--- title: Cascade CMS Reviews meta_title: 'Cascade CMS Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 23 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Cascade CMS works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.0 review_count: 23 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-06-17' parent_category: name: Content Management url: https://www.g2.com/categories/content-management --- # Cascade CMS Reviews **Vendor:** Hannon Hill **Category:** [Web Content Management Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/web-content-management) **Average Rating:** 4.0/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 23 ## About Cascade CMS Cascade CMS (formerly Cascade Server) by Hannon Hill is an award-winning content management system that takes enterprise web strategy to the next level. It has built-in tools to eliminate stale content, increase digital outreach, and promote end-user adoption and accountability. Cascade CMS is designed for decentralized web teams in most major industries, including higher education, government, healthcare, and technology. Clive is Hannon Hill's engagement and real-time personalization tool for collecting information and using it to craft the personalized web experiences visitors crave. Build profiles and engage with audiences through targeted content delivery. ## Cascade CMS Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users love the **ease of use** in Cascade CMS, appreciating its intuitive interface and simplicity for updates. (1 reviews) - Users love Cascade CMS for its **powerful strength** , making it easy to use and update over time. (1 reviews) - Users love the **ease of use** in Cascade CMS, making content creation and updates seamless and efficient. (1 reviews) ## Cascade CMS Reviews ### 1. Best CMS I've ever used! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chris N. | Director of Web Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 23, 2025 **What do you like best about Cascade CMS?** I've used Cascade CMS for 14 years and it keeps getting better. As the Director of Web & Social Media Services for a University, I absolutely love Cascade CMS. It is easy to use, powerful, and also easy to update. **What do you dislike about Cascade CMS?** I don't have any negative views on Cascade CMS. **What problems is Cascade CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Uniform design and structure for our entire campus web presence was crucial. We maintain all content for our University within Cascade CMS. ### 2. Flexible & powerful CMS optimized for higher education **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Peter C. | Director of Web Development, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 06, 2023 **What do you like best about Cascade CMS?** Very customizable and powerful once you learn and understand the underlying data structures. Comprehensive REST API that allows for interaction with the CMS using whatever method you typically would. They're always adding new features, and actively soliciting feedback about how to make it better. **What do you dislike about Cascade CMS?** Setting stuff up takes a lot of technical knowhow, which could be a problem for non-technical administrators. Because it's so flexible, it can sometimes be difficult to decide what direction is best. **What problems is Cascade CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps manage the website and distribute our updating to various departments on campus who know their content best. Helps us have one central place where all our content is located, so there's never a question as to how pages get updated. ### 3. Cascade simple but also not simple **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 07, 2023 **What do you like best about Cascade CMS?** I like that Cascade allows users to save multiple drafts of web content and that it can also send those drafts for review. It also allows users to be notified of content changes on different levels. **What do you dislike about Cascade CMS?** Cascade can be cumbersome when first learning it and can be difficult to teach others about. The ui has greatly improved but still has forward movement needed. **What problems is Cascade CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cascade helps multiple users get information (web content) where it needs to go, with the appropriate levels of coordination and approval. ### 4. Cascade has been great! **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** James T. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 08, 2023 **What do you like best about Cascade CMS?** It's a well-organized platform that's easy to use and train people on/in. **What do you dislike about Cascade CMS?** Brush up on your Velocity. The building blocks necessary to build out an experience presents somewhat of a learning curve. **What problems is Cascade CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use it to manage our flagship website and supporting, smaller sites such as calendars, directories, intranet, etc. ### 5. Great multi-tenant customizable CMS interface. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Bryan T. | Senior Web Administrator, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 14, 2021 **What do you like best about Cascade CMS?** Cascade is, very nearly, infinitely customizable. It uses either XML or Velocity to build the backend for creating and updating content. The outputs are extraordinarily flexible. We moved from an HTML front end to leveraging a design system in order to enhance the webteam's ability to build services that are easily branded to a particular school or department within the University. **What do you dislike about Cascade CMS?