# dotCMS Reviews **Vendor:** dotCMS **Category:** [Web Content Management Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/web-content-management) **Average Rating:** 4.1/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 112 ## About dotCMS dotCMS is a visual headless content management system (CMS) designed to assist compliance-led organizations in the creation, management, and publication of digital content across various sites, brands, and channels from a unified platform. This innovative solution combines the flexibility of a headless CMS with a user-friendly visual editing interface, making it suitable for both developers and content teams. The platform is particularly relevant for organizations that prioritize governance and compliance, such as those in financial services, healthcare, government, telecom, and manufacturing. It is ideal for use cases that involve managing multi-site brand and regional websites, intranets, customer portals, product and marketing sites, and localized content. By providing a centralized system, dotCMS allows users to maintain control over their content while ensuring that it meets regulatory requirements. Key features of dotCMS include its API-first design, which supports GraphQL, REST, and Page API, enabling developers to integrate with various front-end technologies like React, Next.js, and Angular. This flexibility allows for seamless integration with other systems, such as commerce, digital asset management (DAM), and product information management (PIM). Content editors benefit from a visual interface that includes drag-and-drop functionality and live preview capabilities, streamlining the content creation process. Governance and compliance are at the forefront of dotCMS's offerings, with built-in workflows, approval processes, audit trails, granular permissions, and version history. This ensures that organizations can maintain oversight of their content operations, with configurable roles and multi-step approval processes that enhance accountability. Furthermore, dotCMS is aligned with enterprise security and compliance standards, such as SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, providing peace of mind for organizations handling sensitive information. Organizations like BNP Paribas, Telus, and various regional health systems utilize dotCMS to consolidate their content platforms, standardize governance practices, and reduce operational overhead. The platform is tailored for teams that require both content flexibility and stringent control over publishing processes, making it a robust solution for managing digital content in a compliant manner. ## dotCMS Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users value the **user-friendly content management** features of dotCMS, enhancing flexibility and ease for all skill levels. (5 reviews) - Users find dotCMS to be **easy to use** , making content creation accessible for everyone, regardless of technical skill. (4 reviews) - Users praise dotCMS for its **exceptional customer support** , noting their quick and helpful responses to issues. (3 reviews) - Users value the **extensive integration options** in dotCMS, ensuring flexibility and ease of use for diverse needs. (3 reviews) - Users rave about the **API flexibility** of dotCMS, offering multiple solutions and easy integration for content management. (2 reviews) - Users value the **powerful API integration** of dotCMS, providing flexible options for effective content management across channels. (2 reviews) - APIs (2 reviews) - Creation Ease (2 reviews) - Ease of Creation (2 reviews) - Easy Creation (2 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find a **steep learning curve** in dotCMS, requiring significant coding knowledge for effective administration. (3 reviews) - Users face **developer challenges** with dotCMS due to complex upgrades and unreliable features, complicating the overall experience. (2 reviews) - Users feel that dotCMS is **expensive** , especially for smaller businesses or those not needing its full capabilities. (2 reviews) - Users find the **steep learning curve** of dotCMS challenging, requiring extensive skills for effective administration. (2 reviews) - Users face **bugs and stability issues** with dotCMS, making upgrades and functionalities frustrating and unreliable. (1 reviews) - Coding Knowledge Required (1 reviews) - Users find the **complexity of the upgrade process** and permissions system challenging, affecting usability for content creators. (1 reviews) - Users find the **setup process complex** , struggling with permissions and unreliable publishing features in dotCMS. (1 reviews) - Users find the **content management process complex** , making it difficult for clients and content creators to navigate. (1 reviews) - Customization Difficulty (1 reviews) ## dotCMS Reviews ### 1. Evolving CMS from a Committed Vendor **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 27, 2020 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** The dotCMS team is committed to supporting their customers to scale the solution to their needs. dotCMS allows a lot of functionality and has potential for integration with other systems. The training resources are excellent. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** The Admin Panel could use some refreshing as it is a bit difficult to work with to set permissions and manage pages compared to other solutions. For this reason, having a qualified web developer is suggested. Major version updates can be significant and should be reviewed carefully to be sure consistency post upgrade. That being said, the upgrade process is relatively smooth. **Recommendations to others considering dotCMS:** Have a short term and long term strategy so that you can define what you want to achieve. This could look like a phased approach where you set clear expectations for going live and then a future plan for rolling out additional features or functionality. You'll find that dotCMS continues to innovate and have on premise workshops and online sessions quite often. They make their training videos available that help out quite a bit, especially when you get started. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We needed a mobile responsive web site that could meet a variety of needs that an educational institution would require in 2020 and beyond. There are functions such as defining how to utilize a headless strategy for managing systems with dotCMS as the core. Also useful is how to handle authentication with with Active Directory which is helpful for enterprises. ### 2. dotCMS continues to be the best choice for Calvin University **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 25, 2020 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** We have enjoyed the way dotCMS still treats a site as a series of folders with subfolders and pages. It's been the easiest way for our editors to transition. Conversely, it's also been a gentle introduction for our users to the concepts of structured content. It's not at all difficult to understand. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** We have had a series of difficulties with the stability of the software. The cloud has been good for us, but the occasional software crash has been frustrating. **Recommendations to others considering dotCMS:** I would recommend that people take into consideration the level of personal support that dotCMS provides. My issues are addressed in an extremely timely and professional manner. This has been the greatest asset that dotCMS provides to Calvin University. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are sharing content across our site without re-creating it. For instance, a piece of news created by our Marketing department can be shared on the Biology department's website if they wish. ### 3. Powerful platform **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Mechanical or Industrial Engineering | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 17, 2022 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** The flexibility of the platform. UI focussed on Marketing users, not IT admins. Strong backend architecture and highly scalable. Compared to other platforms, this is relatively cost-effective. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Documentation is not that great, and finding talent in the market is not easy. dotCMS support team is accommodating, but I wish dotCMS has professional services to help implementations directly. Documentation certainly needs improvement, and the company should invest in raising brand awareness and attracting more developers **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Marketing content pages can be edited/created by the marketing team; we used to do a lot via the IT organization. This has increased our time to market and reduced our cost **Official Response from J. Todd Bennett:** > Good news! We are actively working on improving everything you mentioned. We recently expanded our documentation team and documentation is getting a complete revamp and full-time love. We are expanding into professional services and our global partner network is rapidly expanding. Our marketing team is growing and we're making a big push in the coming months to expand brand awareness and nurturing our developer community. Cheers! ### 4. DotCMS met every need we had **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Building Materials | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 26, 2021 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** DotCMS is very flexible and provides a solution for all our needs. Our in-house designers make it easy to add/edit content within the page containers and widgets. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** With it's complexity comes a learning curve, especially if you're not a developer. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** The ability to create widgets and utilize them throughout the site is very beneficial. The flexibility for front-end designers to add/edit content is very straightforward. ### 5. If you love bugs, you'll love dotcms **Rating:** 0.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Insurance | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 26, 2021 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** Nothing... The history feature I guess is somewhat useful to see where content has been updated but that's about it. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Publishing is so temperamental. Everything breaks down the minute you want to publish something. I've never worked with a CMS that is this difficult to use. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** I can see how push publishing to AUTH and then PROD eliminates room for error. But the AUTH environment often doesn't depict how content will look like on PROD so it's a stab in the dark. ### 6. CMS is internet friendly and is available anywhere on web **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Noor L. | Senior DevOps Services Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 24, 2021 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** DotCMS is a cutting-edge digital content management company that assists medium and large businesses in creating, maintaining, and launching content-enabled innovations such as websites, independent forums, mobile applications, and many more. CMS is internet friendly and is available anywhere on web, assisting in the development of a multi-channel mobile strategy and facilitating information sharing through various computers and systems. DotCMS, as an online interface system, aids in the development of varied user experiences through personalized content, customization, people, workflows, and activities. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Recruiting them is a simple process for everyday content owners, but as time progresses, they are eager to integrate their own exclusive content material more naturally. The lack of a safe, secure working partnership has perhaps been the most difficult obstacle over the years. Accelerated team growth and development based on technologies that we're already using to solve market challenges for traditional consumers. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** dotCMS for enterprises improves performance and flexibility and is ideal for businesses that need an on-premise Modules solution. Enterprises have complete control and flexibility to create their own platform solution, while also having full access to the initial code for any further implementation and integration. ### 7. Little but Great **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Medical Practice | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 26, 2021 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** When the problem has been assigned it gets completed asap. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** On occasion, response time can be lengthy. **Recommendations to others considering dotCMS:** Good company that can meet expectations and assist when needed. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Overall performance of our system websites ### 8. dotCMS is the most advanced hybrid content management system (CMS) **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Melissa j. | Software Engineering Lead, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 16, 2021 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** This program is a good ready-to-use solution for all organizations and fairly easy to use. It also has many built-in features and custom content types and flexibility. More, This tool can also meet our needs well. Furthermore, its maintenance staff can be up and running within minutes. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** This platform is complicated and using images is troublesome. In addition to its extensive documentation, the software still has some old features that need to be improved. The platform also has some restrictions on the type of data in the content structure. The price of dotCMS also makes its technical management more difficult. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** This program mainly has a cloud-based system, which is easy to use and allows us to start publishing content and assets immediately. More, dotCMS Cloud enables us to build a powerful, engaging, and continuous customer experience across all our channel. ### 9. Excellent Content Managment System **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ryan S. | Business Development Lead, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 18, 2021 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** The number one thing that I like about dotCMS is its unopinionated approach to content management and page layout. dotCMS is up to the task of storing all kinds of content in infinitely customizable content types, and then displaying that content in a wide array of widgets. The ability to manage multiple websites, and share content between those sites natively is incredible. We also appreciate the ever growing options with dotCMS's API, and the ability to interact with that API now without writing Java plugins. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** There are occasions where specific bugs within the system take longer than we'd like to resolve and get added to the core. With an enterprise license, dotCMS's support team is generally fast to provide a patch for specific instances, but we'd like to see core bugs get fixed faster. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We like to use dotCMS to solve the following needs: - Storage of complicated data in a flexible, easy-to-use format. - Management of multiple websites under one CMS - Easy integration with third party services - Drag and drop page editing - Complex persona-driven paths for landing pages and website content ### 10. Framework software for multi-channel sites **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 12, 2021 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** Ease of use in the back-end content management interface, allowing for easy relationships and content searching and editing. Overall publish concepts are excellent and easy to get content between environments. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Some challenges regarding "framework software" concepts, where customization is required to make full use of the POTENTIAL of this software. Customization means complication though and makes supporting the system more challenging. The software is AMAZINGLY customizable (that is a good!), though that creates the 'too' customizable scenario. **Recommendations to others considering dotCMS:** Make sure you have a solid plan regarding "out of the box" vs framework vs customization. More likely to recommend dotCMS for a site starting from the ground up rather than an established site and experiences that need to carry over. Build based on the dotCMS capabilities and then customize on top of that for specific needs. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Serving a multi-channel group of customers and business owners, serving customers that need very targeted delivery of content. Ability to manage a wide range of content types and connections to internal systems to keep that content up to date and delivered to users. ### 11. Development with dotCMS has been largely seamless, but like any software has its flaws **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Entertainment | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 12, 2021 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** We use dotCMS as an intermediary between our internal systems and our outward facing website. It's not a completely headless build, but more of a hybrid. We appreciate the fluidity of the product in being a hybrid model. The API that the team at dotCMS is great. As a hybrid model, we're able to write and receive data to and from dotCMS with little effort. The support we receive has also been a highlight of using this product. The team at dotCMS is quick and very knowledgeable of the product they're developing. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** The backend can be unintuitive and unresponsive at times and the core software is missing some support for what we would consider standard user features. The documentation is outdated or incomplete in some respects. This wouldn't be a huge issue, but there also isn't a whole lot of organic support via other users building and sharing their experiences. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We used dotCMS to rebuild our affiliate site. It's primary function is make marketing materials for content we provide them with available. It also allows users at our affiliate to download and view company and industry-specific information. The benefit of using dotCMS for us was how much is already built into the core and how easy it is to communicate with the API in order to get our customers access to data that lives outside of the dotCMS build. ### 12. Best kept secret in enterprise class CMS systems **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jim C. | Executive Director of Digital Marketing and Communications, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 12, 2021 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** dotCMS is continuously improving to provide its customers with a best-in-class website design and development experience. It is extremely convenient to take advantage of their cloud offering so all you have to concentrate on is your actual website - they do the maintenance, hosting, etc. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Occasionally response times to reported issues are slower than I like. In reality, they are probably fine, but we live in an instantaneous gratification world. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using dotCMS to host/serve our core institutional website. It doesn't box us into a predefined set of rules. We have the flexibility to do what we need to do in order to serve the needs of our customers. ### 13. content author - site manager review **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 12, 2021 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** Bulk uploading - is a pretty neat feature that helped us launch bigger pieces of content. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** our design system and having to build widgets from scratch. There are a lot more intuitive features in a WordPress or square space site manager that are not enabled. Would love to have focal point focusing on the end-user. We struggled big-time with issues during the main content creation - with our widgets and pieces of content disappearing when we launched. That was super frustrating. We have also had issues with images not loading - and have had to re-load images 4+ times to get them to show up on the homepage. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** It has helped us create pages faster and get products to market faster. On our previous CMS it required a lot of development time. ### 14. The Perfect Content Management Tool **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Patrick M. | Operations Manager, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 24, 2021 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** I like dotCMS is very affordable and comes with best features as an enterprise content manager The tool is very secure and makes content collaboration a breeze. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** No single dislike that I can think about because dotCMS has always worked as expected. **Recommendations to others considering dotCMS:** dotCMS is one of the best when it comes to business content management. It encompasses all the important features and it is very secure as well. I recommend it **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use dotCMS as a content management tool. So far it has delivered and I cannot complain. ### 15. There have been up and downs with backend help but the basic user experience is good. **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 14, 2021 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** What I like best is that typical users experience something similar to MS Word. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** What I dislike is that when we have backend issues that it is sometimes challenging to get quality service early on in the process. Sometimes we have to go up the management chain to get help. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are solving the problem of a centralized content process. dotCMS allows the college, in most cases, to allow are content experts to update their content with little help from our one-member web team. In many cases, it has saved time. ### 16. Great CMS system! **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 15, 2021 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** I like the flexibility that dotCMS provides. We use dotCMS both headless as well as the 'traditional' way. We had some trouble setting it up, because of our specific enterprise setup, but the customer service did a great job assisting us. We use dotCMS for several years now and we manage over 30 websites. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** It was really challenging for us to update and I think it's because we do not have an out-of-the-box setup and requires some manually configuration. But again we always got the right support! **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** 10 years ago we were still managing 70+ websites manually (html/css -> ftp). After we installed dotCMS we could finally let our marketing department edit the content. ### 17. Easy to create very flexible website and headless content **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kelvin E. | Agile Delivery Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 12, 2020 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** DotCMS made possible to build very flexible websites with reusable components and templates which enables our content managers and designers to compose pages with different dynamic components in no time. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Some of the DotCMS entinties cannot be deployed through the pipelines which makes impossible to have a continues delivery, however, the push publishing helps on this process. The support and RCA in case of incidents can be improved further as it is already improved in the past year. **Recommendations to others considering dotCMS:** It is a very flexible CMS and you might start with the comunity version to try it out **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Creating headless content for mobile/desktop apps and flexible websites where content managers and designers can compose and create pages themself. DotCMS facilitates the review and publishing of new versions. ### 18. dotCMS is a strong enterprise CMS. Not for everyone, helps to have an internal tech team. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Stephen E. | Agile Development Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 15, 2021 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** Its flexibility. We can custom develop nearly anything we need. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Difficulty and time spent on upgrades. Not a straight-forward process. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We manage multiple sites across our global organization with dotCMS ### 19. Backend content management **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nafi H. | Senior Software Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 17, 2021 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** Organization of content and search capability **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Inconsistent user experience while viewing/managing content **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Have better view of the content which are being processed Utilize elastic search capability ### 20. Awesome CMS platform **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Telecommunications | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 19, 2020 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** i love the flexibility it provides. we chose our desired Front End technology, and after the initial implementation it is very straightforward to use by no-code users. another plus is about the speed to deliver into production new pages. we managed to launch an entire video streaming platform based on dotcms in only 10 days. it is easy to integrate with other platforms due to API based features. on the other hand, features as push-publish, persona and widgets are really great to use **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** The learning curve is quite long. we depend quite much on the vendor to learn to use the product at its best. but the best part here is that they are very committed in supporting us. **Recommendations to others considering dotCMS:** it takes a bit of time to find the best set up (if you are doing it on-prem) but it's worth the effort **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** page editing by non-technical users. fast integration with other sources of data. fast delivery content pages on our site and easy way to modify afterwards, without depending on Developers for the slightest update ### 21. Great customer support **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 18, 2021 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** Jenn and team took a look at outdated support contracts and put together something that makes sense for the business need now. We were having a lot of issues with our instance/updates/customized code, etc. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Updates....way too many instance updates. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Team training/technical competency of the team. That's not a dotcms issue, but an internal issue. We now have a focused web manager that I'm hoping will help! Is there anyone on the dotcms team that we can utilize on best practices, current web trends that we should be looking at? Kind of like a web agency? ### 22. I was quite impressed by the concept and implementation **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Telecommunications | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 21, 2021 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** The most helpful is the fact that it is open source, and it was written over a plugin system like osgi **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** the CRUD system works slowly. Not a production problem but a bit annoying for the content editor **Recommendations to others considering dotCMS:** Get in touch with their support. It helps a lot **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Content management, and reusable frontend components ### 23. Flexible and cost effective cms with great hosting support **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 25, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** Cloud hosting is very reliable and well supported **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Has a bit of a learning curve and requires a good front-end developer to utilize fully **Recommendations to others considering dotCMS:** Utilize the cloud hosted solution. The support is amazing. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** dotCMS supports multiple hosts for our organization, including an internal portal which requires user authentication through the SAML plugin. ### 24. Can quickly put to use. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Logistics and Supply Chain | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 12, 2021 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** Standard features are easy to use and workflow fits easily into most business's workflow. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Consuming webservices requires programing knowledge. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Extend more features and ability to remote office to publish local content and at the same time proof read them centrally. ### 25. Very responsive staff and technical team **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Bola A. | Scrum Master, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 15, 2021 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** The responsiveness of the team. Always willing to jump on a call to resolve issues **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Some features need to be improved better **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Ease of use by non technical team Cloud and ease of access Flexibility and integration ### 26. Great Experience **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kris V. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 24, 2020 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** dotCMS has been a great solution for my organization and enterprise clients. Besides its flexibility, it's also highly customizable and able to handle complex content. I am able to shape dotCMS into exactly what my client requires for content and websites. It's also relatively easy for non-techy people to learn and get comfortable with. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** If you're not a developer who already knows the language, there's a long learning curve before you're able to code Velocity to do what you want. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** As mainly a development shop, the flexibility of the different frameworks we can use (Spring MVC, Struts, OSGi, AngularJS) allow us to use cutting edge technologies along with their scalable architecture and tackle just about anything you could want. ### 27. Powerfull headless tool to leverage our productivity **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Marketing and Advertising | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 11, 2020 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** What we need first is a tool that let us create relational database collections without limit, with GraphQL to access our data. That's what we found and many more. There no limit with data collections , projects, entries and it's very powerfull regardless of its elasticsearch and caching capabilities. The onboarding was very easy, supported by great people. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** We first try the server version which is very difficult to install on premise. The cloud version is a charm compare to it. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We can now upgrade a massive number of website and benefit from an integrated workflow to deploy our content. Thanks to the versioning of every entry that gather all changes and give us the chance to roll back innapropriate changes. ### 28. Its a combination of GUI and where GUI won't work you can use velocity code **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Education Management | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 12, 2021 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** I like the way we can reuse the contents from the site. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Users creation if you don’t want to use saml **Recommendations to others considering dotCMS:** It’s easy to use and publish the contents on the site to different departments once you setup roles properly **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Using as content management system for our school. ### 29. Good system for large sites **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kristoffer B. | CMS Developer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 20, 2020 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** The CMS is able to Handle a massive amount of content quite responsively. Searching using the index provides for fast queries. The cloud hosted environment is very stable and support is usually very quick. The extensibility of the system is very impressive. The plugin framework allows for adjusting or adding new features quickly. The ability to add plugins live without a restart allows for very fast testing and speeding up development times. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Sometimes the documentation can be a little frustrating to understand. Especially when getting into the more technical aspects of the system, there is frustratingly sparse explanations for how certain functions work. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** The system is allowing for a very large number of users to access and edit only the content relevant to them. The permissioning of folder and system elements allows for fine grained control over who can access which features. ### 30. Working with dotCMS product and team has been a great experience **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alexandru Lucian P. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 14, 2020 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** Product documentation was on point and easily searchable on their website. We ran across some issues with our deployment which they resolved quickly. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Although they support k8s deployments, it's rather in an infant stage. In time I think it will get better, maybe they'll have a helm chart. This is more of a heads up than a direct complaint. **Recommendations to others considering dotCMS:** Reach out to them, they are very friendly and helpful. They will try their best to accommodate your requirements. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We desired a scalable and durable hybrid CMS solution. DotCMS was the obvious choice since it combined both of both worlds. Now our DEV and Content Managers are happy. ### 31. create cms page **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jose Luis P. | CEO Lead Software Architect, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 11, 2020 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** I like every module of cms in my company used it **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** The method for authority the publish the page **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** DotCms lets our page update frequent ### 32. Empower content creators within the CMS **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Marketing and Advertising | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 20, 2020 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** DotCMS allows us to divorce technology from design. Content creators and designers can work frictionlessly on our system without needing to know middleware or backend programming. We've enjoyed using dotCMS for more than 8 years. In that time we've build several websites and hundreds of branded pages for our clients. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** The templating (Apache Velocity) is not widely used and requires some specific learning. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using the multi-tenancy capability in dotCMS to quickly and efficiently build experiences for our client. The templating also us to successfully repeat at scale. We continue to use DotCMS in new ways. The flexible headless design allows for creative solutions to come to life quickly. ### 33. Fast & Good colaboration with the teams and easy learning of dotCMS **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Stefan M. | Website Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 15, 2020 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** The interface and the possibility of integration with all most everything. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** I really can say that i found nothing that should i dislike since working with dotCMS and it's team **Recommendations to others considering dotCMS:** I very recommend this platform because it has big opportunities to be no#1. Thanks to the clean code and thanks to the awsome team that is very proactive in giving support of any kind **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Fast content editing / administration of source of components ### 34. As an open source tool, not bad **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 25, 2020 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** I used an older version of dotCMS when I was a college student working in our communication office. I’d say I had average tech literacy and didn’t need extensive training, and it was easy enough to use. I don’t feel like I could get a website up and running myself with it. It looks like they’ve updated some of their interfaces though so that may not be the case anymore. Overall, pretty good product but not my first thought for website builder. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Challenge to see myself building whole website rather just being contributor. **Recommendations to others considering dotCMS:** Have an IT department. Train all contributors **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Was good as an enterprise solution and framework. The website looks really good ### 35. Great for content management but needs improvement on dynamic functionality. **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 11, 2020 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** I like the content creation process and the ability to easily place items in a page. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Lack of support for dynamic functionality **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** The ability to create full websites while giving a seamless content creation process. ### 36. Great service, easy to use tool and great response for help **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kent B. | Client Development Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 18, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** The tool is extremely easy to use for non tech people as well as tech people. Support service for any issues are OUTSTANDING. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** I can think of nothing I dislike. The tool and the people that support it are top notch **Recommendations to others considering dotCMS:** Always consider the ease of use and how well you can import data to the application **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We utilize this to allow easy publication and maintenance of our web pages ### 37. dotCMS is a user friendly and open source software. It has many new features **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 22, 2020 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** Time machine, work flow and publishing features **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** We are not able to track some logs like connection failed. Need to improve to track all kind of logs **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are mainly dealing with work flow and publishing. It is easy to handle in dotCMS ### 38. Awesome! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** dotCMS is super easy to use and very functional for what my organization needs. Navigating dotCMS is very user friendly as well. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** There are rarely any glitches, but they always seem to be fixed in a very timely manner. I don't have many dislikes. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Updating my organizations website has been a breeze with dotCMS. Uploading files, photos, etc. has been quick and painless. ### 39. dotCMS made management of content and information very simple **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Robin P. | DevOps Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 03, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** Being a Java shop we needed something that all of the developers could easily understand. Content maintainers don't have the technical understanding that the developers do, so a good visual editing environment was needed for them, dotCMS provided that too. dotCMS fitted in with our environment perfectly. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** We have a niggly bug that crops up now and again. dotCMS support have been unable to assist in resolving it for us. Pages appear missing from the admin screen, they still exist but just aren't displayed. As a workaround we have to re-index dotCMS. Sometimes it works first time, other times random other pages appear and disappear, and then another re-index is required. It is just a minor irritation and doesn't affect the functionality of the system. **Recommendations to others considering dotCMS:** The documention for dotCMS is fantastic and helps in installing and setting up the CMS immensely. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We needed an intranet solution that would need very little training for content maintainers to be productive. The visual editor is so intuitive and easy to use. The reliance on support required from IT has dropped significantly. ### 40. Flexibility and cache power **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Benjamin M. | Sr Front End Developer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 01, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** dotCMS allows you to use it in the way you want. You can go from purely headless with APIs to simply hosting all your site(s) in the platform. It provide you with the ability to organize the content the way it makes more sense for each different project/site. On the top of it, the Cache system is impressive. You could have your DB in maintenance, if your content is cached, it'll be served like if nothing was wrong. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Sometimes flexibility comes with drawbacks. The limitation of the java based system is that sometimes you will need to do custom things at the core level. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Hosting sites: it can hold several sites in the same instance sharing the same theme. Cache power: you could come up with API of content that is cached and super fast. Organizing content: as a CMS, it does it in a good way with all the relationships of content. ### 41. Excellent except push publishing issues **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 21, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** Headless CMS approach open source Java based concept of osgi plugin multi-site admin **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** push publishing feature does not work seamlessly.. installation without enterprise licence connecting to ldap puts the database in inconsistent state. **Recommendations to others considering dotCMS:** good CMS **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** many sites built with dotcms, some using it as headless CMS ### 42. Makes development simple **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Logistics and Supply Chain | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 19, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** The performance made my to admire dotcms technology and the ease handling contents making the customization simple **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** More sophistication is I dislike.Cache isssues are still found make the technology less consistent **Recommendations to others considering dotCMS:** use more efficiently **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Handling contents posting in specific period and publishing ### 43. dotCMS is a great Content Management Platform for your your web projects **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Christopher F. | Web Developer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 18, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** The flexibility in dotCMS allows us to engineer solutions that meets our business needs. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** With great flexibility comes great complexity. dotCMS is not an out of the box solution, you have to engineer with it. **Recommendations to others considering dotCMS:** Be prepared for the engineering requirements for this software. If you plan to host your own instance, you will need someone versed in setting up java application servers and databases. If you plan on going with their cloud offering you will still need a programmer versed in enough Java to learn Velocity (the templating language behind the software). **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Powers all of our main websites, marketing efforts, landing pages in Eloqua/Salesforce. Integrates with our custom Job Data Providers with the ability to import content from any system we've thrown at it. ### 44. dotCMS review **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Management Consulting | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 20, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** It is fairly easy to learn basic functionality quickly. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Getting data out of dotCMS is complicated and needs a programmer. **Recommendations to others considering dotCMS:** Get training **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Content management and data organization around our assets. ### 45. Dotcms Review - Web Development **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 22, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** The build in functionality that dotcms offers in terms of the demo Project is one of the most helpful thing. Developing website using the demo as an example helps to ease the process. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** There is not as much documentation on dotcms in terms of issues and errors. ` **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Trying to develop a website. Development of webpages and templates is really made easy using dotCMS ### 46. Powerful CMS for Complex Content **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tad L. | Website Content and Design Specialist, Aviation & Aerospace, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 25, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** dotCMS was a great out-of-the-box solution for our organization. It is able to handle complex content and relationships and makes it relatively easy to build your website or app around your content and data. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** The interface and learning curve can be intimidating for first-time or casual users. However, it had improved significantly over the last few years with more improvements constantly coming down the line. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** dotCMS brought our website down from thousands of separate files and pages into a well organized CMS that if much easier to manage. It also gave us the ability for other users within the company to add and edit content without having to go to the web team. ### 47. dotCMS is a good platform to manage and share content between sites. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alec R. | Front End Web Developer, Higher Education, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 01, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** The relationship and tagging features are great for delivering dynamic content across multiple sites. We can use tags to group related content and suggest content to users based on their tagging history. Relationships allow for content to be linked across pages dynamically. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** The admin area for non-technical users is a little confusing. The way content creation works within our system means we need a large amount of training for users to utilize our full system. **Recommendations to others considering dotCMS:** If you have a need to specified content types use this product. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Spreading and sharing information between sites is easy with tagging and relationships. Allows us to spread our research across a broad platform. ### 48. A perfect hybrid solution for marketing team **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Insurance | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 19, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** A powerful headless option for developers and a seamless backend wysiwyg editor that can power and design multiple pages with great ease **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** With the huge variety of options the learning curve can be a bit steep initially **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Working with the extensible java platform allows to create some powerful plugins ### 49. It is a great option that helps you simplify the management and management of content. **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** antony f. | It is a versatile, efficient and powerful tool that helps you manage projects., Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 13, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** is a very versatile and adaptable tool, which allows you to manage the contents in a very dynamic way, thus achieving a new approach to these contents. Facilitating access and management of them. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** some of its functions can become really limited to handle, which makes it difficult and can diminish the utility of the tool. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** thanks to the functions that this tool offers, it is possible to manage and develop the contents in a very dynamic way, which helps to give a new focus and management to said contents. ### 50. Rocky Start, but becoming a stable power house **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 04, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** Simplicity, I've used other CMS programs such as Shopify, Magento, Wordpress etc and I found I was able to dive straight in and get started, the Velocity took me awhile to get my head around but with it's comparisons to Javascript it's helping me understand. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** The updates, not being updated to the latest version (Which solves ALL the issues we initially had). I'm not happy we have to be upgraded one stage at a time 4.0 - 4.3 (test and the upgrade). I feel it's a waste of time and resource. **Recommendations to others considering dotCMS:** Make sure to install latest version. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's making it so all our users who are not developers can create web pages with ease, filling in data where required and utalising the Components in different ways to create a easier, quicker and more stable website. ## dotCMS Discussions - [I didn't check last versions so it might be already there. When dotCMS will fully support all the entities (containers, templates, pages, etc) and content to be deployable through APIs? Is that in the roadmap and for when?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/30456-i-didn-t-check-last-versions-so-it-might-be-already-there-when-dotcms-will-fully-support-all-the-entities-containers-templates-pages-etc-and-content-to-be-deployable-through-apis-is-that-in-the-roadmap-and-for-when) - 1 comment, 2 upvotes - [How is dotCMS priced?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/pricing-9874cac7-11e7-4263-aa31-734b2f725262) - 1 comment, 2 upvotes - [Does dotCMS offer a free trial?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/free-trial-8f0d4c6a-e1e6-489a-85dc-2636a9cfb7cf) - 1 comment, 2 upvotes - [View dotCMS pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/dotcms/reviews?page=2§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-28+17%3A13%3A32+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=08305306-4272-482e-85a4-ab76eff59204&secure%5Btoken%5D=6c2ab908888124cd07100ac0abc243cf65c544ebaaf34ca1b257c4802aeeeef8&format=llm_user) ## dotCMS Integrations - [Oracle Database](https://www.g2.com/products/oracle-database/reviews) ## dotCMS Features **Content** - Content Authoring - Rich Text Editor - Versioning - Plug-ins/Widgets/Apps - Approval Process - Content Scheduling - Asset Management - Internal Search - Content Repository **Analytics** - Web Analytics - Campaign Tracking - Audience Insights - Reports & Dashboards - Personalization - Marketing Automation **Publishing** - Automated Publishing - Multi-language - AR/VR Capability **Design** - Breadth of Pre-Built Templates - Mobile - Branding/Themes - Customization **Content Management** - Customizable Templated Workflows - Asset Management - Portals and Sites **Development** - Image Management - Reuseable Content - Unlimited Environments - Form Builder **Platform** - User Community - SEO - Flexible Navigation Structures - User, Role, and Access Management - Enterprise Scalability - Internationalization - Dashboards and Reports - API / Integrations **Design & Development** - No-Code App Development - Low-Code App Development - Self-Service Capabilities **Analytics** - Personalization - Content Performance **Agentic AI - Web Content Management** - Cross-system Integration - Natural Language Interaction **Agentic AI - Headless CMS** - Cross-system Integration **Agentic AI - Digital Experience Platforms** - Autonomous Task Execution - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Proactive Assistance - Decision Making ## Top dotCMS Alternatives - [Contentful](https://www.g2.com/products/contentful/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (311 reviews) - [Strapi](https://www.g2.com/products/strapi/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (201 reviews) - [Butter CMS](https://www.g2.com/products/butter-cms/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (203 reviews)