ExpressionEngine Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 8.3 out of 10

Score

8.3 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for ExpressionEngine are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Reliable Performance: Many users have praised the product for its reliable performance. Several reviewers mentioned that the product consistently meets their expectations and performs well in various scenarios. Ease of Use: The ease of use is a common pro mentioned by several customers. Users appreciate how intuitive and user-friendly the product is, making it easy to navigate and operate without any hassle or confusion. Great Customer Support: Some users have expressed their satisfaction with the great customer support provided by the company. They have found the support team to be responsive, helpful, and efficient in resolving any issues or inquiries they had.

Reviews

63 Reviews

Flexible and Secure Web Content Management System

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

June 25, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use ExpressionEngine as the web content management system for the majority of our website projects. We do work with other platforms from time-to-time, but ExpressionEngine is our "go to". We like the flexibility to implement any design without a "default theme". We also love ExpressionEngine's longstanding track record on security. This gives us and our clients peace-of-mind after launch.

Pros

Excellent security
Flexible and customizable
Easy for our clients to use

Cons

There are misperceptions about ExpressionEngine being "for developers". Better demos of websites might help

Likelihood to Recommend

We use ExpressionEngine on websites of all sizes and types. A key benefit is that we typically only need to upgrade sites annually. This is due to ExpressionEngine's native security. When we deploy other web content management systems like WordPress, we have to perform monthly upgrades to avoid issues.

Tim Carter

Web Developer in Information Technology at Pedrera Web Development (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

15 years of experience

Great Product, Getting Better All The Time...

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

June 18, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ExpressionEngine is our go to solution for building custom websites. The native template engine uses a syntax that is simple to learn and comprehend, which allows our developers to stand up sites faster, and easily maintain them over the long haul. ExpressionEngine includes a comprehensive set of fieldtypes that will meet the majority of needs for simple to complex content models. If not, there is an addon store with plenty of options to add functionality to a site.

Pros

Easy to learn
Enables rapid development
Secure by default

Cons

In my opinion, mediocre support for block type page builders (Bloqs addon is the best option currently)
Doesn't use a PHP framework under the hood (and no Composer support)
Lacking database migration support

Likelihood to Recommend

ExpressionEngine is particularly well suited for small to medium size brochure sites.

I do not currently recommend ExpressionEngine to clients for websites that require E-Commerce. Part of that is not wanting to be responsible for the cart, and checkout functionality that currently seems half-baked within the existing ecosystem.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

EE - The Peak of CMS Functionality.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 10, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use ExpressionEngine to create bespoke, powerful, and secure websites for our clientele. It allows us to create highly extensible sites that focus on the client's content, the functionality that the client needs, and the direct business requirements for each client, all while providing a beautiful user experience (for both front-end and backend users) and the most secure CMS on the market.

Pros

Highly flexible content management system.
Incredible extensibility to provide any functionality needed.
The best CMS experience on the market.

Cons

Little challenging to get started for non-developers.
Highly reliant on knowledge of the content structure beforehand.

Likelihood to Recommend

ExpressionEngine stands out as a robust and genuine content management system (CMS), distinguishing itself from mere page builders in the web development landscape. With a focus on flexibility and extensibility, ExpressionEngine caters to the needs of developers and content creators alike, making it a versatile solution for building and managing websites. One key differentiator is its commitment to being a true CMS rather than a page builder. ExpressionEngine empowers users to create and organize content in a structured manner, offering a sophisticated system for handling various types of data. For sites that truly care about the structure of their content and ensuring that they can optimize for SEO, EE is the #1 choice. EE also stands out as a pioneer in security among CMS platforms. The team managing this ensures there is a constant eye on what is both required as features, and needeed to keep it secure. Regular updates and a vigilant security team contribute to a robust defense against potential vulnerabilities, instilling confidence in both developers and site administrators. EE is best for users who want a very robust experience, a true content management system, and a secure site that can scale with them.

Doug Black

CEO (Chief Executive Officer) in Corporate at tripleNERDscore (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

View profile

Website development that's simplified and streamlined

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 18, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ExpressionEngine has completely transformed the way we manage our website. This is our first CMS and it has been a life-saver when it comes to making instant updates or creating/editing content across all of the different pages. We have specific templates designed to fit our brand, our products, and our wireframe.

