Choosing a CMS: EPiServer vs Orchard vs SiteCore vs Umbraco

Increasingly, I have noticed the number of Content Management Systems in use. I have some familiarity with SiteCore. I have read some literature on Umbraco. I only just got wind of Orchard the other day. I have only heard positive feedback about EPiServer. I am soon to move into a role that uses it.

Do these differ vastly in features and price? What has led you to choose one (or several) over the others?

EDIT

I did a brief review of so-called free CMSs here: On Free Microsoft Compatible Content Management Systems

Reasons I ditched Orchard when developing a 50k page website:

The Orchard CMS import tool is simply too slow. It would only accept small batches at a time. Initially, it took eight minutes to import 1000 records. So, working on that principle I expected that it could take seven hours to import all the records. Unfortunately, I started to receive performance issues as more records were inserted into the database. I even started to reduce the batch size, which helped only temporarily in the early stages. (See Saying no to Orchard)

I can only comment mainly on Sitecore and a bit on Umbraco from my knowledge of others using it:

Sitecore is an enterprise level web CMS with an "enterprise price tag." It's very extensible, has a lot of developer/community support, and is very developer friendly. The structure of content is based on a tree of nodes with parent-children relationships. Sitecore is well known in the WCM community as a leader in content management and is rated very well by companies sch as Forrester Research, etc.

Based on my previous research and conversations with friends, Umbraco is very similar to Sitecore. It has a lower price compared to Sitecore but its not a complete rip off. Umbraco is also built on ASP.NET like Sitecore.

Here's a three-part series on Sitecore vs. Umbraco from a developer.

Of the ones you mention above, I have only used Umbraco and Sitecore to build with and am certified in both. I like the way they allow me to build systems that really work well for my customers. They both have a feel that they simply give you building blocks to create your masterpiece instead of "modules" of functionality plugged in that give you a blog, forum, etc. They make it really easy to share content throughout the site and create really nice admin experiences.

Umbraco's community is really great. They both struggle a little on the documentation side IMO, but Umbraco's videos really help and the community is quick to help. Also, if you're talking cost then its free (Umbraco) vs. quite expensive (Sitecore).

But the reality is that each developer has their own taste and the style of CMS they like to work with. Ultimately, its the team that has to build the site that really matters most when it comes to how each CMS performs for the end user.

In addition to the links above, here are a couple blog posts that may help you get a feel for the different systems:

Orchard & Umbraco - Introduction (part 1 of 4) - Aaron Powell

Sitecore vs. Umbraco Terminology

Good luck!

I mostly work with EPiServer and Sitecore, and I can tell you the difference in short:

• Sitecore has broader architecture and more powerfull UI. CMS is deeply configurable and highly extensible, it has clever publishing and caching system, powerful search and page editor. But it doesn't provide much out of box and UI is pretty old, slow and hard to learn. So this will be a long journey until you understand it good and make a good support of all its features for editors.

• EPiServer is easy, friendly to users and developers. It provides an essential bunch of features out of box, has easy UI and page editor, good drag-and-drop experience, easy personalization. It is code-first, distributed with NuGet, provides dependency injection for its services, out of box MVC support. But it's not so extensible and configurable, has pure search (without expensive EPiFind module) and generally lower-featured comparing to Sitecore. So it's good for small/middle websites, but can be an obstacle in complex solutions.

Both have similar tree-item concept, rich documentation, pure public module system and hard UI customization. Both expensive and not open source.

As I know, Umbraco is pretty similar to EPiServer and Sitecore, but free and open source. Of course you get less features, more bugs, not much docs and no free support.

Orchard is really different comparing to other three CMS. It is module-based like Wordpress: you use standard or public modules and themes, instead of writing the whole website from scratch. You create your own themes and modules to customize the website and CMS. So entire CMS is highly extensible and provides a lot of free community modules. But in the same time you lose control and learning curve is much longer. Orchard is free and open-source, entirely MVC-based, UI and API are well done, but it can be hard for both developers and editors to understand it.

Wordpress vs Episerver:

http://tedgustaf.com/blog/2011/2/comparison-of-episerver-and-wordpress/

OK so the guy who wrote that is an Episerver consultant but it's interesting and balanced.

All the different web content management systems have different strengths. So which one is best for you depends a lot on what kind of sites you create, what kind of budget you have and what you think matters the most in a CMS.

For example, Orchard and SiteCore are VERY different systems.

I'm a bit biased as I work there, but I believe that Webnodes CMS have several important advantages over the systems you mention.

Keywords: Relations between content, actual classes for the different content types, custom LINQ provider for all data access, expose all content as an OData endpoint etc.

Microsoft used our CMS to demonstrate OData at Mix11. Video from Mix 11