Introduction
Sitefinity, from the Progress company, describes itself as a highly extensible, high-performing and easy to use Digital Experience Platform. They offer an all-in-one customer experience marketing solution, also offering headless CMS capabilities. However, as it tries to keep up with new pure Headless CMS solutions.
Monolithic vs Headless CMS
Sitefinity, as a monolithic CMS, and other older installed CMS systems like it, comes with a coupled front end application layer that requires additional development and maintenance. Cosmic is a Headless CMS meaning that the content API and presentation layer are decoupled which gives your team greater flexibility when it comes to where your content can go.
Cosmic provides everything your team of developers and content creators need: powerful and intuitive APIs for developers, and an easy-to-use dashboard for content creators. We've removed all complexity and CMS maintenance, so your team can focus on building great products faster, together.
But can't Sitefinity go Headless?
Although you CAN use Sitefinity as a Headless CMS or, as they put it, a decoupled CMS, you still have a lot of work to do to bring it up to the level of an optimized CMS system that's truly headless. And along with your application, you will need to maintain the CMS itself, adding more development costs and taking away focus from what really matters: creating great content and user experiences in your main website or app.
Cosmic vs Sitefinity
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Technology
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MongoDB database, serverless Node.js Lambda functions. | .NET. Microsoft SQL Server. |
Scalability
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All components are infinitely scalable. Built on Serverless technology. | Does not scale easily. Limited by servers. |
Security
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We manage the security for you. Data encryption at rest with 256-bit SSL encryption in transit. Two-factor authentication included free. | You maintain the security yourself. |
CMS maintenance
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We maintain everything for you so you can focus on what matters most: building great content and user experiences. | They deploy, host, and maintain everything for you. Along with your application and content, you need to maintain updates and security for your CMS system. |
Global caching
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High-performance global caching layer included. (Fastly) | No caching included out of the box. |
Media CDN
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Global media CDN included. (Cloudfront) | No CDN included out of the box. |
Image processing
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Image optimization and processing service included. (imgix) | Manually manage your own image sizes and optimizations. |
Extendability
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Apps and extensions. | Possible. Limited. Complicated. |
Front end
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BYOFE (Bring your own front end) Front end code is decoupled from CMS. | Front end is coupled with backend CMS. Can be made to be Headless. |
Number of projects
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One login, unlimited projects. | One login, multiple websites. |
Costs
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Save time and money on developer resource spending. Consider us your outsourced CMS team. Team plans start at $99/month. |
You will need to hire developer resources as this system is WAY complicated and outdated. Average salary of a full-stack developer is $111,600 per year. You may need to hire 1-3 developers to maintain the CMS. Plus the cost of licensing Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) can be astronomical. |
Starting at $1,188 per year |
Average $523,200+ per year |
Feature comparison subject to change. Contact support@cosmicjs.com to report any needed updates.
Uptime you can depend on
Don't fear downtime on cloud or Enterprise plans. Enterprise plans start at a 99.95% uptime guarantee. Check our status page for historical uptime on our serverless, cloud infrastructure.







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