Pros

Editor contains preview windows to check work before saving changes.
Each section has a WYSIWYG which instructs users on the dimensions needed for images.

Cons

Sometimes, I'm unable to pull from the PDF folder when trying to link a file in the WYSIWYG.
Content boxes in certain templates do not expand, which makes it difficult to navigate where the cursor is and keep your place while editing.

Likelihood to Recommend

ExpressionEngine, for the most part, has a straightforward, user-friendly interface and is far more simplified than any proprietary software that I've used as a website administrator in the past. Sorting through the site structure and creating new pages is a fairly simple process. This CMS may be less appropriate for customers who require far more complicated templates (with a heavy dose of coding) to match their needs.

Verified User

Employee in Marketing (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

ExpressionEngine. One CMS to rule them all!

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

June 7, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ExpressionEngine is taking care of the day-to-day content input and delivery from several departments within the organization. I recommended ExpressionEngine as an alternate/replacement CMS to my colleagues, and the organization as a whole, due to the need to migrate away from the existing CMS. ExpressionEngine resolved a number of issues, including usability, reliability, and consistency in regards to delivering content accurately, something the previous CMS did not.

Pros

Content is not constrained or controlled by set templates, unlike other CMS.
Gives you total control over the look and feel. You decide the design direction and what your visitors will see.
The UI is sublime. It's a pleasure to configure and work with.
The expandability, flexibility, and customization of the entire system is unsurpassed.

Cons

The only issue I have with ExpressionEngine is the cost of official support.

Likelihood to Recommend

ExpressEngine is suitable for almost all business websites requiring a robust, flexible, and totally scalable CMS. However, It is probably not suitable for basic or small personal blogs or similar.

Robert Bruce Goggins

Digital Designer in Professional Services at Digital Methods (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

View profile

Solid, more flexible alternative to WordPress

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

June 21, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I run a web agency which uses ExpressionEngine and Craft CMS for our small business and organization clients. Both are more refined, flexible, and powerful alternatives to the default to WordPress. Both allow development of custom, non-theme-based websites to fit clients' specific business requirements.

Pros

Wide range of fields types - allows collection and display of different types of information (date, image, multi-relation, etc.)
Security. Excellent security record, does not face hacking risk like WordPress.
HTML-agnostic templating system. Write whatever HTML, JS, CSS you want, and then integrate it into ExpressionEngine's templates.

Cons

UI is still inferior to Craft CMS.
Third-party add-ons are required for certain features that ought to be built in to the product.
Vendor has fumbled support for its developer network.

Likelihood to Recommend

<ul><li>Upgrading from a previous ExpressionEngine build (v2 or v3).</li><li>Custom builds that aren't suited to a theme.</li><li>More complex needs than WordPress can handle natively.

</li></ul>

Ben Seigel

Principal in Marketing at Versa Studio LLC (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

12 years of experience

View profile

ExpressionEngine - the CMS of Choice

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 15, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I worked at an advertising agency that used ExpressionEngine for all their client websites; it was their CMS of choice. All of the developers installed it, set up custom fields and made it meet the client's requests, each site is fully customized for the client. We had a boilerplate set up that enabled us to set up a new install quickly.

Pros

ExpressionEngine manages content and users extremely well and with ease.
ExpressionEngine is reliable and scales for small websites to enterprise websites.
ExpressionEngine has a large community following and many reliable plugins.

Cons

ExpressionEngine makes a ton of calls to the database, so caching is extremely important.
ExpressionEngine has a learning curve when learning to set up templates properly.

Likelihood to Recommend

ExpressionEngine is a good option for a CMS for many people. It scales easily, is reliable and has plenty of plugins to extend functionality. I've used it on small websites and enterprise websites, receiving roughly 15,000 requests daily. It's easy for end users to navigate and easy to manage user roles.

Verified User

Employee in Marketing (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

ExpressionEngine, not the worst but not my favorite

Rating: 4 out of 10

Incentivized

February 20, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My husband and I are software developers. We work for companies with websites built in Drupal, ExpressionEngine, Wordpress or any php based platform. There is one company using ExpressionEngine for their website. They have forms, user registration, and data display.

Pros

Simple admin interface for the end user.
Generates clean markup for front-end theming.

Cons

Not flexible enough to create a really custom website.
Source control can be a mess since it's mostly database.
Data migration even core updates or server migration are not easy to make.
Is not an open source license.

