After heavily researching 20+ products, I stumbled upon your article. Very well written and VERY helpful. My research had important points missing and your article provided them very nicely. May be, I should compile a comparison matrix, put it up on the web, give you due credit, and link back here!!

We had narrowed down to Umbraco in the open source category and to Ektron and SiteCore in the commercial category. I wrote to Ektron on a Friday and promptly got a response saying they'd like to talk to us on Monday. The trail went cold after that. After trying twice to follow up, I had to give up due to time constraints.

On the same Friday, I had sent a mail to SiteCore as well. We received a mail back from their Sales and Marketing Coordinator in Denmark (Lila Carlyle) with concrete timeslots for the following Tuesday. I confirmed my slot and also wrote about our integration-heavy requirements. SiteCore called me on the dot. The sales coordinator made the introductions and said that she had senior techie (Frank McDonald) with her to discuss technical points with me right away.

The impression that the SiteCore team gave me on that call was one of thorough professionalism. They had researched my specific integration needs and were ready with answers when I asked questions. The best thing I liked was their honesty in telling us what was doable (with respect to our case) and what wasn't. And they had the deep knowledge to suggest well-known alternatives that would work well with SiteCore for stuff that wasn't in SiteCore's direct scope. They also provided fair details about Development License and Production License.

As a company that develops products and provides product development services to others, we will not have to think twice now. For non-commercial (or low-budget) projects we are going with Umbraco. For all relevant commercial projects, our clear choice will be SiteCore.

Nathan, thanks again for this gem of an article. Keep up the good work!

Fellow decision-makers, here are two unsolicited recommendations

1) All the above products have great features. SiteCore adds human availability to it. This is VERY important, IMHO.

2) http://cmsmatrix.org/ is worth a look for its feature-by-feature comparison of most CMS tools out there.

Best wishes to all of you with your respective projects!

Cheers,
Sriram

We evaluated most of the ones you listed and drew almost identical conclusions for most – we shortlisted Ektron, Kentico, SiteCore, EPiServer and ADXSTUDIO. We then selected EPiServer for our strategic CMS, and have found it absolutely terrific. Strange that you had such difficulties speaking to them because we’ve found them very forthcoming (albeit they do have a presence in the UK).

We also partnered with ADXSTUDIO for low-cost solutions as their license model at entry level is very attractive. It’s a limited product and is BADLY in need of a cosmetic and technical overhaul, but it does a job. The most recent version is a big improvement.

If you ever want any assistance with EPiServer or ADXSTUDIO just shout – the company I work for has offices in the States too. If not, then good luck with wherever your CMS journey takes you!

Dan

We evaluated most of the ones you listed and drew almost identical conclusions for most – we shortlisted Ektron, Kentico, SiteCore, EPiServer and ADXSTUDIO. We then selected EPiServer for our strategic CMS, and have found it absolutely terrific. Strange that you had such difficulties speaking to them because we've found them very forthcoming (albeit they do have a presence in the UK).

We also partnered with ADXSTUDIO for low-cost solutions as their license model at entry level is very attractive. It's a limited product and is BADLY in need of a cosmetic and technical overhaul, but it does a job. The most recent version is a big improvement.

If you ever want any assistance with EPiServer or ADXSTUDIO just shout – the company I work for has offices in the States too. If not, then good luck with wherever your CMS journey takes you!

Dan