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Adobe Experience Manager vs Adobe Web Experience Management comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Adobe Experience Manager
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Content Management (8th), Web Content Management (3rd), Enterprise Social Software (6th), Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) (1st)
Adobe Web Experience Manage...
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Customer Experience Management (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Customer Relationship Management solutions, they serve different purposes. Adobe Experience Manager is designed for Enterprise Content Management and holds a mindshare of 2.8%, up 2.8% compared to last year.
Adobe Web Experience Management, on the other hand, focuses on Customer Experience Management, holds 4.4% mindshare, down 5.9% since last year.
Enterprise Content Management
Customer Experience Management
 

Featured Reviews

Prince Shivhare - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing content is very user-friendly, AEM makes maintenance simple and auto-scalable
Area of improvement for Cloud Service: For the last four years, I've been working on AEM as a Cloud Service. I feel the tool has all the features needed for production, but the problem is with skills. Depending on the skill level of the developers building the components within Adobe Experience Manager, you can have a very streamlined implementation or a very difficult one. Tool-wise, the Adobe Experience Manager support team is not very responsive when the user faces issues in AEM as a Cloud Service. If I reach out to Adobe for something, they create a ticket, and then I might wait three to four days for a response. When I have issues, I want an immediate response. On AEM as a Cloud Service, this is the one thing I think Adobe needs to improve. They should resolve issues within a day so everything runs smoothly for the user. Area of improvement for on-premises: For on-premises AEM, everything is managed by us, but since Adobe Experience Manager was not a very big market earlier (though it's growing now), there are limited clients. The cost of the tool is high, and maintenance is heavy – it's very costly. So, the developers working in AEM development might not always have the proper skills to develop the components. For example, in a normal website, we often see carousels which represent your website in a very dynamic way. Now, suppose you have two carousels on the page – one at the top and the next at the bottom. They have different purposes. If I'm a skilled developer, I'll create one component and serve both banners with the same component – a single, dynamic component. This makes it easy for content editors in the production environment to drag, drop, and change the content. But, if I'm not an experienced developer or I don't have knowledge of AEM, I might create two components – one for the top and one for the bottom. Maintenance becomes heavy, and it's harder for the content team to understand which component to use. A less experienced developer might create multiple components for the same function, increasing complexity and challenges. Over the last three to four years, this lack of resources and skilled AM developers has created these kinds of issues.
Syed Hasan - PeerSpot reviewer
It has a lot of features, and it is very easy to learn, use, integrate, and manage
It would be better if it also supports some styling. Currently, whenever we have to do design for a particular client according to their brand strategy, it takes a good amount of effort. Adobe never focuses on this area. They say that you design your pages, templates, etc. If they can define common components or a common section of the style sheet so that if you want to have a button by default, you can go and just mention the specifications, such as the color code, and those specifications are automatically followed across the whole site or multiple sites according to the brand strategy. Such functionality will be helpful because currently, it takes a lot of effort to manage them separately. They can increase the number of components in terms of combinations. For example, if I take an image and a text component, currently, Adobe gives you just an image and text component. It should provide multiple versions, such as image, text, and video. That's because, on most of the sites, clients always come up with this combination. They want to have a video. They want to have an image, and they want to have some text. There could be options to have any of the following combinations: * The image on the left, the video on the right, and the text at the bottom. * The image on the left, the video on the right, and the text at the top. * The image in the center, the video on top, and the text at the bottom. If they can come up with such permutations and combinations, it will make the work easier. It will help us in putting out the site in a faster way, instead of us having to do the regular development every time. They can come up with some out-of-the-box components to help you drag and drop a video that will be displayed in a particular player. Currently, some of the features are not available, and we have to customize them. They can look into the top video players that are being used by most of the end-users from a location and provide out-of-the-box components. They can look into the features of YouTube, Vimeo, and other top players.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Easy to work with the solution."
"I've used several CMS tools, but Adobe Experience Manager is feature-rich, especially for web security and content management. It's more efficient to manage content on Adobe Experience Manager, and you can do a lot with it, such as updating content at any time, and on any platform, even from mobile or tablet. Adobe Experience Manager is still getting updated daily, and it's the best CMS tool in the market for me. I like that you can manage assets in Adobe Experience Manager. I also like that the solution has an analytics dashboard that shows you where the traffic comes from, how many clicks come from a specific location, the number of clicks and impressions, etc. Adobe Experience Manager can be accessed by other teams, for example, the digital media department of my company, so the solution can be used and updated per each team's requirement. Adobe Experience Manager is more than just a web developer tool, as it also allows visibility tracking and has other uses. I also like that the GUI for Adobe Experience Manager is straightforward and catchy. It has separate folders and icons, so using Adobe Experience Manager isn't tough. The solution is straightforward to use and handle."
"Adobe Experience Manager is a content management system, and we use it to create and manage a website."
"I like the native applications such as Adobe Target, Adobe Analytics, and Adobe Experience Platform. Because of these, it's very easy to connect and obtain reports on how my website is doing, how many have visited it, how frequently, etc. The multiple publisher concept is one of the best parts of this solution."
"If you want to use content in a mobile application and you want the content in some other application, you can simply expose it from the CMS to different clients or different systems. It's easy. On top of that, the technology underlying AEM is open-source and is very powerful like Apache Sling and JCR."
"The integration of customer behavior and website setup is impressive."
"It is easy to learn. You don't need to be an advanced Java developer."
"The integration of customer behavior and website setup is impressive."
"The templates and components that come out of the box are very helpful, especially in terms of the content fragments and experience fragments. Every client would like to have some templates and components, and they would like to cut down the effort of having to create every component that's customized. So, they try to use them out of the box. Other than that, the user roles and permissions workflows, third-party integrations, and system integration are the features that are very important."
"Good content and digital management capabilities."
 

