How often do you expect there to be maintenance and future development phases carried out?

Largely the deployment process will be quite standard but they do differ on CMS templates. The object which defines a CMS template is called a “document type” in Umbraco and a “content type” in EPiServer but they are the same concept.

Umbraco requires an administrator to manually set up and configure “document types” in the admin UI each time new or updated templates are deployed. This get’s inefficient as you deploy to stage, UAT and live environments. More importantly it adds the inevitability of human error.

EPiServer on the other hand allows the developer to set up “content types” programmatically. As code is deployed, new or updated templates will be automatically configured.

Limiting configuration and user error associated with deployment could be a minor win or it could be a game changer. This really depends on the complexity of the project at hand.

Developer Support

Although Umbraco is a free CMS option, you need to sign up to a subscription if you want developer support from the Umbraco team. Before you buy a subscription, consider that there is a large and very active community of developers who will often be able to provide assistance in resolving issues.

As you would expect with a licensed product, EPiServer provides developer support through it’s service desk and from my experience reasonably fast turn around times.

So which is better?

Both are excellent platforms.

The question is which is better for your client and the project at hand.

Strive to choose the right tool for the right job by assessing the information above and you will be on the right path.