CMS Vendors
Livingdocs
Livingdocs
Livingdocs is a newer CMS targeting the German-speaking world, with a comparatively modern interface featuring "Google Docs"-like collaboration, at the expense of front-end capabilities and print integration
- Modern architecture with an easily customisable editorial environment, including a DAM and some planning functionality
- Targeted mainly at news organizations that have multiple publications, and a reasonably sized technical team to take care of customizations, willing to focus on developing their own front ends
- Key customers include Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Süddeutscher Verlag, Handelsblatt
Likely fit
Livingdocs is well suited to Mid-sized Chains of News Organizations, who have a strong in house technical team but favor leveraging their development effort into control over their audience facing front end. Since Livingdocs offers no front end (and no advertising, subscription, or paywall services), the platform is unlikely to be a good fit to Micro or Small Publishers.
At a glance
Primary Customer Fit
Mid-Sized Chain Of News Organizations
Secondary Fit
Mid-Sized Independent News Organizations
Most Active Geographies
EMEA
Official Support Hours
The vendor says "24/7" but is unclear on what channels this refers to
Officially Supported Languages for User Interface
DE, EN, FR, IT
Third-party Language Support Available?
No
License Model
Monthly Subscription Fee based on number of users, depending on number of users € 11 - € 72 per seat per month; additional hosting/support cost for SaaS; median implementation cost ~€100k
Scope Summary
Complete editorial environment, but without visitor facing front-end, suitable for publishers in EMEA
Tech Base
SaaS Model with Azure Hosting included
Cloud Model
SaaS
Headquarters
Zürich, Switzerland
Head Count
24
What customers say
- Editorial staff seem to welcome a comparatively easy-to-use collaborative news room environment
- Clean modern architecture allows for sandboxed customization
- Steady platform evolution with frequent releases bodes well for future innovation
- Has no front-end or print integration, and therefore works best when supported by a reasonably sized in-house technical team
- The vendor itself will not help with your front end development, and holds only very small partner network to outsource this work
- Because the company is relatively small, customers report they aren't always as quick to take on board feature requests as they'd like, and tends to prioritize the wishes of larger customers
Background
- Livingdocs was founded in 2015 in Zürich, Switzerland, launching with their first major customer, NZZ (the Neue Zürcher Zeitung), who subsequently invested in the company (though the majority of shares is still held by the two founders, Gabriel Hase and Lukas Peyer).
- Livingdocs' core ambition was to deliver "Google Docs for the newsroom", with a clean and modern interface that allows editors to collaborate and comment on articles. This has expanded into a more elaborate environment that also includes DAM capabilities. Most users will work from customizable dashboards that also allow basic planning features based on tasks (which can, for instance, be organized as a Kanban board). Customers report that editorial staff is very comfortable with the interface, and generally prefer to work in the Livingdocs editor, rather than an external word processor.
- Early customers will often still run Livingdocs themselves (on-premises or on cloud), and have in many cases extensively extended the core system, working closely in co-development with Livingdocs, the company. However, Livingdocs is now shifting more towards a SaaS model; and is also migrating from Angular to the Vue JavaScript framework. With this development, extending the core platform is also becoming more productized, and it's relatively easy to customize the offering without touching the core code. Although this will still, in most cases, require developer resources, customers can likely keep up with Livingdocs' frequent release schedule without breaking their customizations.
- Livingdocs focuses on the editorial environment, and exposes the content through APIs to your custom front end. As a headless system, this means customers have full control over the front end; however, Livingdocs doesn't provide resources to develop these (the company has a nascent partner network of companies who can provide such services). Livingdocs customers tend to have their own in-house development staff, and cite the main advantage comes in shifting focus to audience facing technology.
- As have other systems, Livingdocs has recently integrated AI functionality in its editor; however, interestingly, this has been done as a plugin, which means customers should have full control over which third party services to use for this (or to develop their own).
- While the product is popular in the DACH (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) area of Europe, it has not yet made major inroads elsewhere. Staff is steadily but slowly expanding, and as a result the evolution of the platform isn't always as rapid as customers would like to see.
Package scope (as reported by vendor)
| Core platform - i.e., bundled in product (yes/no/beta) | Add-On (yes/custom/3rd party) | |
|---|---|---|
|
Content lifecycle: author / classify / edit / approve / publish / re-purpose / archive / dispose
|
Yes
|
|
|
Basic digital / voice / media asset management
|
Yes
|
|
|
Support print publishing
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Simple social media re-publishing
|
No
|
Custom
|
|
Optional modules: forms / polls / social widgets / etc
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Connector library (OOTB connectors, APIs, etc.)
|
Yes
|
|
|
Bundled CDN (with DDOS protection)
|
Yes
|
|
|
User registration
|
No
|
|
|
Subscription management and fulfillment - digital
|
No
|
|
|
Subscription or membership
|
No
|
|
|
Personalisation
|
No
|
|
|
Ad management - digital
|
No
|
|
|
Ad management - print
|
No
|
|
|
Content management
|
Yes
|
|
|
Research
|
Yes
|
|
|
Content management
|
Yes
|
|
|
Video management / OVP
|
Yes
|
|
|
Audio management / podcasting
|
No
|
|
|
Data journalism and visualisation
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Classifieds
|
No
|
|
|
Commenting / community features/
|
No
|
3rd Party
|
|
Newsletter production and management
|
Yes
|
3rd Party
|
|
Notifications and alerts
|
Yes
|
|
|
A/B testing
|
No
|
Custom
|
|
SEO
|
Yes
|
|
|
Multi-title management with variable inheritance
|
Yes
|
|
|
Complex layout and subsite / subsection cloning
|
Yes
|
|
|
AR- / VR- enhanced services
|
No
|
|
|
Audience segmentation
|
Yes
|
|
|
Online user / partner forums
|
No
|
|
|
Regular user group meetings
|
Yes
|
|
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