I've used dotCMS since their early years (something like 15 years now). They have come a long way and created a great product that I would highly recommend for any team that needs an enterprise-level CMS and is wants a product they can mold and shape into exactly what they need to deliver either just their content or their content and their websites.

dotCMS is a developer's sandbox with lots of toys in it. It has a lot of built-in features and the custom content types and flexibility. There has been nothing we've wanted to do that we could not do using dotCMS.

With great flexibility comes great complexity. There are examples of how to do everything, but in the end you have to build out your own stuff. It doesn't theme, it doesn't one-click upgrade. You have to have a competent development wrapped around it.

My experience overall has been very good. We use their enterprise cloud-hosted service so we pay one reasonable fee for the annual license, support and hosting. It is advisable to purchase some sort of training package to get started. Otherwise, you may spend extra time figuring out how to ideally work within the system. For instance, you need to become familiar with the Velocity language that is related to Apache/Tomcat/Java.

This is an ideal CMS for an enterprise environment that needs a product that is flexible, highly customizable and reasonably priced.

There are bugs at times that are identified and either resolved via a hotfix or held for resolution in the next iteration. I have received emails saying that a bug was identified and proactively already fixed. However, other times I notice an issue that is documented as a feature yet doesn't work and you must wait until the next iteration is released. One example is an automatic sitemap generator tool. While the configuration of the module is in the documentation there are known reports that not all of the features work. Rather than prioritize it as a hotfix, it is idle until the next release. In the meantime, I have to defer to a third-party sitemap tool.

I think the biggest problem over the years (we are no longer clients) was the lack of a good, consistent working relationship. As a result, we missed years of updates and then had a very painful period where everything seemed to break while, version by version, we got our system up to date. During this time our stakeholders lost faith in DotCMS, so when it came time for a site redesign, there was no question that we would move to another platform even though the capabilities of the updated software were solid.

The ability to create widgets and place them in any container on the page allows for a ton of flexibility for pulling in and displaying content. The interface for content editors was generally easy enough for them to use effectively.

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. Also, some things that require little or no setup in other systems require customization. (Example: generating friendly URLs, which is automatic in something like Wordpress.) We also didn't like the strange URLs auto-generated for file assets. Permissions were buggy, partly because some of our files were so old ("legacy" assets).

Overall this platform has opened doors to us that were previous closed. I'm generally very happy with the freedom this software has given my team.

We appreciated that we could make tweaks and changes that we needed to get the platform to do what we need. Thanks to dotCMS, we are able to give our front end users an easy way to edit and add content to their pages no matter what their skill levels are. We also have the freedom to push to production without having to involve the System Administrators which gives us AMAZING turn around time. If there is a problem in production, we can fix it in minuted, which makes our client very happy and lowers their impact to revenue.

Sometimes it feels like the software falls short in some instances. Some UI bugs that we have encountered frustrate us as they seem to simple that with some UI/UX focus, shouldn't have occurred. Better documentation could also help us in leaps and bounds. When we have issues, it can be so frustrating to find the correct way to do things, or how to fix our problem. It is often found to be out of date or inaccurate.

My background is in web development, with most of my experience in frameworks and content management systems like Drupal, WordPress, and Laravel; one organization that I work for specializes in web development. However, another organization that I work for (the one that uses dotCMS) does not specialize in web development. This organization does want each of its employees to be able to add content to the website on a routine basis, though, and dotCMS fits this use case perfectly - its familiar concepts and simple interface make dotCMS an easy tool to learn and get comfortable with.

dotCMS uses concepts familiar to the average computer user, such as files and folder, so it's easy for people who know nothing in particular about web development to add and maintain content. Support is very courteous and responsive.

Not very developer-friendly: On the job, the main thing I do in dotCMS is write code for templates, detail pages, etc. I often end up copying and pasting code back and forth between dotCMS' interface and a text editor like Notepad++ because I find the built-in code editor fields too small. While dotCMS has WebDAV support, I have never been able to get it to work - and I've tried about a dozen times on a dozen different computers. The closest I've come to getting WebDAV to work is getting a list of all folders in the dotCMS installation -- but no files.

Easy to use folder/html-page style site interface. Extensive API uses Java viewtool objects to interact and code with the data programmatically. Apache velocity is a nice templating language for front-end development. Easy to create and deal with new structures.

Permissions can be difficult and involved to set up and maintain. There are limits on datatypes in content structures (which is understandable) but I can't think of why the text limit and date limit should be the same. We are always running into the text type limit because so many field types use the text data type. On the other hand, the most we've ever used the date data-type is twice in a structure. We don't need 25 date fields.

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.

dotCMS was a great out-of-the-box solution for our organization. It is able to handle complex content and relationships and makes it realitvely easy to build your website or app around your content and data.

The interface and learning curve can be intimidating for first-time or casual users. However, it had improved significanlly over the last few years with more improvements constantly coming down the line.

We use dotCMS to drive over 2 dozen websites and web apps. We integrate it with our custom internal tooling, as well as many third-party integrations like: Eloqua, Taleo, and Google's entire suite of SEO tooling. We also integrate with many different APIs and back-end infrastructures.

The flexibility and toolset gives our team a lot of options and methods to integrate with our complex ecosystem.

IMO, dotCMS is not for the small team. It provides a ton of features and power, but the complexity makes it hard to jump in to.

I work for a large college within a university and we needed a solution to organize and centralize all the websites within that college. This product gave a platform for managing each department's sites while giving us a way to generalize the content and share the content between the different departmental units. We have defined content types and the template tool and reused content and widget editor allows us to display those content types in ways that make the code reusable. For regular content creators it is a slight struggle to train them but as time goes on they are able to add their own content more intuitively. We have needed to customize a lot of solutions on our own to accomplish this but dotCMS is very accommodating when we have difficult questions.

