A Fair Review of the Top Mid-Market CMS for 2020 — Crownpeak

HISTORY

Crownpeak was formed in 2001, with the mission to provide marketers a faster way to publish and manage websites by launching the first CMS to be delivered as a hosted service, the precursor to the SaaS model. Not content with being the first hosted service, Crownpeak evolved its SaaS environment to become the only true multi-tenant WCM solution. In 2010, Crownpeak forged ahead to become the only open cloud platform for Web Experience Management, and more recently, joining forces with ActiveStandards to become the only cloud-based CMS that can deploy and maintain high-quality experiences across all digital touchpoints.  

“Built from the ground up as a SaaS platform, Crownpeak’s easy to launch fast to execute kind of positioning is perfectly suited for customers looking for a lighter weight, faster to deploy solution, not wanting to do upgrades and worry about versioning issues,” states Darren Guarnaccia, Crownpeak’s Chief Product Officer. “And as we watch the rest of the market play catchup turning on-premise platforms to cloud solutions, customers are finding out that you can't go back and rewrite a platform to be SaaS”, said Darren Guarnaccia, Chief Product Officer at Crownpeak.

More recently, Crownpeak achieved Amazon Web Services Digital Customer Experience Competency status. This designation recognizes that Crownpeak provides proven technology and deep expertise to help Digital Customer Experience customers, by providing end-to-end solutions for all phases of the digital customer acquisition and retention life cycle. In 2017 Crownpeak acquired Evidon, one of the world’s largest ad-blocking technologies.  Evidon had built up a huge collection of ad technology, which meant they could pick up JavaScript tags, ad patterns and snippets of code, and trace them to the vendor.

In late 2019, Crownpeak announced a new Privacy and Consent Management extension for Adobe’s Cloud Platform tag-management facility.

KEY CAPABILITIES

Crownpeak fully supports headless content delivery and allows created content to be repurposed across multiple channels, supporting any web development environment, including .NET, Java, PHP, and others.

“One of our key platform features is that we automatically and silently conduct upgrades once every two weeks or 24 times a year. In addition, Crownpeak allows customers to launch a website from scratch in as little as 6-weeks from an easy-to-use interface that requires no coding knowledge,” stated Darren.

Key features and functionalities include:

ECOMMERCE CAPABILITIES

Crownpeak provides an eCommerce solution for customers via integrations with a few of the leading commerce platforms. Crownpeak has recently partnered with Falcon-Software to develop and maintain a commercetools eCommerce solution with a release date set for 2020.

Key eCommerce features and functionalities include:

DIGITAL EXPERIENCE CAPABILITIES

Crownpeak offers a suite of powerful tools that deliver enterprise-grade digital experiences in one of the industry’s fastest time-to-market. With a unique cloud-native, decoupled architecture, you can integrate existing applications and tools, deliver trust-building privacy opportunities, and execute digital experiences with confidence.

Key DXP features and functionalities include:

TECHNOLOGY PARTNERS

Crownpeak technology partners play a crucial role in enhancing the capabilities of their platform, leveraging connectors and integrations with over 50-plus applications including marketing, CRM, and language solutions. Crownpeak supports any customer back-office system with a REST-based, bi-directional, 25-method API.

Key technology partners include:

STRENGTHS

Crownpeak's Point of View

One of Crownpeak’s core strengths is being a version-less SaaS platform with silent upgrades. This means that every customer is always on the latest verion, taking advantage of new innovations without ever dealing any of the time and costs of traditional upgrades.

Another Crownpeak core strength is its decoupled architecture, which allows them to deliver technology agnostically, whether you use PHP, Java, .NET, etc. Not only does this give developers more freedom, but it also enables lighter deployments with low-code or no-code options for that quick-to-market approach. Crownpeak has seen customers launch enterprise sites in days and weeks as compared to months and years on traditional platforms.

Finally, Crownpeak ensures the highest security protections at all layers of the technology stack. In addition to the industry-leading security and data protection of Amazon Web Services, Crownpeak participates in a robust set of independent audits, assessments, and certifications to ensure they continually exceed customers' security needs.

Implementation Partners' Point of View

"Crownpeak, being developed as a software architecture (SaaS) system, always offer the advantage of being on the latest version for its customers. There is no upgrade wait time to the latest version or extra cost. The system has a decoupled deployment structure; content authors are able to create, manage and push content globally (in various languages) with less efforts and shorter turnaround times when it comes to delivering complex digital projects without any IT involvement. The workflow structure and content management process allow non-technical users to create state of the art customer experiences with limited teams. In-built DQM (Digital Quality Management) tool gives the marketing teams the ability to audit their content for accuracy and accessibility. 
 
As for the development team’s simplistic approach it gives the developers the flexibility to implement their code rapidly with the use of component-based templates. The CMS is easy to set-up and can be ready within a few weeks compared to months in a traditional WCM. User configuration, roles, and managing access are smooth; active directory configuration allows users to access the platform with their corporate credential which is a simple set-up. Another key benefit of the system is interoperability; it is easily integrated with 3rd party platforms, Crownpeak provides at least 60+ out of the box connectors that comes as part of the Crownpeak CMS console. 
 
With the recent announcement of the launch of the Crownpeak Community platform, the company is expanding its technical support for the development and content author community."

WEAKNESSES

Crownpeak's Point of View

Crownpeak has lost opportunities when organizations want the software to run in their own datacenter, which they cannot support. Although Crownpeak can deliver customer experiences on-premise, they can't run its WCM solution on-premise.

Crownpeak has also received feedback from its partners that deployment timelines are sometimes a little too light, meaning certain large system integrators don't like dealing with solutions that are not a ten-to-one, software-to-services ratio. Crownpeak is closer to a one-to-one ratio.

