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Choosing the right CMS: WordPress VIP vs. Brightspot

screenshot of Brightspot CMS UI

With thousands of CMS options on the market, choosing the right CMS can be a daunting prospect. Here, we take a side-by-side look at Brightspot and WordPress VIP to help identify if Brightspot is the right CMS choice for your organization.

When choosing a new content management system (CMS), organizations are faced with a long list of vendors, each of whom has a different offering and value proposition. One of the oldest and most commonly-used CMSs is WordPress. It offers its own benefits, but newer solutions like Brightspot might be a better option for many organizations.

WordPress VIP is the company's enterprise-level offering that is comparable to Brightspot. Here, we explain why we think the Brightspot offering is a better fit than WordPress VIP when choosing a CMS solution.

What is WordPress VIP?

WordPress VIP is not a CMS—it’s value-added services built on top of the WordPress CMS. A WordPress VIP customer still starts with the same WordPress CMS that any other non-VIP customer starts with.

WordPress is open source, and there are versions of it that are free. However, larger companies and teams who want a truly successful web presence typically have to augment it, often with the VIP offering. WordPress VIP will handle all the actions that companies need but don't get with the base offering, such as cloud hosting management, security, patches and updates. This is a critical service for any company that wants to use WordPress at a high volume and doesn't want to take on all of the work.

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WordPress VIP adds people, time and money

The most important difference between Brightspot's CMS and WordPress VIP is that using WordPress VIP often requires cobbling together a collection of additional companies with which to work, while Brightspot provides an all-in-one solution. An engagement with WordPress VIP usually costs between $5,000 to $25,000 a month, and then you will still have to layer on third-party providers who come with their own costs. Working with additional people not only causes costs to increase, but also wastes time and reduces business efficiency.

5 ways Brightspot outshines WordPress VIP

There are a number of areas where Brightspot's CMS provides an offering that may work better for today's brands than WordPress VIP would. Let's take a closer look.
Digital asset management (DAM) use case graphic
Themes
The WordPress VIP support team will help you select one of their premium themes as an initial step. To implement a WordPress theme, you’ll pay $1,000 or more per year from a third party company.

Brightspot, on the other hand, includes themes out-of-the-box, and you can use the Brightspot CMS to customize those themes at no additional expense. You can extend the themes, often without developer support, and if you do need developer support, Brightspot can provide it as opposed to needing an external provider.
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Plugins and integrations
With WordPress VIP, the base WordPress CMS has tens of thousands of plugins, also known as integrations. This includes video players, email service providers, and translation software. WordPress VIP assigns you a project manager, who will talk to you about what your goals are with your site. Based on what you're trying to accomplish, he or she will recommend WordPress plugins to perform those tasks.

The catch is that you have to pay separately for each of the WordPress plugins. The project manager will also recommend solutions providers to actually integrate the plugins. This can get complicated and expensive if you have to use different providers for different plugins. Customers' biggest frustration working with WordPress VIP is that it often takes a long time to get any changes made to their site. This is because there's so many people involved and because front end software must go through code reviews with multiple stakeholders before changes can be made.

With Brightspot, a number of the most popular integrations (plugins) are already built in at no additional cost, saving you from having to work slowly with multiple, expensive providers. You also don’t usually need help with the integrations—you just enter your API keys and you're off. If you need deeper integrations, Brightspot will build them for you, and though there’s an additional cost, you don't have the hassle of working with multiple companies.

Brightspot integrates with many third party providers, but you don’t need to work with them directly as this can be handled through the Brightspot platform. When you have a Brightspot enterprise engagement, you have one product manager who you talk to, which is a benefit since this person knows the ins and outs of your program and can connect you with the right solutions.
High-volume publications use case graphic
Content types
WordPress VIP has no native content modeling, and still requires development or plugins for anything beyond "page" and "post" frameworks for content. Essentially, you need to engage a third-party service provider to help create content types, such as a photo gallery or custom recipe content type.

Brightspot has dozens of content types built in, such as galleries, playlists, and live blogs. When you do need to extend beyond to a very specific content type, you can work with the Brightspot delivery team who will make the module for you so that you don't need to go through a solutions provider.
Multisite and multi-national use case graphic
Multisite
WordPress VIP lets you have up to five sites. If you're going to go beyond five sites, then you need a second or even a third or fourth WordPress VIP engagement, which increases costs and complications. WordPress VIP has only rudimentary ability for you to share content and workflows among those sites.

In today's world where brands are global and must produce a lot of content, having a CMS with robust multisite support is essential. Brightspot lets you have hundreds of sites, and it also stands out when it comes to multisite capabilities. Brightspot natively makes it possible to share content and workflows among sites.
Headless and decoupled CMS use case graphic
Headless and modular
WordPress VIP is also limited in its capacity for cutting-edge content practices like headless CMS and modular content. WordPress has a traditional history and architecture, and if you want to adopt something newer, you would face the same issue of needing to rely on many expensive solution providers.

Brightspot, meanwhile, is future-forward and natively provides headless CMS and modular content capabilities. Applying these is relatively simple for your team to handle as soon as you sign up with Brightspot.

Choosing the right CMS is important

You can think of WordPress VIP as a service that meets enterprise needs, while Brightspot is an enterprise CMS through and through. From day one, it has what you need to meet your business needs and to support you in driving success today and into the future.

With WordPress VIP, you would need much more outside support to get you to a solution like the one that Brightspot customers like Walmart and Sotheby’s are using. When you do need that additional support with Brightspot, we provide it for you. By offering a feature-rich CMS that can be used by a core team, Brightspot helps organizations move faster. This helps them advance to what’s next for their business to keep driving success.

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