** The one thing that can be challenging is the speed of Cascade. The more complicated you design your page, the longer it takes for cascade to load the page for display, and edit. **Recommendations to others considering Cascade CMS:** We were lucky in that we had a webteam member who was already familiar with Cascade when we brought it in. I highly recommend that you purchase the consulting time to have Hannon Hill come in and help you to configure and set it up. **What problems is Cascade CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are resolving a number of problems. The biggest was content ownership, which cascade has a great setup for. The next was giving our maintainers more flexibility in the templates they can use. We were able to implement a "build your own" template that allows people to design, practically, any type of page they want. One of the benefits of using Cascade is the ability to utilize work flows. This allows for a technical review as well as a content review. Technical review would be examining things like page structure, layout and image sizes. Content review is exactly what it sounds like, an opportunity for another set of eyes to catch any issues with the content, or to improve it. ### 6. Useful but not Flexible **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 06, 2021 **What do you like best about Cascade CMS?** I like that I can edit and produce sites intensively without implementing the changes until they're fully ready to go. I also like the robust use of templates and premade materials that make it easy for me to work with materials supplied by IT. **What do you dislike about Cascade CMS?** I dislike how much clicking is required to publish a change. The submit option is great when making big updates, but when making small changes to many pages on a site, it takes forever. **What problems is Cascade CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** I administer an informational site in education—we give visitors details about courses and instructors. Cascade has benefitted my work in allowing me to work with templates that the university uses. It solves the problem of not being able to see how your changes will look because the interface is so clean. ### 7. A good tool to work in **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mr. Naveenkumar C C. | Engineering Trainee, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 01, 2022 **What do you like best about Cascade CMS?** It's easy to use, comfortable, user friendly and the it has a good User Interface and easy to navigate. Plus it gives more options and features to use for a better work output. **What do you dislike about Cascade CMS?** Almost everything is cool and fine but some hindrance can be found while choosing different options/features which might cause some discomfort in using the tool. Except that everything is pretty good and fine. **What problems is Cascade CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are managing the web content with the help of this tool/software. The benefits include, 1. Efficient way to manage the content on the website 2. Easy to navigate and use the features as mentioned. ### 8. Great ability to view projects in development before going live. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 17, 2020 **What do you like best about Cascade CMS?** You can preview how a project looks in development before pushing live. This means you can get other opinions along the way. I also like that it has version history so that you can revert back to a previous version easily and quickly. The file system set-up is well done. You are able to keep projects together by folders, with images, documents, pages all collected within the folder. This allows you to produce essentially small websites of category within your main website. **What do you dislike about Cascade CMS?** If templates are set at a main level, it's harder to add changes to a page without using a lot of CSS. It would be nice if conditions were added within modules to better tweak results. It's like a WordPress page builder without full functionality. If modules are built into the templates, moving them about on the page really isn't an option; though you can move info within each module. This means that the design needs to be thought out much more. Another dislike is that the view while writing may not actually be what it looks like. Any rss feeds, event feeds, etc. won't populate until it's published - dev or live. **Recommendations to others considering Cascade CMS:** Decide how much flexibility you want with a CMS. I tend to like WordPress for its ease and overall design. Cascade is great for revisions and file structure. **What problems is Cascade CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's easy to have many people work on a site and manage what areas, down to the page, that they have access to at any point. You can also include subsites and restrict based on a hierarchy within the company or business. ### 9. Easy to navigate **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 23, 2021 **What do you like best about Cascade CMS?** I like how primary the interface is and the clear delineation of hierarchy. **What do you dislike about Cascade CMS?** The dashboard is overwhelming, and I find that the specific pages I use do not appear as recent, so I always have to drill down. **What problems is Cascade CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** The library did not have access to the website, so when I was trained on Cascade CMS, I was able to make quick changes without relying on an external source. ### 10. Cascade CMS works well for Higher Education **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jesse K. | Senior Manager, Digital Accessibility, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 17, 2020 **What do you like best about Cascade CMS?** Easy to use. Easy to involved other co-workers in managing their web content. **What do you dislike about Cascade CMS?** Wish there were more integrations and control over what abilities to give to more advanced users. **What problems is Cascade CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cascade CMS helps us get our message out to potential and existing students in a timely manner. ### 11. A powerful CMS that makes a web developer's job efficient **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 31, 2018 **What do you like best about Cascade CMS?** I like how Cascade centralizes content in XML and opens up transformation via XSLT or Velocity Script. I like the power offered via Velocity Script since there are Java standard methods and multiple built-in tools. I like also having capability of building tools in the CMS, including jQuery-based web service calls using the REST API. **What do you dislike about Cascade CMS?