Sitefinity vs. Orchard CMS

I just set up Orchard CMS for the very first time and just began using it to see how easy it would be to use and even more importantly how performant it would be compared to Sitefinity CMS.

And boy oh boy, let me tell you that Orchard CMS is the CMS to beat!!  I was able to create pages almost instantaneously!!  The response time was astounding!  I would state that nearly every action and operation that I performed was on the order of 1 second or less.

In addition, I was able to run Orchard CMS well within the memory limits provided by most Shared Hosting Providers.

Orchard CMS absolutely rocks!  If you are sick of the performance issues associated with the last 2 major releases of Sitefinity (v. 4.x and v. 5.x), I would definitely recommend giving Orchard CMS a spin.

If Sitefinity can ever match the performance of Orchard CMS, it would once again be a formidable rival in the marketplace.

For now, I am placing all bets on Orchard CMS!

Good luck with that.

Orchard is an interesting Microsoft open-source .net mvc project, but not for me.

@Samir,

A content management system is only as good as its end users ability to use it and trust me, end clients aren't ready for a barebone developer orientated CMS like Orchard - and when it comes to usability and not #RTFM'ing trust me, Sitefinity definately is the CMS to beat.

If your users aren't able to click on 'Pages' and then click on 'Create a page', you're in trouble anyway - regardless of which CMS you use. You can get Sitefinity up and running from the box to full-fledged multi-lingual ecommerce within 15 mins (http://youtu.be/eQF4kH3gSV4). Try doing that in Orchard in a user friendly way...

I can't blame you that the response time is astounding, especially since you're running Sitefinity on Cassini and IIS Express. Do yourself a favor and switch to proper IIS7 with proper caching and compression configured.

Sitefinity's a big boy that can run your community blog but also your global load balanced corporate web presence. First load isn't that fast but once its warmed up and ready to go, you'll reach those same 1 second or less respond times...

Hi Samir,

I actually did some websites within Orchard. You are right that the performance is great!
@Jochem: sorry, but my experience with Orchard compared to SF on IIS7.x is that Orchard is still way more faster.

Jochem is right that in terms of usability there is still lots of work to do for the Orchard community.
I like the templating stuff in Orchard. This architecture is very nice and extendible. In Sitefinity I always end up with lots of templates because I can't layer templates or parts of templates. (yes I know about templates based on other templates, but that is just very basic) This is very nicely done in Orchard with shapes and drivers.

The fact Orchard is MVC is now obsolete ;)

Sure it is easy to setup Sitefinity to be a fully multilingual website (besides the still existing nasty multilingual bugs), but you will be losing time with styling the whole site. Unless you like some basic design. I do not, so I end up spending hours of templating and rewriting CSS.

Anyway, both systems are having pros and cons....

Just decide it based on the project specs. If it has to be cheap and fast,... well fill it in yourself ;)

Daniel

@Daniel,
You're right, Orchard in itself is faster, because its way leaner and although not in production, I've played and dabbled with it and its fun. But... I was more commenting on Samir's other post regarding running Sitefinity on Cassini or IIS Express, and just wanted to point out that Sitefinity's designed for IIS.

Once setup there and once configured properly the initial hit is still slow, but v5.1 's performance (once warmed up) should knock you of your shoes. (And with that I mean create/publish a 1st page and it's so so - create a 2nd page and the publishing is near instant).

If you have any suggestions about redoing a 'base template' mail me ok? Boilerplate & Bootstrap are finished now so I'm game for a new contribution...

Jochem.

I have not yet had the opportunity to use Orchard, so I do not have a valid opinion about the difference between the two. But I do have an opinion about usability. It does not matter how easy to use a system is, if it is too slow then it will frustrate the kindest and most understanding of users.

Now Sitefinity has been making great steps forward as far as speed goes (looking back to 4.0), and I think the progress should not stop here. And I am sure it won't, I am sure more is to come, where we don't have to jump through all sorts of hoops to squeeze every little bit of speed possible. But the main point I am trying to make is that, any future design decisions will need to be measured very well before implementing to avoid any similar disasters like 4.0.

Andrei

Hi guys,

There are always pros and cons of using certain software or an alternative of it. Sitefinity as a software product is not an exception, especially when you have strong competitors with great vision and products (that's right, we respect every competitor, Orchard CMS in question).