Implementation Partners' Point of View

KEY DIFFERENTIATOR

Crownpeak's Point of View

Running your WCM solution like the rest of your marketing technology stack is the right methodology. Most digital marketing tools and platforms are SaaS, and a content management system that works and behaves in the same manner, such as Crownpeak, is well-positioned in the market space. Many other platforms try to claim they can deliver benefits of SaaS, but when you look under the hood, just a portion of the platform is SaaS, or it is really a managed service (which comes with a slew of hidden costs). Crownpeak is uniquely a true SaaS, multitenant enterprise DXP. 

Also, Crownpeak believes in a best-in-class approach to marketing technology, which means we aim to make integrations as easy as possible.  There is the desire out there to move to simplification and rationalization in every market. With that said, a core differentiator for Crownpeak is its focus to simplify and make it easier to get the job done, using the tools that you choose, by delivering what users need versus wading through twenty pounds of features you won’t ever use or already pay for from another provider. 

Implementation Partner's Point of View

TRAINING & SUPPORT

Crownpeak provides onsite or virtual training for developers. The training curriculum allows developers to be able to create templates, components, workflows, users, and permissions and set up integrations with Crownpeak Search. As part of the implementation process, Crownpeak also provides training for the marketing and content authors on the templates and components that are specifically built for them to use. This also includes setting up user guides and other knowledge bases to ensure they have key information within the platform. Additionally, customers have access to the Crownpeak Community, which contains various video tutorials and other forms of content on how to leverage and use the Crownpeak platform.

Crownpeak expert help and support is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Crownpeak DXM is delivered exclusively as a SaaS offering. Crownpeak DXM's exclusive SaaS model enables software updates to all core functionality (features/functions, performance improvements, security/vulnerability patches) to be transparently deployed on a bi-weekly basis — greatly reducing overall TCO, enabling marketers to immediately react to customer demand, and relieving the brand exposure normally associated with lengthy software upgrade cycles. All updates to Crownpeak DXM are included in the Crownpeak subscription. In addition, every Crownpeak customer is assigned a named Customer Success Manager to help align Crownpeak with your project success criteria and ensuring that you are making the most of the wide feature/tool-set included within the project to overseeing Crownpeak support escalations, product roadmap requests, and management.

IMPLEMENTATION PARTNER PROCESS

Crownpeak has 15 trained and certified implementation partners worldwide, and although the number may seem low in comparison to others in this review, their strategy is quality over quantity with a small but elite group of implementation partners. Crownpeak takes on only the best-in-class partners that they trust to deliver successful projects. 

In addition, Crownpeak takes a very different approach to its partner channel, where enablement takes on a high value with a high touch point approach.  Partners can expect several touches that are designed to create well-positioned, well-developed partners in the field, including a 55-point checklist designed to set the bar of what partners should expect and measure Crownpeak.

Developer training is held monthly at no cost. Developer certification is also available following training at no additional cost to get the majority if not all partners’ developers certified. Crownpeak has an active community and expert access for questions at any time at community.crownpeak.com and quarterly product launch reviews, providing partners with early access to new releases and what is being worked on for the next quarter.

CUSTOMERS

Worldwide Deployments: 500-plus

Top Market Sectors: 

Notable Crownpeak Brand-Name Customers:

Customer Comments:

Sean Brasher, Sr. Director of Web Technology, Healthgrades
"Because our customers rely on our expertise to get their websites deployed quickly, we couldn’t risk that manual upgrades would slow us down. Because Crownpeak DXM is a native SaaS solution, upgrades are automatic, so our customers are always on the latest version.” 

Katherine Attoe, IT Business Partner Global Communications Manager, Unilever
"The feedback from users so far has been very positive. If you’re a busy web editor managing an in-country site, DQM is a great tool to assist you. It helps make sure you’re compliant, meeting best practices, and achieving the same results locally as your global counterparts.” 

Emanuela Tasinato, Digital Experience, Toyota Motor Europe
"A critical requirement was to ensure that the localization requirements of the markets would be fully supported. “There is a balance between making quality management as simple and centralized as possible and catering to every market’s specific needs. We needed a solution with the power and flexibility to do both, which is why we selected Crownpeak DQM.” 
 

 Customer comments and testimonials are all third-party verified

Featured Case Study

The Evolution of Digital Experience Delivery for Healthcare

FUTURE ROADMAP

Crownpeak’s future roadmap is focused on three key areas:

1. Usability and ease of use for marketers. We plan to roll out guided experiences and walkthroughs, content analysis tools, and AI-driven content augmentation. In addition, we are working on streamlining editorial tasks specially around experience quality, accessibility, consent and privacy.

2. Interoperability and flexibility. We continue to extend our integrations ecosystem and connectors infrastructure that marketers can deploy without IT resources. This helps our customers leverage their Martech investments with hundreds of providers such as e-commerce platforms, CDPs, Marketing automation platforms, document repositories, digital asset management platforms, and more.  

3. Performance and agility. We are working on enhancing a few areas, including faster deployments, server-less delivery, and enhanced marketer-friendly headless delivery.  We are also focusing on the developer experience to streamline implementation for our customers and partners.

PERFORMANCE GUIDE

CMS-Connected's performance guide is based on our interviews with the vendor, their implementation and technical partners, customers, and leading industry analysts.

Category Scoring: 5 = Excellent | 4 = Very Good | 3 = Good | 2 = Satisfactory | 1 = Unsatisfactory

Overall Performance Scoring: 57–70 = Excellent | 43–56 = Very Good | 29–42 = Good | 15–28 = Satisfactory | 1–14 = Unsatisfactory

ANNUAL HOSTED EVENTS

Crownpeak’s annual event is Crownpeak Empower held in the UK and USA. The event is designed to bring Crownpeak customers from different industries together to get to know one another and share digital marketing stories.