Adobe Business Catalyst: Far Better than WordPress for B2B Small Business

Sean Parnell - January 12, 2017 5:00 am

Update: Adobe has announced the end of life for Adobe Business Catalyst as of March 25, 2021. Contact us to learn the best options to migrate your website.

As an Adobe Business Catalyst partner for over five years, I’m often asked why this web content management software (WCMS) is so effective for business-to-business (B2B) marketing for small and mid-sized (SMB) businesses. Having worked with WordPress for numerous years, as well as Joomla, Drupal, Modx, Umbraco, Miva, Adobe Muse, American Eagle, Ruby on Rails, Tridion, HubSpot, and good ol’ straight HTML, here’s why Adobe Business Catalyst continues to make so much sense for our clients and for us (this is an Adobe Business Catalyst website).

What Do You Like Best about Adobe Business Catalyst?

Adobe Business Catalyst requires a minimum of website development to look great (no more need for Joomla, Drupal or Modx), includes many features built in (vs. third-party modules like web forms, SEO, e-commerce, etc.), and never gets hacked like WordPress so often does. We also like how you can use content holders and web apps to re-use HTML on various web page and blog templates. For some clients, the 5,000 email sends per month also replaces the need for Constant Contact or MailChimp.

What Do You Dislike?

Support from Adobe is only provided through LiveChat in India (no phone), product enhancements are very slow to arrive (SSL arrived in late 2017 but requires DNS hosting, which requires creative workarounds to bypass), and there is almost no support for resellers.

Fortunately, there is a strong community of other Adobe Business Catalyst partners that can provide reseller support. Also, the CRM is basically a contact database, capturing info from form fills, and is nowhere near as robust as SalesForce, Act-On or other CRMs.

Recommendations If You’re When Considering the Right Website Platform

Most people implement WordPress, but 90% of the WordPress sites we’ve run across (have used, inherited or otherwise know of) have been hacked, which can destroy rankings and inbound lead generation.

What Business Problems Do You Solve with Adobe Business Catalyst?

Adobe Business Catalyst is the best website content management software platform for our B2B small business clients. We’ve seen so many WordPress sites get hacked and we haven’t had a Business Catalyst site get hacked in five years. Additionally, I do not have to engage my developers and most website enhancements and fixes, and its very easy for our clients to edit their own sites (if they want to).