One Friday afternoon, I was sitting at my desk and fixing bugs (as usual), a member of sales team came up to me and said
“Hey Naveed, we have this interesting new client and they are not sure about which CMS to go for, they have finalised Sitecore and Umbraco as the last two, can you help”
I replied: “Sure, why not, what are their business requirements ?”
Sales person: “They are medium to large size organisation and have usual requirements like news, events, forums, blogs, video content etc, they want a simple to use CMS with multiple authors and security levels”
I replied: “Ok, Sitecore and Umbraco are both equally powerful in content generation and management, they both are based on .NET stack (.NET,C#,SQL) and both are highly customisable, so far they both can be their potential CMS, do you have more specific requirements ?”
Sales person: “Yes, in future, they would like to integrate with Sharepoint and their back-end CRM system”
I replied :”Sitecore comes with a sharepoint connector out-of-box whereas for Umbraco we have to custom build one. As long as their back end CRM exposes API, we can integrate any of the CMS system with their back end, this will be custom build in both cases, do you have any other requirements ?”
Sales person: “It is not a requirement but in their wish list to have personalised content for different regions or profile history”
I replied: “Sitecore comes with Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) and Online Marketing Suite (OMS) which can make their life easy in future, however, Umbraco lacks these customised modules. So it looks like Sitecore can be their potential candidate for CMS, also do you have any idea about their budget for the website?”
Sales person: “Yes, it’s a five figure sum, not sure what exactly their budget is”
I replied: “If they are tight on budget and can compromise on add-ons then Umbraco would be good to start off with but will have high maintenance cost if they go down the route implementing customised modules. However, paying for Sitecore licenses up front will give them added benefit to use some of the modules out of the box and will have low maintenance cost, I guess best would be to give them a demo of both CMS systems to the client and let them make informed decision”
Sales person: “Sounds like a plan, ok I will let them know, cheers”
Conclusion:
No CMS is right or wrong for your business out of the box, you have evaluate them against your own business requirements for the website. Open source may be cheaper to start off with but will have maintenance costs down the line.
Disclaimer: I have worked with both CMS systems and hold them up in same respect for what they do, I am not a sales person or work for either of the CMS systems, this is just my opinion as a third party developer
Naveed's Blog 