# 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 **easy-to-use content management** of dotCMS, enabling seamless contributions from both novices and experts. (5 reviews) - Users find dotCMS to have an **exceptionally easy interface** for content management, making it accessible for everyone. (4 reviews) - Users praise the **exceptional customer support** of dotCMS, highlighting quick responses and helpful assistance when problems arise. (3 reviews) - Users appreciate the **extensive integration options** in dotCMS, enabling diverse solutions and seamless content management. (3 reviews) - Users love the **API flexibility** of dotCMS, allowing diverse solutions and easy integration without extensive coding. (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** with dotCMS, requiring extensive coding knowledge for effective administration. (3 reviews) - Users experience **developer challenges** with dotCMS, including complex upgrades and unreliable content publishing features. (2 reviews) - Users warn that dotCMS is **expensive** , particularly challenging for smaller businesses or those with limited budgets. (2 reviews) - Users find that dotCMS has a **steep learning curve** , requiring significant coding knowledge to effectively manage the platform. (2 reviews) - Users report **bugs and instability** in dotCMS, leading to complex upgrades and unreliable content publishing. (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. is an efficient and powerful tool for managing content. **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** sonia r. | It is an excellent option to execute and manage various projects in a very accessible way., Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 28, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** It is a tool that gives you a lot of freedom of handling for different areas to manage content, allows you to edit and improve content, managing to develop content in the best way **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** It has certain limitations when developing and improving the content level content. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** is a good choice to manage and address business content in the best way, managing content in a very practical way ### 2. Head of Frontend Development **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Khai H. | Head of Frontend Development, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 05, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** dotCMS provides a simple flat UI that anyone can use. We can set it up for all kind of users in the company to work on the system. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** It isn't open for 3rd party plugins. Some other platforms I used have a community where we can find some useful additional features. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Store contents for management and scale. ### 3. Great platform for our clients **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Billy F. | VP, Business Development, Internet, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 07, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** As an implementation partner, dotCMS provides our team with excellent support and resources to ensure we're able to deliver the best experience for our clients. It's also an extremely easy platform to work with, which has enabled us to increase our speed-to-market and lower our implementation fees, opening room for much more ongoing enhancements. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Brand awareness is fairly low, so sometimes it takes our clients a little longer to become familiar. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** - Faster implementations - Extremely easy to use for our marketing clients - Headless capabilities - Easily deploying SPAs for our clients ### 4. Great experience **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 05, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** Versatility: it's an ibrid CMS and it's great for headless developments and standard content management both. Great UI: updated to the latest technologies (angular 6 next to 7) and extremely powerful and intuitive (noCode philosofy) Great REST api: all is a service **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** for my experience I can only say that the product has grown considerably over the years and that there is nothing that really does not going to be resolved soon **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** My company has a partnership with dotCMS inc. We work togheter dotCMS team for our customers customization. Never problem. ### 5. Powerful CMS with intuitive interface **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 05, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** I love how easy it is to use, not only for me (not a programmer) but for my 50+ content editors of varying degrees of tech savviness. I can deploy new content types quickly and relatively painlessly. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** I wish it had a better calendar tool for front facing Calendar of Events. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We can maintain a decentralized Web content maintenance model so that each expert area can update their own areas of the website with minimal training (no expertise in HTML or CSS required). It allows resources to deployed more efficiently. ### 6. dotCMS is pretty great **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Education Management | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 25, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** the system is an excellent way to curate abstract content and create websites according to content strategy best practices **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** there are a few idiosyncrasies and user interface issues, but any mention of specifics would probably get old fast, as the vendor releases new versions often **Recommendations to others considering dotCMS:** if you're looking for a system to abstractly curate content with various types of taxonomies and metadata, this is a great candidate **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** we are currently running over 500 websites in dotCMS, all of which can share content with one another ### 7. Great enterprise CMS **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 25, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** Easy to use. Great support. They listen to customers and integrate feedback into updates. It's very robust, stable and fast. Lots of APIs **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Would like tags to be first class citizens and considered content in the system. Somehow have relationships be bi-directional **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Consolidate our content into common content types to facilitate content sharing across all of our websites. As well as to get a handle on our content strategy. ### 8. 1 year out **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 05, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** The headless cms is a nice feature, API integration **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** there are some bugs in the application. It can be less than user friendly for non-technical based users. **Recommendations to others considering dotCMS:** consider setting up as a headless CMS and velocity is a bit arcane **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** the code base is quite flexible under the hood so our team is able to handle a lot of client requests. ### 9. Engineering Lead **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Joe K. | Engineering Lead, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 01, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** I like that dotcms contains traditional and headless CMS options and paradigms. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** I often find there is a lack of quality documentation available for newer versions of dotcms. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** I've used DOTCMS to build singlepage applications. We've realized integration easement using the headless components. ### 10. First it was confusing. Now I love it **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Leanna F. | Marketing Assistant for Residence Life, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 07, 2018 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** It is very easy to update the Res Life web page using this program. It's fast, easy to use, and convenient. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** The formatting tools are confusing, and I feel like there are a lot of useless ones that have easy access, but the more important ones are harder to get to **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are updating the page with important dates so that students know deadlines. It benefits out students a lot, because they know when all the important dates are ### 11. Ease of use **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 11, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** changes on this platform are easy to be made. Front end is so simplified. users can easily edit and add contents. has Lots of built-in features and the custom content types and flexibility. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Permissions can be difficult and involved to set up and maintain **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** User exp ### 12. exceellent and easy to use cms **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 25, 2019 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** the user interface is very good and clear to user **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** push publishing is not good and needs improving **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** dynamic content personalistaion ## 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=3§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-30+15%3A16%3A57+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=c9ed5895-90a1-4e4b-8be2-65904266e118&secure%5Btoken%5D=a981ea5f0883e5cf05ffa74e63898c9d33b1632b8d4ec250058f0e4fc15bc129&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)