** I dislike how the system handles ampersands. It always demands they precede an entity and this causes errors in the system. I dislike the inefficient search capability, particularly when choosing an asset though this is reportedly being changed in a soon-to-be-released upgrade. **Recommendations to others considering Cascade CMS:** This will make centralization, maintenance, migrations and changes so much easier with your web presence. **What problems is Cascade CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Centralization branding, code and web presence. There has been improved efficiency with maintenance, migrations and development. It is also more secure as assets can be locked down. This protects the template and more complex coding while allowing web publishers and content managers from various departments to better maintain the content on their departmental sites. This CMS also allows a centralized backup of our assets used on the website. ### 12. Platform agnostic, robust CMS for higher ed **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dan B. | Director of Web and Design, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 24, 2020 **What do you like best about Cascade CMS?** The most helpful feature of Cascade CMS is its flexibility. You are not locked in to a particular UI or UX - it becomes what you make of it. The CMS editing interface is yours to describe and build, the data architecture is yours to manipulate. If you can imagine it, you can build it with Cascade, with whatever your preferred server- and client-side language(s) are. **What do you dislike about Cascade CMS?** The downside to Cascade is the amount of resources needed for a fast implementation. It is resource-hungry, and if your websites get too large, you will definitely notice some speed and efficiency hits to your self-hosted solution. As long as you are willing to invest in hardware upgrades in the long term, Cascade is a great product. **Recommendations to others considering Cascade CMS:** Cascade CMS is a great choice for enterprise-level content management. You will need to use their implementation of Velocity templating language, and be familiar with XML and structured content markup. But once you get the hang of it it is a powerful solution and almost infinitely flexible. .NET and PHP are both well-suited for use within Cascade depending on preference. We even have some old ColdFusion running in there. **What problems is Cascade CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** The problem we were solving was using a reliable, flexible, extensible, platform-agnostic CMS to power our higher ed web sites. While other universities have moved to a Wordpress model, we wanted something more robust without 3rd party dependencies. Cascade has a nice user interface for our casual users as well. ### 13. Does the job, nothing special **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Cara L. | Norris Center Supervisor, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 06, 2019 **What do you like best about Cascade CMS?** Easy to nest things, easy to upload multimedia **What do you dislike about Cascade CMS?** Not good with copy and past functions functions **What problems is Cascade CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Not consistent with text size/formatting. It does the job and creates the pages we need. ### 14. Easy to use, even for me **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 19, 2018 **What do you like best about Cascade CMS?** I will be honest I know little to nothing about web design. Cascade CMS was easy to use even for someone like me with ZERO experience outside of being a user. I was able to design layouts based on how my preferred style and asthetic and others were easily able to add and edit content, as well as design aspects as needed. It's a great product for a team environment. **What do you dislike about Cascade CMS?** As a self confessed novice, updating the software was a little tricky. I was always able to figure it out, only occasionally needing help from someone from it, but it was complicated enough that it made me nervous. someone with more experience would probably find it completely reasonable, but again, novice here... I felt like it was harder than it should be **What problems is Cascade CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Building websites in collaboration with other team members. Made the process much easier and reduced duplicate work/effort ### 15. Easy to use CMS **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 29, 2018 **What do you like best about Cascade CMS?** Cascade is relatively easy to use once you are familiar with the platform and its layout. **What do you dislike about Cascade CMS?** It can be a bit rudimentary and it is difficult for beginner users to perform more complex tasks. **Recommendations to others considering Cascade CMS:** Cascade is probably one of the easiest professional CMS platforms around. While it is not as intuitive (the way we have it configured) as some others that allow for drag and drop layouts and such, it does provide easy ways to update content. I'm not sure how well it handles building things from scratch as I was not integral to that process, but it does handle basic daily functions well. **What problems is Cascade CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our website is based on Cascade. It is easy to give multiple users access to as much or little content as you wish. ### 16. CAscade for higher ed **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kimberly S. | Human Resources/Payroll Manager, Higher Education, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 14, 2018 **What do you like best about Cascade CMS?** Easy to use once you learn it and the look is nice **What do you dislike about Cascade CMS?** There are too many steps to publish content. **What problems is Cascade CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our website is built using cascade. ### 17. Amazing CMS for Higher Educaion **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 12, 2018 **What do you like best about Cascade CMS?