Brightspot Reviews & Product Details

As an administrator and designer, I love using the existing tools and options to come up with new ways to present the content to the users. I love the capability of having machine translation. We translate our site into 40+ languages and the batch translation and easy selection area helps to quickly get this done. I love the batch archive option and being able to archive quickly. I love that we can have a nested hierarchy for the 45+ websites that I manage and being able to lock down pages and through workflow, having those editors edit only what they need to. It helps me and my intern stay organized. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I think one thing that I would like is an option to batch delete permanently in the menu bar. Currently we have to archive first and then delete on an individual item. The extra step can be a hinderance, especially if you are trying to archive and delete 10+ items. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Scalability and flexibility are key strengths of Brightspot, as it manages large-scale publishing and multi-site operations smoothly.

We rely on Brightspot to publish content for our RootsTech Conference, which serves more than 11 million attendees over a four-day period. Additionally, we operate a global help center and a blog site available in nearly 50 languages. We also oversee 50 separate localized websites for our FamilySearch Centers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The most frustrating aspect of Brightspot is the restricted access to new features within the product. Since we use a headless configuration that depends on custom development for implementation, innovations introduced to Brightspot’s platform do not always make their way to non-standard builds. As a result, self-hosted teams are often left without the latest tools and efficiencies.

This situation frequently forces us to develop or replicate features on our own, which not only slows our pace of innovation but also adds to our maintenance workload. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like Brightspot’s unique ability to handle content across multiple websites. As a local publication serving 30+ cities across the United States, it’s important for our users to collaborate and share content across our various sites. Brightspot makes standardization, content sharing, and third party integrations a breeze. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

If a feature that you’re looking for is not “out-of-the box”, Brightspot can get quite costly as a platform. I recommend hiring in-house front end and backend developers if you plan to move forward with the Brightspot CMS platform. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One of the best things: we’re less dependent on devs for day-to-day product management tasks — PMs can do a lot more without waiting in a backlog.

Strong customization across the board: granular user permissions, custom workflows, flexible form content and content types let us tailor the CMS pretty tightly to our process.

The support team is genuinely helpful — when issues come up, they don’t just point you at docs; they jump in and assist.

Ability to impersonate users is a huge win: it helps us debug permissions / view problems exactly as the user sees them.

Bulk content editing/updating is powerful — saves tons of time when we need to roll out changes across content items or users.

Revision history is great; being able to go back, compare versions, restore content helps with accountability + recovering from mistakes.

Flexibility to adapt for evolving needs — even when new types of content or workflows come up, much of Brightspot can be extended rather than rebuilt. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Such deep customization means managing changes can become a headache — lots of moving parts, high chance of unintended side-effects.

Sites & settings don’t save history of changes, so it’s tough to trace who did what and when.

The tech stack can feel heavy; maintaining/updating underlying systems (dependencies, libraries, frameworks) can be painful.

The schedule build-out (for our radio shows) is still giving us grief that don’t mesh cleanly with the system’s scheduling tools.

Platform upgrades are a bear when you have a small team already focusing on other priorities.

Sharing content across sites is not seamless; duplication, syncing, or coordinating changes across multiple site instances has friction.

Documentation isn’t always up to date or detailed enough for some of the more complex custom workflows. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Fits our needs as a media and publisher brand pretty well, and there are some updates that we haven't yet received that seem promising, like a Google Doc <> Brightspot integration. We migrated off a homegrown CMS and it's improved our efficiencies for sure. I like that we can create templates, manage our redirects in place, and have more robust user settings and permissions. The entire team uses it every day. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Migrating was a mess. The BSP team did not check to make sure no URLs would be changing during the migration so we had to delay it a few weeks to ensure that several thousand URLs would be kept the same. Even so, we still ended up with all of our image URLs changing with no redirects and AMP being turned off on half our site. This tanked our search traffic and it took us about a year to recover, especially since BSP was not fast to fix a lot of urgent changes. We're three years past the migration and I'm only now fixing some of the final issues.

Google Ads has also been a pain in the butt to set up and maintain. It often cause CLS issues. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Our organization represents a somewhat atypical media hybrid (a tv network with niche programming plus a heavy news component). 3 years ago, we migrated a suite of websites from our previous CMS provider over the Brightspot. The Brightspot customer support team was top-notch as they guided through that highly complex, months-long process – and that same quality of service hasn't diminished one bit since. In terms of the product/platform itself, we've found it to represent a robust mix of flexibility (e.g. the ease with which page layouts can be modified and varied, new components added, etc.) and ease-of-use which we continue to be very pleased with. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As flexible as things are, some additional features for non-enterprise users would be appreciated. Such as:

• The ability to override some features of the imposed style guides (especially with regard to typography/fonts) when desired

• A broader suite of third-party integrations

• An internal form builder Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Brightspot is a powerful CMS with a clean editor interface. It has helped streamline our editorial process and made content management much more efficient. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There is a learning curve for both developers and editors. Some admin tasks take more steps than expected and small changes often need developer help. Documentation could be stronger in a few areas. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are a lot of features available for administrators to control what users can see, along with flexible UI forms and permission settings. The platform is also highly adaptable for developers, making it easy to implement and extend feature sets. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Performance can occasionally be problematic, and there are times when SOLR issues arise unexpectedly. Additionally, users have mentioned that completing simple tasks often requires too many clicks, which can be frustrating. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Brightspot is a great CMS tool for the Economist Intelligence Unit. Our prior content management system had so many limitations that the BSP CMS is incredibly refreshing and allows so much more leniency. It's allowed our analysts a lot more freedom to create articles while at the same time offering easy features. This has helped our analysts and subedit team to process and publish so much quicker but still quite efficiently. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I'm on the Operations side of the house and am an Admin on the tool. I've sometimes found it a bit difficult to create and set limited roles. Other than that, the tool is great! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We do a conference every year that is hosted on Brightspot and they have help us out so we could get it going. Now that we have been doing this conference for 5 years it is still working great. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Brightspot can be slow at times that makes our calls slow. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.