Sitecore SXA vs. Hedgehog Feydra

Question

It is not clear to me what are differences between Sitecore SXA and Hedgehog Feydra. Both seems to address similar issues and help frontend and backend developers to speed up the things. I have already went through this article but it seems to be outdated.

If I simplify what I understand so far about these products:

Sitecore SXA helps frontend developers to add styles, scripts, and so on without even opening / installing Sitecore. For backend developers it adds some information architecture defaults to your tenants and sites and also lot of other useful things like components, page/partial designs, bundling, minification, CORS support, ...

Feydra is really "just" driving cooperation between frontend and backend developers and also supports frontend developers who also (like with SXA) don't need to work directly in Sitecore.

Questions:

• Is it worth paying for Hedgehog Feydra when it has less features as Sitecore SXA and Sitecore SXA is free of charge as of Sitecore 9 with consumption license?
• What are pros and cons of both products?

Answer 1

SXA and Feydra are two completely different products attempting to solve completely different requirements. It's like comparing a convenience store (7-11) to a specialty drink store (Smoothie King).

SXA

SXA is a product that is in use during the development life-cycle and in production. For example, it includes Creative Exchange to assist developers in pushing css/js associated with your theme into the CMS. There is also a site provider that is driven by items rather than a config; which is what makes creating new tenants on the fly possible.

Feydra

Feydra is a product that is in use during the development life-cycle. It provides a way for developers to test out their css/js on a server running Sitecore, without needing to have it locally. The tag line on the TDS website says "Feydra: Sitecore Front-End Development Tool".

Answers:

• Both products bring value. Depending on the makeup of your team and the customer that will ultimately be responsible for maintaining the site, you can build a business case for each product independently. Referring to my analogy above, both stores sell drinks but are not the same type of store and people go to them depending on their needs. If you are really thirsty, you might go to both.
• Pros and cons - each product has a finite list of features that can be evaluated within the scope of each project.

Answer 2

Writing all the pros and cons would lead us too far... but actually Feydra and SXA are two completely different things.

Feydra is a tool that will help frontend devs working with Sitecore without actually needing Sitecore locally (well, it has some more features).

SXA is actually so much more...

But if you are using SXA it has indeed functionality that makes most of Feydra obsolete so you won't need it.

Feydra is a development tool - the implementer will choose whether or not to use it. SXA is something that goes much further so you will probably discuss this with the customer whether to use it or not.

Answer 3

I think the two answers above make it clear that these are two different tools altogether.

I would like to add that Feydra seems to rely on back-end developers building fairly well structured HTML which I think is a bit of a reach in some cases. Its main advantage from what I see is letting front-end developers avoid the hassle of having a local Sitecore instance.