Custom CMS VS Off-The-Shelf CMS: Which Is The Best One?
TABLE OF CONTENT
Benefits of Using a CMS
Compare between Custom CMS vs Off-the-shelf CMS
Things to consider before choosing the CMS
Conclusion
Benefits of Using a CMS
With a website, content management plays a vital role in creating, editing, organizing and publishing content. Leveraging a CMS helps you can manage in the world of digital businesses content. Here are several benefits of CMS for website:
- Simplified content creation: One of the profound benefits of CMS is creating content. Generally, CMS is designed to intuitive user interfaces with the full indispensable elements which affects to website performance. No matter how you’re non-technical users, you can also create, edit, and public content easily without coding.
- Efficient content management: You don’t worry about your content is separated management. Because CMS allows you to store all content in a single place. Therefore, you can not only create but also find and update content quickly without losing. Thus, it helps you save times and resources for content management.
- Consistent branding and design: As a prime tool, CMS allows you maintain branding and design across all digital channels more effectively. It delivers pre-built templates, style guides, and branding guidelines ensuring that all published content on the website are synced adhering to your standard. Furthermore, you don’t take much time for research and create new sitemap for each page or blog.
- Improved collaboration: As mentioned above, CMS lets businesses work all-in-one platform, so multiple users will do simultaneously in there. This results in enhancing content development process. Additionally, each user can see the work of each other as well as get the progress.
- Scalability: Generally, you don’t need to more features and functionalities from your CMS when starting first. However, you should consider the scalable capabilities of it to add advanced them, you tend to expand your business in the future. A good CMS is a system which can scale up and be suitable for all company sizes. And, it is also able to integrate with third-party systems in the ecosystem.
- SEO optimization: It profound impacts to your search engine rankings on the Google. Almost CMS platforms include built-in SEO features to help you use easily. However, a few platforms don’t have it, you must add to through coding.
Compare between Custom CMS vs Off-the-shelf CMS
Many businesses realize the potential of CMS in assisting to manage content on the website. Therefore, they tend to find the best solution for your business to gain more efficiency and productivity in content management. Facing the custom CMS and CMS platform, they seems indecisive because of its features. In this part, we will compare several features of custom CMS vs on-the shelf CMS to help you gain a holistic view of CMS.
Launch time
Time-to-market is important to decide the website performance as well as sales. Therefore, many businesses usually prioritize the solution with short term to implement. If you create a custom CMS, it will synonym to build the entire system with a complete process, including requirement analysis and planning, CMS architecture design, UX and UI design, front-end development, back-end development, testing and deployment. It sounds like a time-intensive solution which take months or even years to complete by the complexity of website architecture and content types. However, if you have more time and specific requirements, you can choose customize CMS to adapt the demands.
With off-the-shelf CMS, you can set up, customize, and launch in a relatively short time in a few hour or days. CMS platforms provides pre-built templates, themes, and plugins, allowing you to easily use. Additionally, you don’t need to choose a web host or set up the sever because CMS platforms deliver hosting services.
Customization level
It is certain that custom CMS is higher level of customization than off-the-shelf CMS. As mentioned above, custom CMS is built end-to-end, so you can flexibly customize to meet your business needs. However, pre-built CMS platforms are able to customize features and functionalities but relatively limited. Moreover, customization of CMS platforms is quite complex, it requires the additional technical expertise which take more time, effort and money for hiring. If you need to tailor CMS, you can hire AHT Tech dedicated IT team – our experienced developers with more level from junior to senior help you customize CMS platforms, adapting to your needs without wasting time and money.
Broaden IT team
There is no doubt that custom CMS will need to a large of web development developer with a range of technologies to build. For example, while front-end development requires HTML, CSS, and JavaScript frameworks, back-end development need to Java, Python, and PHP. Therefore, if you use custom CMS, you must take more money for resources to build CMS. On the other hand, CMS platforms requires less technical expertise. It is built to be user-friendly and no-code/ low-code, users can easily to manage content. However, if you need to modify templates or plugins, and integrate CMS with third-party systems, you will get the support of experienced developers.
User experience
One of the elements affected to efficient task is user experience. Therefore, when creating a custom CMS, you need to gather in-depth analysis of user needs and expectations, feedback both before and after the CMS launch. Make sure that the CMS is intuitive and easy-to-use, allowing users to work more effectively.
Unlike custom CMS, off-the-shelf CMS is built and presented in the market over years, so it has received more than feedback yearly. After that, it has passed through a large number of interactions and testing sessions to cater to all target audience to bring smooth user experience.
Plugins and integrations
When comparing custom CMS vs off-the-shelf CMS, the capability of add plugins and integrations with third-party systems is essential. While custom CMS need to develop additional work and technical expertise to implement and maintain plugins and integrations, CMS platforms has a wide range of pre-built plugins and easily integrate to the website. To illustrate, plugins and integrations in custom CMS need to embed to back-end of your custom CMS development. This tasks requires the experienced developers to implement. Certainly, it can take much money and time to implement and maintain.
Maintenance and support
From development to maintenance, custom CMS need to a dedicated team of technical experts to work. This results in investing much time and resources for custom CMS. Additionally, you also need to have in-house IT team to ensure the custom CMS run smooth as well as handle trouble on time. Meanwhile, CMS platforms still need to a tech team to manage but fewer resources because it includes the services of maintenance and support. Your CMS platforms will be constantly updated and addressed issues if requested.
Things to consider before choosing the CMS
Choosing the CMS dramatically affects to your business. Depending on your core businesses, you can choose the right one. To choose between custom CMS vs off-the-shelf CMS, you need to consider several element, including:
- Requirements: In the first step, you need to list your specific requirements. In case you have more unique features, you can choose custom CMS to adapt much more requirements. It is fortunate for you if CMS platform adapts to basic needs.
- Budget: You should estimate the budget both upfront costs and long-term maintenance. While CMS platform will be suitable for small company with limited budget, custom CMS might be suitable for large company.
- Timeline: Off-the-shelf CMS is faster than custom CMS.
- Technical Expertise: If your company limited IT resources, you should choose off-the-shelf CMS. Custom CMS development need to technical expertise for a long time.
- Scalability: Prioritizes on scalable capability of CMS will help you easily expand for each stage of growth. In this case, custom CMS might the best choice for you to gain more customizable and scalable in the future.
Conclusion
Comparing custom CMS vs off-the-shelf CMS helps businesses understand the CMS as well as choose the niche one. Each CMS has different features and functionalities. Whether custom CMS or off-the-shelf CMS, it also brings more advantages for managing content on the website. Depending on your specific requirements, you can choose the right one with the advanced management.
So, do you want to implement CMS for your website?
AHT Tech has more than experience and seasoned developers to develop and implement CMS for various industries like eCommerce, retail, etc… Our talented developers specialized in a large of technologies to help you, contact us now!