--- title: dotCMS Reviews meta_title: 'dotCMS Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 116 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how dotCMS works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.1 review_count: 116 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-06-30' parent_category: name: Content Management url: https://www.g2.com/categories/content-management --- # 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:** 116 ## 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 admire the **user-friendly content management** of dotCMS, appreciating its flexibility and support for all skill levels. (5 reviews) - Users value the **ease of use** of dotCMS, enabling effortless content creation for everyone from beginners to experts. (4 reviews) - Users praise the **exceptional customer support** of dotCMS, highlighting quick responses and helpful assistance. (3 reviews) - Users value the **robust integration capabilities** of dotCMS, enabling seamless connections and enhanced flexibility across platforms. (3 reviews) - Users appreciate the **API flexibility** of dotCMS, enabling diverse solutions and seamless content management across various channels. (2 reviews) - Users value the **flexible API integration** in dotCMS, offering numerous solutions and reliable performance. (2 reviews) - Users appreciate the **versatile API options** of dotCMS, enabling multiple solutions for any task or challenge. (2 reviews) - Creation Ease (2 reviews) - Ease of Creation (2 reviews) - Easy Creation (2 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find dotCMS has a **steep learning curve** , requiring significant coding knowledge to navigate its complexity effectively. (3 reviews) - Users face **developer challenges** due to inconsistent Push Publish, sparse documentation, and a steep learning curve. (2 reviews) - Users feel that dotCMS can be **expensive** , especially for smaller businesses or those with limited budgets. (2 reviews) - Users find a **steep learning curve** for dotCMS, needing extensive coding knowledge to effectively manage the platform. (2 reviews) - Users report **inconsistent Push Publish functionality** , indicating a need for clearer source and target demarcation. (1 reviews) - Users warn that **coding knowledge is essential** to effectively administer dotCMS, which can be a challenge for some. (1 reviews) - Users report **inconsistent Push Publish functionality** , emphasizing the need for clear source and target differentiation. (1 reviews) - Users find the **complex setup** of dotCMS frustrating, especially regarding inconsistent push publish functions. (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. Great service for flexible websites **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jennifer W. | Digital SEO Marketing Specialist, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 10, 2024 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** dotCMS is super powerful with the ability to create dynamic content easily. For those inputting content, it is super easy. It really allows you to access various pieces of information in an easy way. Their support is exceptional as well. Whenever there is a problem, they get back to you very quickly. After reviewing some other platforms, dotCMS is also priced very well too, especially for all the features it offers. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** You need a certain level of coding knowledge to be able to be a good administrator. I need more help than I would like. This platform is great for a whole team, web developer and SEO and strategic marketer. You really need ALL those skills for this, and I only have two out of three. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** dotCMS is our CMS for our primary website. We have a lot of information and dotCMS allows us to display it in ways that are easy and helpful to our website visitors. They also offer Professional Services which is solving the problem of our lack of coding knowledge. While I would like to be able to do this on my own, it is not feasible at this time so this service is invaluable. **Official Response from Melissa Petrie:** > Thank you for your feedback on dotCMS. We're delighted that you find it powerful and user-friendly for managing your content. We understand that the need for coding knowledge can be challenging. Your input is valuable as we strive to make dotCMS more accessible. If you need further assistance with resources, please feel free to reach out to your CSM. Thanks again for your insights! ### 2. Efficient and Friendly, But with Room to Explore More **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jesus Eduardo G. **Reviewed Date:** June 17, 2026 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** dotCMS is quite a good tool for a CMS, and it has been very useful for registering all the content we need to display. I have learned a lot about its architecture and how to configure it to optimize the server and the Java Virtual Machine, thus improving its performance. The information about the system's performance in the back office is quite useful, as you can see the logs, memory performance, and the status of the nodes. The little I have seen about the system's usage seems quite user-friendly to me. The initial configuration of dotCMS was excellent, we reviewed all the documentation and it is working very well. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Previously with the old versions, we had many problems and the server would restart several times, and the applications were left without service, but we discovered it was due to configuration issues. With the new versions of dotevergreen, we haven't had any problems so far. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use dotCMS to upload content to web and mobile applications, such as PDFs and images. It is a useful tool for logging content. It helps us optimize server configuration and improve system performance. **Official Response from Marc Boutillette:** > Jesus, thank you so much for taking the time to give us feedback and a review! I'm glad to hear that dotCMS has been useful for managing content across your web and mobile applications, and that you have been using the tools to optimize performance! I also appreciate you sharing your past experience with server restarts and configuration challenges. It’s great to hear that moving to dotEvergreen has improved stability and that things are now stable and performant. Thanks again for the feedback. We’re happy to continue supporting your team as you explore more of dotCMS and keep optimizing performance. ### 3. All in one package for online content management from a customer-focused team **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 04, 2022 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** dotCMS offers a complete and easy-to-use content management platform with great support, an intuitive permissioning system, and impressive scalability - allowing everyone from novices to seasoned developers to contribute to an online presence. Their dedicated upgrade project manager ensures minimal service disruptions and their Evergreen release model provide seamless maintenance and peace of mind ahead of larger product upgrades. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Earlier versions of their product had a steeper learning curve for new content editors, but the more mature platform is easier to use and more flexible - and continues to improve with additional development. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** dotCMS's development cycle keeps the platform innovative and fresh - safely adding new features to keep websites robust while addressing the shifting trends in development and design. dotCMS Support works quickly and efficiently to address any issues related to hosting our enterprise website. The new partnerships to provide a Content Delivery Network (CDN) adds extra security to the hosted environment against DDoS attacks. **Official Response from Marc Boutillette:** > Thank you so much for the thoughtful review. We really appreciate you taking the time to call out the areas that matter most to enterprise teams: ease of use, permissions, scalability, support, and a smooth upgrade experience! It’s especially great to hear that Evergreen and our upgrade support have helped provide peace of mind and reduce disruption for your team. That is exactly the kind of experience we want to deliver — a platform that keeps improving without creating unnecessary risk or overhead for the teams who depend on it. We also appreciate your note about the learning curve in earlier versions. Improving the authoring experience and making dotCMS easier for both new content editors and experienced developers continues to be a major focus for us. Thanks again for your partnership and trust. We’re grateful to support your team and help keep your enterprise web presence secure, scalable, and ready for what’s next. ### 4. Versatile, Highly Customizable CMS with Top-Notch Support **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Government Administration | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 24, 2026 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** The CMS capabilities are versatile and highly customizable, and the support team is top-notch—responsive, professional, and consistently helpful. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Their evergreen version can be a bit confusing, since new features sometimes take effect while they’re still in development. On top of that, the documentation isn’t always easy to follow, and it can be difficult to get clear answers from it. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** They give me complete control and plenty of customization options. The permissioning is solid, and the tailored solutions are exactly what I need. Speed, security, and support have all been fantastic as well. ### 5. Fast layouting, but workflows and search definitively need review **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 16, 2026 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** Quick layouting of pages, preview is quite OK **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Bad multilingual support, too many workflows when you have access to several projects, slow indexing, system crashes or resets without notice, illocic search, no filtering by author or date etc. in the tasks lists (only sorting), in 4-eyes-principle workflows, no possibility for yourself to take back a task you sent to the workflow, although it is your task! etc. Note that some or all of the above might be due to the implementation in my company, and not inherent to dotCMS itself. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** dotCMS allows us to publish quickly on the internet what needs to be public facing **Official Response from Marc Boutillette:** > Thank you very much for the thoughtful review and honest feedback. We’re glad to hear that page layouting and preview are helping your team publish public-facing content quickly. Some of the items you mentioned have been a major focus in recent dotCMS releases, including improvements to our Locales tool, the editing experience, search and filtering, indexing, and our Evergreen cloud infrastructure. It’s possible that your team is on an older version or that some of these areas are influenced by your current implementation. Either way, we’d welcome the opportunity to review your setup and walk you through the latest improvements. Your workflow feedback is especially helpful. Visibility across multiple projects may be something our team can help refine through configuration, but the ability for a user to pull back a task they submitted is a very useful suggestion. We’ve added that to the workflow improvements we are evaluating for an upcoming release. Thanks again for taking the time to share this feedback. We would love to connect with you through your Customer Success Manager so the product team can better understand your experience and help improve it. ### 6. Excellent Support Team and an Easy-to-Start Content Model Approach **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Telecommunications | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 30, 2026 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** The support team has been excellent, and the content model approach makes it easy to get started. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** dotCMS administration interface does not support caching of data relationships, which results in slow page load times (>10 seconds to open a page editing form). The system also does not support the publishing of more than 500 pages at a time, which means that mass changes have to be batched. dotCMS will only maintain 20 past versions of a page, which is not sufficient for our requirements. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cost effective product for offering a site and traditional search. **Official Response from Marc Boutillette:** > Thank you for the thoughtful review and for highlighting the strength of our support team and content model approach. We’re glad to hear that dotCMS has been easy to get started with and that it is providing a cost-effective way for your team to manage your site and search needs. We also appreciate the specific feedback around page editing performance, large publishing jobs, and version history limits. Those are important considerations for teams managing enterprise sites, and your feedback is helpful as we continue improving performance, scalability, and administrative workflows. We’d love the opportunity to review your use case in more detail with our support or customer success team, especially around relationship-heavy content types and large publishing operations, to see where configuration, newer platform improvements, or roadmap work may help. Thanks again for taking the time to share your experience and for being a dotCMS customer. ### 7. Flexible Tech Stack Content Creation, but the Velocity Templates Feel Dated **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jonas P. | director of digital development, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 01, 2026 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** I really value the flexibility to create content using different tech stacks, along with the great support from the dotcms team. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** The Velocity engine–based template feels pretty outdated. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps keep our business running 24x7. **Official Response from Marc Boutillette:** > Jonas, thank you so much for the review and for recognizing the flexibility dotCMS provides across different tech stacks, as well as the support from our team. We’re glad to hear dotCMS is an integral part of keeping your business running 24x7! We also appreciate the feedback on Velocity-based templating. While Velocity remains supported for customers who rely on it, we understand that many teams are moving toward more modern front-end development frameworks. That’s why we continue to invest in headless, API-first, and modern front-end framework support so teams can build with the tools and architectures that work best for them. That said though, we would love to get further feedback from you on specific needs and where Velocity is holding your team back. We can do that in our regular Customer Success calls moving forward. Thanks again for sharing your experience and feedback. ### 8. Continuous Updates and Always-Available Support **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 08, 2026 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** Continuous platform updates and always-available support **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** The ways to customize the CORE code are sometimes too restrictive **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is helping us with the technological migration of the product, bringing benefits in solving issues related to backward compatibility as well as fixing the bugs we encounter. **Official Response from Marc Boutillette:** > Thank you for your review and for highlighting our Evergreen updates and amazing support team. We are happy to hear that our Evergreen release process is helping get new functionality and bug fixes to you quickly! We also appreciate the feedback around CORE code customization. dotCMS is designed to balance extensibility with long-term upgradeability and platform stability, but we understand that some use cases may require more flexibility. We are always open to suggestions and feedback and would love to learn more about your specific extensibility needs - you can do that by scheduling time through your Customer Success Manager. Thanks again for taking the time to share your experience. ### 9. Excellent Attention to Detail and Clear Communication **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Transportation/Trucking/Railroad | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 19, 2026 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** The attention to detail to our needs and communication. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** I do not know if I have "dislike", but we had a bumpy startup, which smoothed out over time. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** dotCMS allows us to separate corporate communication and customer application. ### 10. dotCMS is good product, improved a lot with few opportunities to improve. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 26, 2021 **What do you like best about dotCMS?** improved license management, integration of opensearch, improved cluster/node management, cache management. **What do you dislike about dotCMS?** Push Publish is still not consistent. There must be clear demarcation of source and target. **What problems is dotCMS solving and how is that benefiting you?** Upgrade to latest LTS version. **Official Response from Jenn Ezell:** > Prashant, Thank you for your review. We appreciate your feedback, and I'm glad to hear you are moving to a Long Term Supported (LTS) version. Being on an LTS version should improve the overall user experience and make it easier to stay up to date. We value our customer's feedback and would welcome any opportunity to discuss how to improve dotCMS for our users. Best, Jenn Ezell Customer Success ## 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/dotcms-review-1831545?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-30+23%3A19%3A45+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=8e905f7a-69a4-4190-ae0f-c404ecc4f43a&secure%5Btoken%5D=3c48ceea7717b4dea5a062e7695e424c948c5744b42e22d80cb59a8b4dce51a9&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)