Adobe make a pretty darn good Creative Suite for developers but their forays into simplified tools for website content management have consistently failed over the years.
Anyone who has used Adobe Contribute knows what I mean. It uses the desktop-software approach to update a website that a developer has setup for you. The problem of course, is that end users don’t much like it.
Dreamweaver is a nice code editor, but even it’s “WYSIWYG” (what you see is what you get) editor is too high level for average users.
Then they have another product, Fireworks which tries to do the same thing at a lower level and throws in a lot of prewritten javascript to make things behave. If you ask around though, it’s not terribly well liked in developer circles.
And then of course there’s flash.. slowly dying a horrible death at the feet of HTML5 and world popular iOS devices that don’t support it.
So it’s with this context you have to wonder about Business Catalyst. The in-browser approach to a CMS (Content Management System) where Adobe is trying to sell (at a subscription rate) something that has been pioneered for years by free open-source alternatives like WordPress. What’s more, they charge you per user and per feature so the more you grow – the more you pay. Sounds good for Adobe. Want social features? Another $200 please.
To keep the money flowing, they’ve setup a partner program to encourage developers to use their CMS and basically take all the support so that they don’t have to. Good for the shrewd developer who makes their money from support, not so good for the end user. Ultimately with any subscription based platform you are effectively “locked in” and can’t easily migrate your site to something cheaper (or free). As a hosted service it runs on their servers which (going by their support forums) often go down.
Here are some of the business catalyst complaints and issues you quickly find online from disgruntled users :
“6 months down the track of using Business Catalyst i would not recommend it to anyone… Yes if serious build your own or use something more widely supported.” – via Whirlpool Forums
“I have been a developer for many years now and in my experience every BC website I have worked on is an absolute mess. I’ve found support difficult to obtain and the CMS is annoying.” – via Freelance Switch
“Price is fine. I’d pay twice that if the system did everything it claims to do better than open source solutions. But it doesn’t. It really does suck. “ – Web Developer Blog
“When I read and see the clients’ frustration on their support forum, I know I should stay far away…” – Lynton Web
“It didn’t even occur to us that such a powerful product would fail on such a fundamental level.” – Boag World
It seems like Adobe have missed the mark again with a solution that is overkill for many small businesses and not really good enough for larger businesses with serious needs. It’s a hard sell for some.
6 Comments. Leave new
I am a freelance web designer, doing mainly smaller sites. As I am in need of a CRM for a client, I am looking into BC. From your review though I am questioning if you really used it? Your review seems based on their pricing structure and other people’s comments, I do not see anything about functionality, ease of use, comparison to other sites?
Hi Guni.
We are an online development and google advertising agency and clients come to us with BC sites all the time. Because they are proprietary and the client is locked into a particular framework and developer, getting even minor changes made is problematic. Sometimes the developers never respond. We’ve had client’s sites go down entirely (ruining their SEO and wasting their SEM) because their CC payment to adobe bounced that month. If the client decides to move away, they can’t easily migrate their site and IP off the BC platform. If we want to just install a code snippet (say, for conversion tracking) we are unable to do so without licensing, which is hardly worthwhile for us, for a snippet.
We did look into it as developers, but investing in a framework from a company that has repeatedly failed to deliver one good one (Contribute, Dreamweaver, Flash etc etc) means our best time and effort are spent on open, and popular technologies which opens up our potential market greatly.
Hope this helps in your decision!
Dylan.
I disagree with many points on this post. Having used BC for three sites now, I have been happy with the results – not as a partner, but as a client. I think it’s one of the best hosted CMS solutions out there. Yes, you can do more with Drupal and WordPress (and other open source CMS solutions), but with a greater learning curve. As far as being “locked-in goes”, you are no more locked in than you would be with any other CMS. You have FTP access to all HTML generated pages, and if you host your domain externally it’s easy to point to a new host if you decide to move. To say that their hosting service goes down often is a dramatic overstatement. I am running three sites – the first one went live December 2011, the next March 2012 and the next August 2012. Not one has gone down once.
I have used BC for 2 years and I’m not looking elsewhere anytime soon. BC is a no brainer + if you have several options such as Muse, Dreamweaver, or your own preferred IDE and http://FTP...
If your client want a different shipping option you are completely screwed.
Adobe has ignored adding options, and the select few who help decide the direction of BC seem to be making a ton of money on shipping issues $3000-$10,000 to add a new shipping option.. SERIOUSLY.
So enjoy getting screwed over!!!
agreed BC sucks