** I love the push based publishing of Cascade CMS. This allows our website to have virtually 24/7 365 operation since there is no database dependency for basic operation. **What do you dislike about Cascade CMS?** There are no significant items I am dissatisfied with. **Recommendations to others considering Cascade CMS:** This is a great product supported by a great organization in Hannon Hill that cares for and listens to its customers. **What problems is Cascade CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use Cascade to manage our entire enterprise website with over 400+ publishers and 300+ sub-sites. ### 18. Fully customizable, user friendly CMS **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 26, 2018 **What do you like best about Cascade CMS?** Cascade CMS make no assumptions about your content. **What do you dislike about Cascade CMS?** Without previous experience, professional training and implementation assistance is required. **What problems is Cascade CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We needed a custom user interface for specialized content layout and publication workflows. ### 19. Easy to use **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 30, 2018 **What do you like best about Cascade CMS?** I use Cascade to update content on a number of university websites. Understanding of coding is not necessary and the CMS has been seemingly easy for our web services team to manage and maintain. **What do you dislike about Cascade CMS?** There are multiple steps required to publish content. While this is helpful from a quality control standpoint, it does require additional time to publish. **What problems is Cascade CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our marketing and communication function is somewhat decentralized. Cascade has allowed us to equip lead users with the ability to manage content on their pages, while limiting decisions related to look/feel, site organization and navigation to our web services colleagues. This has created significant efficiencies. ### 20. Quick and Easy to Learn! **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Education Management | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 28, 2018 **What do you like best about Cascade CMS?** very easy to learn even for those who do not have any web content management experience **What do you dislike about Cascade CMS?** To publish a content sometimes you have to publish the entire contents. Otherwise, the link of new content doesn't work. **What problems is Cascade CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Being able to update information regularly. ### 21. Multimedia Design Director **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Education Management | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 04, 2019 **What do you like best about Cascade CMS?** Not too much, it doesn't crash on my, I guess that's one thing. **What do you dislike about Cascade CMS?** Requires very specialized knowledge to customize templates. **What problems is Cascade CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Keeping track of customers and making sure we contact them in a timely fashion. ### 22. Version 8 much better **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Education Management | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 23, 2019 **What do you like best about Cascade CMS?** Faster preview/edit load, faster refresh to server. **What do you dislike about Cascade CMS?** I wish there were a bypass to the save-check-submit-publish process for simple updates. **What problems is Cascade CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Fast web publishing. ### 23. Easy to use, customize and deploy **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Education Management | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 30, 2018 **What do you like best about Cascade CMS?** Easily assign permissions, folders and sites to individuals across the organizations. Best feature if the 'history' feature allowing you to roll back to previous versions, restore content or get a snapshop of a site on a previous date/time. **What do you dislike about Cascade CMS?** The preview feature takes a little time to load. Would be nicer if you could preview on the fly without having to wait for it to render. **Recommendations to others considering Cascade CMS:** Look at Drupal if you have the tech expertise. **What problems is Cascade CMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Enterprise wide website updates can be done by each individual department easily without the need for programming experience. Very WYSIWYG. ## Cascade CMS Discussions - [What is Hannon Hill?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-hannon-hill) - [Is CMS Cascade free?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/is-cms-cascade-free) - [What is the Cascade program?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-the-cascade-program) - [How does Cascade CMS work?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/how-does-cascade-cms-work) - [View Cascade CMS pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/cascade-cms/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-22+07%3A26%3A13+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=e3e7406f-91a7-4abc-872d-6670ef3033d2&secure%5Btoken%5D=7709f53b5739f37b1a884ae764a089b753ef6be21d935df98d0aecd0d0ae11e8&format=llm_user) ## Cascade CMS Features **Content** - Content Authoring - Rich Text Editor - Versioning - Plug-ins/Widgets/Apps - Approval Process - Content Scheduling - Asset Management - Internal Search - Content Repository **Design** - Breadth of Pre-Built Templates - Mobile - Branding/Themes - Customization **Platform** - User Community - SEO - Flexible Navigation Structures - User, Role, and Access Management - Enterprise Scalability - Internationalization - Dashboards and Reports - API / Integrations **Agentic AI - Web Content Management** - Cross-system Integration - Natural Language Interaction ## Top Cascade CMS Alternatives - [Drupal](https://www.g2.com/products/drupal/reviews) - 3.9/5.0 (405 reviews) - [WordPress.org](https://www.g2.com/products/wordpress-org/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (9,376 reviews) - [Progress Sitefinity](https://www.g2.com/products/progress-sitefinity/reviews) - 4.0/5.0 (496 reviews)