CrafterCMS Reviews & Product Details

I like the way content types can be created with ease, and how various pieces of content can be embedded in any content type. The ability to create multi-lingual content is very helpful as well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We're still using version 3.1.27, yet to upgrade to 4.x, but I find that earlier versions don't have the ability to edit content on mobile devices. The only way to access the context menus from the sidebar is with a right-click. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

CrafterCMS is exceptionally versatile. It enables us to serve any content to any type of digital experience and integrate with any external system we need to. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We have not encountered any negatives or things that don't work well for us. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The authoring experience is pretty good. I like that Crafter puts a lot of thought into content management and makes developers and authors focus on how that content is managed within the system. I have seen other CMS systems where the CMS turns into a swamp of content. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While I like that Crafter handles everything via Git repositories, sometimes the underlying Crafter repository seeps its way into my developer's processes -- the Crafter repository is a leaky abstraction. The code forward/content back model proposed by Crafter is good in theory. But dealing with DEV/STAGE/PROD release cycles can get messy very fast because the content is getting created at all three levels, DEV/STAGE for testing and PROD for the real content. Then if you have to change the configuration files in one of the upstream environments (STAGE or PROD) -- a hotfix config change -- that makes merging your code from DEV messy. I would like to see more effort put into improving this developer experience.

I don't like the fact that groovy is the only programming choice for most things in Crafter. We should also have the option to use Typescript/Javascript throughout. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Prompt customer service. Easy to send in tickets with issues. Can handle a large database without being slow. Love the new publishing options for the new system update. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

System updates take months. And some fixes mysteriously can't be addressed until a system update patch comes through, which means I'm stuck with a bad UI for months.

New Crafter update has some streamlined improvements, but doing away with scrolling menus makes using the sidebar soooo slow and clunky. Bring back scrolling for sifting through large databases! Clicking to "next 10" for a database with hundreds of entries is maddening. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that the delivery (website in our case) is separate from the authoring environment, which means we can deploy releases at any time without impacting the end user. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The version that we currently use requires an instance of Elastic that is outside of the Crafter environment and our internal security policy makes that difficult to maintain. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Crafter CMS has a great support team that is very helpful during challenging times. Logging options are very flexible which helps to quickly diagnose problems. Updating content, deploying the changes across the cluster are very simple tasks. From a development & deployment perspective, Crafter is a dream. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

My biggest dislike is the way Crafter syncs data between repos. I suppose Git is a better than the old option of Alfresco, but Git working across clusters has been prone to conflicts which are sometimes a mess to work through. There's got to be a better way. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- Git Based platform <3

- Very friendly and active service support, development, and growing community

- The platform is based on modern and reliable technologies Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- Lack of deep testing in the development branch (from one version to another, some pieces might be missing in the development branch)

- Documentation could be better, but they are doing a great job improving this point and providing CrafterCMS Courses through Crafter Academy Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Crafter CMS offers several unique advantages for our company. For example,

- Content Management, Crafter CMS offers easy-to-use WYSIWYG features that allow the content author to preview desktop and mobile content before publishing.

- Content Distribution, Crafter CMS supports modern headless-cms capability, which allows the developer to build API(s) to distribute content through multi-tenant architecture.

- Content Discovery, Crafter CMS provides GraphQL out of the box, which allows the developer to build advanced queries on top of a massive pool of content.

- Content Version Control, we have complex needs to support CI/CD (Continue Integration and Deployment) for our multi-tier architecture between Content Authors and Developers. Crafter CMS offers version control, which allowed us to build automation and improves the overall code quality and time-to-market on content publishing.

- Crafter Customer Support, Good software cannot be GREAT without superb customer support. The Crafter product team went beyond our needs as a software vendor. The core team members in Crafter software company had a long innovation history in the CMS industry. They experienced different paradigm shifts and created CMS solutions for different industries. They are passionate about CMS technologies and open to working with their customer to resolve challenges. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Crafter offers several advanced features with limited documentation support. It would be great to see an archive of how-to videos and examples so the Crafter community can take advantage of all the Crafter offerings. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are many features that I like in Crafter CMS. Some of the noteworthy ones are:-

1) Content authors and developers can work on the same version of "truth" and this enables rapid feedback from authors to devs.

2) Git based versioning allows easy branching out and merging back for new features.

3) Self contained installer bundles (tomcat, elasticsearch, webapp jars etc) provide an easy way to create prototypes.

4) REST API to configure and monitor the engine and studio services

5) JVM based architecture means backend features can be developed and debugged from IDEA (or any other capable Java IDE) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are a couple of things that I believe could be improved for an even better user experience. They are:-

1) There are far too many externalised configuration properties and they are scattered over a large number xml files. It would be great if some of these can be internalised (some sensible defaults with ability to override if necessary) and the external ones made more intuitive.

2) The documentation, though extensive, is not very user friendly. It has a "reference manual" kind-of layout which helps someone who knows crafter very well but needs more details on how to do something (for example:- they know that an issue is in the studio and also know which api to call, but needs more information regarding the payload, or request headers etc). For someone completely new to Crafter, the documentation navigation is not very conducive to an "exploratory" style of learning the product. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Its tools allow for better organization and content management for our WEB portal. Likewise, an optimal development for your brand is achieved since it will allow the employee to create content more easily.

The structure stage system allows you to freely edit the designs you want since it is possible to use C + or java languages in order to offer the best ease of creating and improving, very efficient and I like it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I have no complaints, although on some occasions we have been forced to consult with CMS experts since our virtual platform was outdated, which can be frustrating waiting for some help is a negative point for the system, however the tools comply, needs optimization. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.