Likelihood to Recommend

Dynamic validations or complex conditionals are hard to accomplish.

Claudia Lorena Aguilar Ayala

Software Developer - Drupal, Rails, JQuery, ExpressionEngine, PHP, Coldfusion, MySQL, Rubymotion in Engineering at Eaglepeak Consulting (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile

EE Above the Rest for Client UX.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

February 19, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used ExpressionEngine as our primary CMS for building web client solutions. Most of these solutions were created with fairly large data architectures, giving full control to various levels of [client] users to make changes to (and organize) data site wide. The biggest solution this offered was easy, quick, reliable content creation and editing for the user.

Pros

Content architecture. It's very easy to create highly customizable display of content in various pages and templates; equally importantly it's very easy for a user to create the content within these structures.
Features / Plugins. Out of the box EE is exceptional for a CMS, but when you add in some of the offered plugins from the EE community, the customization and usability reaches 5 star status.
Community. There is a huge, devoted community of power users who contribute to the CMS. Developers create and maintain plugins with full reliability and service. This cannot be said for other CMS's I've used through time.

Cons

The one drawback I wasn't impressed by was that the entirety of all data - including templates (html / php / etc) was stored in the database. This made complications a few times.

Likelihood to Recommend

Honestly, from a UI/UX standpoint, EE stands at the top of the mountain. The usability and user interface is leagues beyond any other CMS I have used, which is what the huge appeal is for me. Wordpress can leave you confused and uncertain with a very half baked UX. ExpressionEngine's level of detail and ease of use is impressive.

Verified User

Former Employee in Professional Services (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

ExpressionEngine, Affordable Comercial CMS

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

February 19, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use ExpressionEngine as our enterprise CMS solution for the entire university. We host over 10,000 pages, support over 75 departments, train and manage over 200 editors, and serve over 4 million page views per week. After evaluating many commercial CMS solutions, ExpressionEngine was selected for several reasons. First, it was far more affordable than other choices presented to us. Second, our in house skill set was in php development in a LAMP stack environment. Third, it is easily extensible, allowing us to develop custom solutions in house and not be reliant on only solutions provided by the vendor. Out of the box, ExpressionEngine is extremely flexible in regards of how you decide to display cont in the presentation layer.

ExpressionEngine's affordability and flexibility have allowed us to continually enhance our web presence and use the system to build several stand alone web applications.

Pros

Extremely flexible and extensible
Fabulous user and developer community on Twitter, Facebook and Slack Chat.
Wide range of third party add-ons that solve many challenges. Ranging from calendars to special field types.
Cost of entry is extremely affordable compared to other commercial solutions.
Runs on any LAMP server setup. Though, larger installations will require something with more horsepower. We run on a load balanced, 3 server setup.

Cons

Running Local, Staging, and Production environments takes a bit of work.
The Control Panel set up and theme are not great. We usually swap out the theme. Though once you become familiar and set up quick links, it becomes much easier to use.
It can be a little resource heavy on large, high traffic sites without some additional caching.

Likelihood to Recommend

It functions well for a small blog, a catalog site, or a large high traffic site. Some notable sites are Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Garmin, and Pizza Hut.

Jim Wyse

Web Services Manager in Information Technology at UMass Boston (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

9 years of experience

View profile

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Reviews and Ratings

ExpressionEngine, Affordable Comercial CMS

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

February 19, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ExpressionEngine's affordability and flexibility have allowed us to continually enhance our web presence and use the system to build several stand alone web applications.

Pros

Extremely flexible and extensible
Fabulous user and developer community on Twitter, Facebook and Slack Chat.
Wide range of third party add-ons that solve many challenges. Ranging from calendars to special field types.
Cost of entry is extremely affordable compared to other commercial solutions.
Runs on any LAMP server setup. Though, larger installations will require something with more horsepower. We run on a load balanced, 3 server setup.

Cons

Running Local, Staging, and Production environments takes a bit of work.
The Control Panel set up and theme are not great. We usually swap out the theme. Though once you become familiar and set up quick links, it becomes much easier to use.
It can be a little resource heavy on large, high traffic sites without some additional caching.

Likelihood to Recommend

It functions well for a small blog, a catalog site, or a large high traffic site. Some notable sites are Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Garmin, and Pizza Hut.

Jim Wyse

Web Services Manager in Information Technology at UMass Boston (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

9 years of experience

View profile