There are many factors that will influence the cost of Sitecore for your business.
In this article, we want to give you as much information as we can about Sitecore pricing, and the different factors that can affect how much your business will end up paying for Sitecore.
The first thing to note about Sitecore pricing, is that the costs are broken down into two main areas: License costs and partner costs.
License Costs
Sitecore license costs are subscription-based and will vary depending on the following factors:
- Site visits per month
- Non-production installations
- Concurrent users
- Add-on modules
Let's look at these points in more detail.
Site Visits Per Month
The amount of unique website sessions your site receives impacts how much you pay for Sitecore.
Having an elastic consumption-based pricing model based on website traffic is a fair way of pricing the system, and means that your cost scales with the activity and success of the platform.
Sitecore has three product packages, all based on how many website visitors your site receives annually:
- Standard: Up to 2 million visitors per year
- Corporate: Up to 12 million visits per year
- Enterprise: Up to 240 million visits per year
Non-Production Environments
The amount of test and development environments your business needs will impact the price of Sitecore for your business.
For licensing purposes, reporting and processing servers are classified as non-production servers and will affect the cost of your license. This also includes any server that isn't a live CD/CM server.
The number of live production environments you have won't affect the cost of your license. So even if you have 10 delivery servers scaled globally, they would all fall under the same license. This gives an incredible amount of flexibility in tailoring your environments, as both respond globally and to scale with rising demand.
Concurrent Users
The amount of users you have in Sitecore only affects the cost of the system when the users are concurrently using the platform.
This means that the editors would have to be authoring the website simultaneously in order to affect the pricing of the platform.
This isn't one that's likely to bring your cost up for a large businesses, it's usually unlikely that you'll have more than 3 or 4 authors editing in Sitecore simultaneously. If you have international offices and are worried about the additional authors bringing up the cost of your Sitecore instance, having authors in different time-zones shouldn't affect what you pay for Sitecore if they're authoring during different parts of the work day.
Add-On Modules
The add-on modules refer to any additional systems added onto either Sitecore's Experience Platform or Experience Manager.
Sitecore Experience Manager is Sitecore's basic CMS solution that includes a WYSIWYG editor, forms, search options, a drag and drop user friendly interface, Sitecore JavaScript Services, Active Directory and more.
Sitecore Experience Platform combines the CMS and everything included with Experience Manager, with the addition of analytics, customer data, marketing automation, Sitecore AI, path-analyzer and real-time personalization capabilities.
It's worth noting that the cost of a Sitecore license doesn't change based on the version of Sitecore you're using. Your Sitecore license includes access to all new versions of Sitecore for the same price. This is the same for both Sitecore Experience Platform and Sitecore Experience Manager.
The two primary add-on modules for Sitecore that could affect pricing are Sitecore Experience Commerce, and Content Hub.
Sitecore Content Hub is a great tool for content marketers that gives them the ability to control the entire content lifecycle in one place. This includes planning copy, content authoring, collaborating with managers and co-workers, publishing content and viewing analytics. For more details about Content Hub and its benefits, click here.
Sitecore Experience Commerce is Sitecore's commerce solution. It allows businesses to combine data, content and commerce to create unique and highly personalized commerce experiences that drive sales.
Partner Costs
Other factors that can affect the overall cost of Sitecore are partner costs. Partner costs are the costs you pay a Sitecore partner for developing and maintaining your website.
Partner costs will vary depending on the following:
- Amount of custom development you require
- Integration with other applications and systems
- Level of ongoing support you require
- The number of websites and domains you have
- Hosting
How Does Sitecore's Pricing Compare With Other Content Management Systems?
Since Sitecore is an enterprise-level CMS that requires the purchase of a license, the cost is going to be greater than some of the free open-source options out there, such as WordPress. However, Sitecore is well priced according to its features and the value you'll receive from the platform.
Compared with other enterprise-level content management systems, the features that you receive with Sitecore are often cited as great value for money, with many businesses noting that they saw ROI quickly from using Sitecore to its full potential.
Get A Straightforward Answer
To get a straightforward answer to how much Sitecore costs, please contact us at [email protected].
We have a strong working relationship with Sitecore, and always represent our customers' best interests so they can receive the best value for money based on what they want to achieve with the platform.
Contact us first and ensure you're asking the right questions when it comes to pricing your Sitecore project.
This blog was original published on the 14th of April, and was last updated on the 20th of April with updated information about reporting/processing servers affecting license cost.