Sitecore has undoubtedly proven to be a force to reckon with in the world of digital experience and customer experience management, as a leading Digital Experience Platform (DXP) and Content Management System (CMS).  A safe haven for enterprises, developers, and marketers looking to get their hands on advanced personalization and improved customer-buyer experience. 

Sitecore offers services to almost every industry, whether manufacturing, healthcare, finance, etc.  However, this may not be the ideal solution if you’re a product-based company with thousands of product types, descriptions, and SKUs. Why is that?

Let’s say you own a company selling hundreds or even thousands (constantly evolving) of sportswear products to sporting agencies and athletes across the world. A common problem you would face is manually organizing this information and keeping them consistent/accurate across your e-commerce, sales, and marketing channels. This is where product information management (PIM) solutions become pivotal to the digital experience.

Pimcore on the other hand offers a powerful open-source PIM and MDM platform that caters to the quality and consistency of your product information coupled with a leading digital experience platform. A good PIM helps you store, enrich, and manage complex product data, by facilitating collaboration between various key team members (marketers, product managers, etc). This ensures data governance, high-quality distributed product information, and improved customer experience. Sitecore doesn't offer this combined offering, which differentiates it from Pimcore.

Let's think of a real world example of why a PIM is so important. Imagine a customer finds your product specifications on Amazon. The customer then visits your website and finds differences within the product specification. This inconsistency will lead to a lack of trust and confusion for your brand.

This article explores the features of Sitecore in comparison to Pimcore.

What is Sitecore?

Sitecore is a . NET-powered software that offers an integrated all-in-one solution for content management and digital experience. Sitecore has both a traditional all-in-one DXP and its recently released SaaS-based composable DXP. 

At the heart of Sitecore’s suite is its “very popular” CMS, known as Sitecore Experience Manager (XM). Sitecore also broadens its capabilities with the integrated Sitecore Experience Platform (XP), which includes features such as marketing automation, personalization, customer analytics, and data collection.

Sitecore’s composable DXP operates under the architecture of the Sitecore XM cloud (the worthy successor to Sitecore XM). A strategic move towards modularity and scalability. 

Let’s take a look at some of the offerings in Sitecore’s DXP platform.

• Content cloud: Sitecore’s content cloud comes packed with solutions that improve the quality of content being stored in its cloud-native SaaS CMS. These solutions include Sitecore’s AI-powered search, Content Hub DAM, Content Hub operations and Content Hub ONE (its new solution).

• Engagement cloud: Sitecore provides solutions that help businesses gather real-life insights from customers during their buying journey in order to improve and personalize their digital experience. These solutions include Sitecore CDP, Personalize, Send, and Connect (its new solution).

• Commerce Cloud: Sitecore Commerce Cloud is composable and intuitive, allowing for seamless modularity and scalability in your e-commerce business. Commerce Cloud solutions include Sitecore Discover and OrderCloud.

• Customer Data Platform: Sitecore CDP is designed to help enterprises eliminate data silos and improve customer experience by providing intelligent insights from customer activities.

• Digital Asset Management: Sitecore’s out-of-the-box DAM solution is its automated Content Hub DAM. This solution helps you store all your digital assets (videos, PDFs, pictures, and more) in a central location while enabling you to distribute them across multiple touchpoints. Backed by Sitecore’s AI-powered search.

• Personalisation: With Sitecore XP, you can offer a powerful personalized experience to your customers. Sitecore is a strong player in the field of personalization, making the process of adoption seamless, out-of-the-box. 

• Enterprise CMS: Sitecore is an enterprise CMS, which means content can be stored in a central location across the organization while documents are securely created and distributed. Sitecore’s CMS is packed with enterprise-grade features such as analytics, marketing automation, and more.

• Personalized Search and Merchandise: Sitecore Discover is an AI-powered product discovery solution used to identify buyer intent and personalize product search results. For instance, with Sitecore personalized search, you can provide cool sportswear product recommendations or suggestions to customers who occasionally search for sportswear products on your e-commerce platform. 

Discover also provides merchandizing automation, experience orchestration, language/ inventory localization, and more.

• OrderCloud: Sitecore OrderCloud, built as a composable e-commerce solution, provides a highly scalable and flexible system for business users and developers/partners. With OrderCloud, you can easily handle large order amounts by automating and digitizing order workflows for omnichannel. It also has an enterprise marketplace and follows the MACH principles.

What is Pimcore? 

Over the last decade, over 100,000 companies have adopted Pimcore for data and experience management. This is attributed to Pimcore being an impressive MDM/PIM solution and a powerful open-source DXP and CMS software. Both developers and marketers widely use Pimcore to edit and manage web content, as well as the creation of catalogs or price sheets using the Web-to-print feature.

Pimcore is constantly developing ways to provide an innovative platform for its users. Perhaps, one of the best ways it does this is through open-source. This allows for constant upgrades from external developers, with less development cost.

Pimcore has several solution partners within its eco-system that assist enterprises in creating solutions using the Pimcore platform. This can be replatforming a website from a legacy system to a modern headless CMS or integrating its PIM modules into a company's e-commerce architecture.

Pimcore offers an out-of-the-box composable suite, so you don’t have to worry about integrating your favourite third-party tools and solutions. Interoperability at its finest. This also means seamless scalability, agility, and flexibility while still enabling you to achieve a faster time-to-market. 

Marketers can manage content and marketing campaigns in real life, and thousands of developers can contribute to its open-source code at GitHub, making the platform extremely scalable and future-proof.

Why Replatforming from Sitecore to Pimcore might be the best decision for your business

Sitecore is generic, meaning that it's open to any business demographic without catering to product management needs. It basically has a solution for every need and every organization across any industry, except when it comes to managing product information. 

A strong MDM/PIM strategy coupled with a robust DXP/CMS platform (Pimcore) is all you need to store and provide consistent and accurate product information to customers while still being able to create and distribute high-quality content across multiple channels. 

The obvious result is an outstanding digital experience for customers, leading to higher customer conversion and increased ROI for your business.

Apart from the aforementioned, Pimcore is a great alternative to expensive DXP platforms like Sitecore.

Feature Comparison

Conclusion

The decision to replatform from Sitecore to Pimcore could unlock many benefits for your brand. First, the open-source nature of Pimcore not only makes it a cost-effective choice but offers a level of flexibility and customization that is hard to match. This means you can tailor the platform to your needs, ensuring it fits seamlessly into your operations and delivers maximum value.

Moreover, you get a risk-free trial free trial with Pimcore to test the waters and decide on how best to use the platform's resources.

Most importantly, no matter how large your enterprise is, having inconsistent, outdated, and poorly distributed product information will likely cost you some important customers, and the effect may be seen in the long run. 

Manually updating product data via PDF and Excel files is a tedious task for your product managers, and you can guess right what this means. Slower time-to-market!!

Pimcore seamlessly solves all these problems. If you are already using Sitecore or planning on adopting it, and you have a large product base, you should consider your options more carefully.

Contact us, to get more information!