It’s easy to knock any CMS that doesn’t quite do what a particular job requires, including beloved EE.
Instead, I focus on what each does best when I’m making a choice. For me, it’s all about how to deliver value to customers in a very specialized segment of an industry dominated by .NET/ASP (healthcare).
Sitefinity offers many good things (touted in the posts above). A few corrections are in order: It is not priced comparably with Expression Engine: It’s around $899—and the hosting requirements make it considerably more costly to operate. More costly, but not necessarily more expensive. There is a difference.
Nor is it simple to demo—unless you happen to love playing with Microsoft server configurations. They do have a severely crippled online demo: It’s a fine way to see the UI, but little more.
If you call one of their certified “hosting partners” and offer to pay for a hosted demo (like Ellis offers), you’ll either be treated with confusion or quoted a price tag higher than the cost of the CMS itself. In fairness, I should add that Sitefinity’s own folks will go out of their way to help you install their demo on your own machine and server. A hosted demo is just something on my wish list, because Ellis does such a good job offering this.
None of these things are “deal breakers” for me—but I do wonder why some companies make it so hard to buy what they’re selling. Especially in today’s economic climate. Nobody’s perfect: Sitefinity is considerably more buyer-friendly than other offerings.
Sitecore, for example, has a $15K price tag,doesn’t appear to do much more, and forces potential customers to deal with sales people to learn even the basics. I guess IT folks love paying “enterprise” prices and chatting on the phone.
Or Umbraco, which I am sure is fabulous if you live in Denmark and love deciphering broken-English (if and when they feel like responding to emails).
No doubt about it, EE has spoiled me: If this were a PHP project, it would be a no-brainer!