Alternative to Civica CMS for your Government Website

Are you looking for an alternative to Civica for your municipal website?

Civica was a website development company that built websites for municipalities (mostly in California) but in other states as well.

Like many companies in the local government software space, Civica was ultimately acquired and then absorbed by a venture capital company.
Civica was acquired by Vista Equity Partners, who then combined it with Granicus (another one of their acquisitions).

When a government software company that you depend on is acquired by a venture capital company, as we see happening over and over since 2014, you have to then be concerned about investing in the website platform and applications that you use to power your website. Why? Because your fees will absolutely go up, and the environment at the company will become profit-driven. This slows innovation as the company's employers will have many masters to answer to and multiple platforms to support.

Employee reviews from past and present employees are certainly subjective, but take a look at this Granicus employee review (from Glassdoor.com) below that specifically mentions the acquisition:

Granicus Employee Review of the Company Post-Merger:

"The merger has been tougher than expected, especially for teams that have already been pushed together. Leadership is so busy with hitting their numbers they're mostly absent from day to day all together. After years of having really engaged and personal leadership, it's culturally a big shift to never hear a peep from anyone with a c-level title outside of formal presentations once a quarter. Also, HR has gone from a friendly and helpful partnership to stressed out and borderline adversarial with employees which is a shame and affects how I feel about working at the company."

Another recent review from a former employee:

Source: Glassdoor.com

Is your municipal software vendor owned by a venture capital conglomerate? Probably!

In our opinion, when venture capital companies acquire software companies (like Granicus/Civica/GovDirections/GovLoop), they are presented with a HUGE challenge of integrating the various companies and their systems. In most cases, they just don't bother to try to integrate their systems together because it would cost too much time and money to do so. And these VC companies are all about pumping up profits and then reselling the company they aquired for a profit.  Acquiring many different technology companies, each with its own programming ecosystem will negatively affect developer morale at each one. And the profit-above-all-else VC mentality affects company morale as well. The management culture then becomes more about "hitting sales numbers" than about developing a culture of innovation. This ultimately will affect you, the customer in many ways; support, product roadmap, product features, solution features, cost, and total cost of ownership.

So how can EvoGov help?

We can take your Civica website and move it to our platform in weeks, not months for a very competitive cost. With over 20 pre-built design layouts to start from, we don't need to re-invent the wheel to give your municipality a great mobile-first look and feel. We can take ANY design layout element or design feature that you bring to us that is designed by ANY competitor and make it run on our platform. There are no extra charges for applications, so your hosting costs will likely drop considerably with us. All applications are included in our hosting fees.

Some of the many advantages of EvoGov over Civica

  • We offer a more modern, cloud-based CMS where ALL applications are included.
  • No limits in users, file storage, customers, or applications.
  • Actively updated platform gets new features rolled out each week, sometimes daily (so no looming upgrade to a new platform).
  • Much lower up-front development fees. Usually over 30% less that our competitors.
  • Much lower hosting fees. One flat monthly fee - as low as $150 per month for small cities, $200 for larger ones.
  • All applications are included with our service fee. Why pay for separate applications that you will need?
    • Mobile-Friendly Municipal CMS
    • Free SSL security certificates for all of your domain names
    • Mass Email System
    • Complaint Tracking System
    • Bid System
    • Secure Staff Portal Website (Intranet)
    • 311 Request tracking
    • Form-to-database
    • Drag and Drop Media Manager
    • Custom implementations (Tax Assessment Lookups)
  • Direct access to all of your design code and file in the CMS (your competitors can't offer this).
    • No need to pay Civica an hourly fee to make a simple image change.
    • Direct CSS file access (with versioning and security).
    • Direct page template access (with versioning and security).
    • Direct script access (with versioning and security).

Ready for a quote?

Please use our online quote form to get a timely quote from us.