Cons

"The solution's pricing and stability could be improved."
"Adobe Experience Manager could improve by allowing the reuse of components like a progress bar across multiple pages to make the development process more efficient."
"The latest trend is to render everything in the client-side framework. For example, SPA or single page application. This is a feature that needs improvement. The cloud deployment pipeline needs to be improved as well."
"The licenses are very expensive."
"I haven't seen any areas for improvement in Adobe Experience Manager as it's a full-fledged CMS tool, and Adobe is already working on enhancements for the solution. Adobe is working to make Adobe Experience Manager more valuable and easier to use for any user, even non-technical ones, through multiple components and templates. Day by day, Adobe provides the latest update to Adobe Experience Manager, and if my team needs any particular change, it just needs to be reported to the Adobe team. As Adobe Experience Manager has a broad scope and a lot of use cases and features, it's a solution that requires some time and effort from you in terms of learning, especially if you're implementing it for different clients, which could be an area for improvement."
"A little bit of background knowledge of coding and website structure is required."
"In comparison to other CMS products, Adobe Experience Manager is missing some capabilities such as proper versioning or a better versioning system and backend connectivity. If something is deleted in AEM, the user cannot recover it. You have to call technical support, and they will need to recover the whole instance. So, it's really difficult. For example, if you delete a page, you cannot recover it. There should be an option to recover it. In AEM, you have to go to the previous state of the instance itself or the virtual machine, and you have to restore everything, which is not good."
"Tool-wise, the Adobe Experience Manager support team is not very responsive when the user face issues in AEM as a Cloud Service."
"Unable to handle very large video files."
"It would be better if it also supports some styling. Currently, whenever we have to do design for a particular client according to their brand strategy, it takes a good amount of effort. Adobe never focuses on this area. They say that you design your pages, templates, etc. If they can define common components or a common section of the style sheet so that if you want to have a button by default, you can go and just mention the specifications, such as the color code, and those specifications are automatically followed across the whole site or multiple sites according to the brand strategy. Such functionality will be helpful because currently, it takes a lot of effort to manage them separately."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Users have to pay a yearly licensing fee to use the solution, which is highly-priced."
"There's a free trial for one month for Adobe Experience Manager, which you can use for learning purposes, then, after the trial period, you'll need to purchase the license. Adobe offers a few plans for Adobe Experience Manager, but I'm unaware of how much my company is paying."
"It's a costly solution. I would rate the price at two out of five on a scale from one to five, where one is the most expensive and five is the most competitive."
"It's really costly."
"It's definitely an expensive solution, but it comes with a lot of features and scalability. As compared to other content management systems that we have in the market, AEM is the costliest one. There is no hidden or additional fee."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
47%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
5%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Adobe Experience Manager?
It is easy to learn. You don't need to be an advanced Java developer.
What needs improvement with Adobe Experience Manager?
While there are many aspects that could be improved, discussing them would require more time. The licensing model is opaque, and technical support could be improved, especially for smaller companies.
What is your primary use case for Adobe Experience Manager?
I've worked with all major content management systems. Currently, I work with the leaders such as Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, and Acquia.
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Also Known As

Adobe Day CQ5, Ektron Social Marketing, Episerver Content Cloud
No data available
 

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Metra
Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, University of Georgia, The University of Auckland, Dalhousie University, KfW Bankengruppe, IG Group, National Australia Bank, Investec, New Mexico Department of Transportation (NMDOT), Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), Singapore Tourism Board, European Southern Observatory (ESO)
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