- Lots of room for customization - templating and layout options are robust - file management is a breeze - personalization and personas - ability to establish workflows for publishing content - reasonably priced for a product of this size

- Complex for non power users - Documentation is overwhelming with examples not always being clear - Velocity is some what limiting when programming certain features - Large macro code base but they don't always function or stay up to date

I love the content model, it provides a very flexible and powerful way to model what content makes up our website. I also love the ability to adapt the software itself to what our business needs through the use of plugins.

Administration is not trivial. The powerful features in dotCMS come at a price that makes it harder to administer at a technical level. It requires more resources to run, upgrades are difficult, etc.

Overall, this tool has unlocked previously blocked channels for us. I'm usually pleased with the flexibility this product has provided. We liked that we might make necessary adjustments to have the system achieve what we required. We are capable to provide our front-end customers with a straightforward method to modify and add data to their sites, regardless of their skillset, owing to dotCMS. We possess the ability to force deployment without involving Sys Admins, giving us an AMAZING delivery time. Unless there's an issue in execution, we can solve it in minutes, which pleases our customers and reduces their income effect. Ascertain that you have a solid agreement in place on "outside the box" vs structure against modification. dotCMS is likely to be recommended for a website commencing from the initial point rather than a stacked-out site and experiences that must endure. Construct provided the dotCMS capacity and then fine-tune for defined standards.

Elegance in the back-end CMS interfaces, considering simple interconnections and data searching and editing. Generally, spreading concepts is a wonderful way to obtain content across requirements. I enjoy how versatile it is and allows me to create bespoke material kinds. That's what I believe, with enough planning, a self-serve website is feasible, while still considering unique layouts and styles.

A few issues with "system coding" principles, where personalization is intended to make use of this package's Capabilities. Nevertheless, modification implies effort and necessitates platform testing. In certain cases, it appears that the software comes up short. Certain UI flaws we've found irritate us since they appear to be so basic that they might not have happened with certain UI/UX efforts. Improved documentation might also assist us tremendously. If we have problems, it may be quite hard to figure out what to do and how to solve them. It is frequently discovered to be outdated or wrong.

Dotcms has served us well for an intranet application. We are happy with the product and will continue to use it for the foreseeable future.

The main reason we chose dotcms over other products was its ability to be customized to fit our needs without being overly complex. We need a product that folks without an IT background can navigate and use. Dotcms fit the best of both worlds for us.

The biggest challenge for us is upgrading. We host our instance of dotcms and all our upgrades are done manually. It would not have been so bad if we didn't write custom plugins to begin with.

Fast paced team development built around technologies that we're already using with mainstream clients to tackle enterprise problems.

We've been using the software with out clients since almost the inception of the software. Their support is great, and more affordable than most that are comparable amongst enterprise CMS providers. 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.

Software still has some legacy functionality that needs refactored; the impact is very low but from time to time creeps up from a "want" to a "need".

Adding and maintaining content in dotCMS is simple and easy for non-technical staff. The editor is intuitive and has all the features needed without being overwhelming and difficult to master. Content maintainers are up and running within minutes, its brilliant.

dotCMS has a fairly large footprint and can be quite complex to set up initially. There are some minor quirks which we have come across that their technical support wasn't able to solve for us, but I believe it is specific to our installation and may not affect other installations. Other than that their support has been outstanding.

we have been able to use the system to unify over 500 websites which now are able to share content and features for easy management!

we were looking for a highly configurable system that would allow us to create and manage a large number of abstract content types using taxonomies, workflow and other best practices. dotCMS definitely provided this for us.

the system is pretty abstract so it takes some planning to get started. we also ended up going with the cloud solution, which was easier than installing it and managing it ourselves.

Intuitive interface for creating web pages and reusable or structured content; ease of adding JQuery plugins; custom workflow designer; theme-based templates that support responsive design; built-in personalization and rule-based targeting; effective multilingual support; RESTful API; push publishing across servers.

Lack of built-in components - but then it's more of a framework than a plug-and-play system like WordPress.

Ease of installation and customization. Front End management and customization of themes

Nothing. I think dotcms, compared to other CMSs, offers unparalleled uptime and build times.

dotCMS is a powerful tool that could be customized to your need without having to modify the core. Allowing you to create content and use it in many different ways. From totally headless to hosting the pages in itself. You can make it fit your needs.

Like any CMS, having to create template for special things might be challenging some times.

Good so far, we have our web interfaces deployed on dotCMS.

Build on sound software foundations and frameworks, flexibility with regards to integration plugins.

Customer support, lacking in understanding requirements of clients especially the ones who are in commercial in nature, taking feedback from marketing and real users for UI specific needs.

It was a good experience starting from dotcms1.7 to dotcms3.

A Java base CMS which is compatible with all platforms.

Newer version of dotcms have issues with plugins.

Ease of use, lots of freedom in HOW to use it.

Initially it was pretty hard to setup. That might not have been dotCMS' 'fault', because our environment was a little different then the standard installation.

We need an easy-to-use but flexible CMS; dotCMS is a good balance of both.

It's easy for new users to grasp. Permissioning is granular. Custom content types are fairly easy to create.

Getting satisfactory answers from support is sometimes frustrating.

DotCMS is providing both content management and digital customer experience through personas. The platform cost was reasonable considering all the features. Maintaining updates at the business unit level is crucial to our productivity.

Would really like an LMS or event management component that is as simplified and integrated with marketing content.

ease of use for users, time machine feature and the integration with elastic search

Sometimes the backend visualization is quite slow; in some places the code is inflexible and not very optimized

Being able to template out multiple websites with the same look and feel. The ability to reuse widgets & content across the site is a time saver.

Building tables on the web page is painful but it is across most web environments.