What shape products like Sitefinity though is not only the software, but the services around it, the support that you get, even the people behind the project who do not mind to speak to you directly when you need it - there are people within this thread that can confirm that :)

Our mission is to make Sitefinity one among the best, a system that brings value not only to you, but to your customers as well. We believe that we are moving in the right direction, based on the feedback from you. That feedback is taken in mind on daily basis and I must admit that we appreciate this thread as well - it help us look on the things from another perspective. 

We have a commitment to make Sitefinity better with every release. After all, we do it for you.

@Georgi

After all, we do it for you.

I've used both Sitefinity and Orchard. I decided to try my hand at Orchard figuring it was an MVC -based CMS. Given the reviews I read, I was left with the impression that it's a well designed and easy to customize platform. The people who claim this obviously haven't invested much time in customizing Orchard. Like WordPress, it is easy to install and start using, but customizing it is a different story.

It's true that Orchard is well-architected highly modular and fast, but there are some serious trade-offs and the biggest one is useability. There are lots of settings you can change that render the system unusable. The back-end is very confusing and complex, requiring several clicks and page loads to get something simple done. Be prepared to watch the several videos, documentation and read discussion forums to figure out how to do simple things such as create and place content on a page.

If you plan on deploying Orchard to end-users, make sure you give them the least amount of privileges needed, which comes down to editing and creating content. Anymore than that, is welcoming a maintenance nightmare. In contrast, Sitefinity makes creating and editing a pages very easy. With some very basic training, I would happily allow end-users to not only create and edit content, but also control the layout of the site.

Orchard's architecture is well designed, but it breaks out of the conventional mold of an ASP.NET application. To get new functionality, you install modules which may have widgets you can install on your page. The module installation procedure is very straightforward. One of its nicest feature is the ability to attach functionality to existing content types such as a blog post, image, etc. You can also download and install themes fairly easy. Although the whole plug-and-play functionality and flexibility seems cool, it turns into a horror show really fast.

Most Orchard modules will render HTML output called a widget. Orchard uses Razor Views to render the markup, but it is unconventional.  In doesn't have the concept of nested or multiple master pages. Instead, you must create a single master page for the entire site with Razor code to selectively render sections.  It is almost equivalent to the "display: none" hack in HTML. Furthermore, there is a concept of a "layer" where a single Razor View displays different widgets depending on a context such as whether a user is logged in or not. With Orchard, you'll need to master MVC and it's awkward templating mechanism.

You must also work with cryptic placement.info files to instruct Orchard where to place dynamic widget views within a section. You will need to understand the content of this file if you plan to make any kind of customization.  Be prepared to spend hours reading the poorly written documentation and watching PluralSight videos.  You'll need it!  Some modules, emit HTML strings instead of views, forcing you to recreate entire views.

Sitefinity, on the other hand, makes templating and theming  straightforward. You'll truly miss the drag and drop simplicity and the intuitive content creation process. There are areas where Sitefinity can improve, but Sitefinity Thunder has made it easier. Sitefinity is far more polished than any other CMS I've experimented with open or closed on the backend.

Being a competent, .NET developer won't make Orchard any easier, since it frequently breaks from .NET centric conventions. There are many developers who will claim that it is a true MVC CMS, whereas Sitefinity isn't. While it is true that Sitefinity recently implemented MVC, the latest version has a far better implementation of MVC. Most of Sitefinity's widgets are not MVC-based, but MVC's ease of creating controls makes this point moot.  You can easily recreate the entire Sitefinity Widget library fairly quickly by simply rewriting the existing WebForms widgets.

To really compare Orchard and Sitefinity, I would try creating a standard blog site with all the bells and whistles. What would take a day in Sitefinity, can easily take a week in Orchard. Even if you use Orchard's built in recipes, which are not very good, you'll still find yourself reading source code and watching videos to find out how to turn off a content part. The standard blog behavior, for instance, is to put a date on every post including the blog itself. It also uses the username instead of the full name to render the author's name. Changing how blog posts are displayed is a non-trivial task and requires either a hack or rewriting core code.

In summary, I have been running back and forth between the two systems and even experimented with a few others such as Umbraco, N2CMS as well as Kentico. Sitefinity clearly rules them all in terms of usability, documentation and productivity. The only reason I am using Orchard now is because Sitefinity's performance is too slow. Caching pages and waiting for changes to refresh isn't acceptable for my clients.  I am also very unhappy with some of the bizarre choices Sitefinity has made since version 3.0 series. It insists on storing images in the database with versioning. Although you can switch to a file provider, you can't directly FTP content libraries to the site.  Finally, although templating is superior to what Orchard offers, Sitefinity insists on controlling my HTML markup through the use of the sf_ prefixed tags.

For now, I will continue to struggle through Orchard until Sitefinity provides an adequate solution to these showstopping issues.  It's really sad because version 3.x was near perfect. I hope the people in charge will take head to these issues.

Sitefinity is unfortunately not care. They continue just to build new modules. Marketing people have the greatest power in Telerik/Sitefinity group. It's amazing that they do not wake up and listen to us! Mega slow administration, which get current customers to be crazy and new customers run away screaming!

Hi,

I am using Sitefinity since version 3. I have tested the lastest version (5.2.3700) but still having problems using it. For example:

1- When you place a Pager, Search box, Taxonomy or better to say every Widget Control in Sitefinity on a page, you will see a lot of script refrences on your page like Microsoft Ajax , JQuery,Telerik Scriprts and ....
When you try to find the reason you see that when there is a control in a widget template that inherits from SimpleScriptView these scripts are added to pages automatically.

2- ScriptManager is added to every page  by default.

3- Widgets depend on the type of controls that are in their templates. For example if you want to use a  Repeater instead of RadListView in Master View Template you have to create Master View from scratch.

I have a co-worker who is currently researching Orchard to see if we should switch from Sitefinity. I really like the features and ease of use for Sitefinity and I can't see the benefits of switching other than up front costs.  I am looking at upgrading to the Online Marketing Edition and using the multi-site options since we have about 9 sites that we manage for our company.  With the latest releases of both CMS applications, are there any new advantages of one over the other?

It's been quite a while since I've worked with either CMS solutions. The last version I played with was Sitefinity 4.6 and it was unbelievably slow. I stopped following Orchard and the solution I developed was scrapped in favor of a stripped down customized version of blogengine.net. This was a couple of years ago, so things may have changed drastically since then. Last time I looked at Orchard, there was almost no improvement. As far as mind share, it doesn't come up as much as it used to.

I would recommend having a disinterested member of the team perform a basic implementation using both systems and report their findings. I would place strict time limit and a set of requirements covering the most critical use cases. I've ended many debates using this process. 

 If your implementation is for a corporate environment, don't allow a penny-wise and pound foolish decision. License fees pale in comparison to implementation and maintenance costs. Be aware that open source solutions are frequently abandoned by their creators, leaving you high and dry. 

 I can't give you a definitive answer, but I hope I have provided you with help finding it. Good luck on your project.

Thanks Bob.  Your comments are spot on with what I am thinking on Open Source and Closed due to maintenance costs vs license fees.  Not to mention support.

Thanks,

Orchard is one of the Outercurve Foundation projects.

This is (supposedly) an independent non-profit organisation initially established by Microsoft, promoting open-source and community-driven projects, using BSD-new licensing. Typically, some MS employees are involved in the early stages of a project before handing it over to the community.

Orchard is now firmly in the control of the community, and should remain a valid solution whilst ever the community continues to be interested in developing it, and while MS continue with the ASP.NET platform. i.e. There is no obvious reason for it to die.

That said however, a community-driven product/project is probably always going to lag well behind the rich feature-set of a Commercial product. That is often not an issue for simpler requirements, but can result in significant additional development and maintenance time/costs for complex ones.

Some have gotten really good results with it, while others have found limits that have frustrated them.

At the end of the day, you need to assess your own requirements, and decide what fits best - which is just stating the obvious.

just some updates, Orchard-1.9 is amazingly fast, leavers Azure very well (yet an azure cost).
I have found building the full version (from source) to be the only happy path, and publishing it to azure (painful if FTP). As for a non-Programmer developing content for the CMS, that's problem free. However, a downside is that they suggest you use WebMatrix (Nooo!)  where as the free version of VS2013 Express is fine.
Orchard has a lot of MS backing, but not a Telerik 24hr support help desk - that matters.
I have found one think book on Orchard CMS - and that's all that a CMS author needs to get going.  Orchard is Free and Sitefinity is not. It depends have much support time you needs. Orchard  is quick on your IISExpress dev PC but is at home on a production IIS box. In Azure it is fine.
BUT its worth testing before you put it on your own server, or on a GoDaddy ($5/mo) server or Azure - you have to consider the expectations of your customers as well. Just some feedback.