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Adobe Experience Manager vs Adobe Web Experience Management comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Adobe Experience Manager
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Content Management (3rd), Web Content Management (1st), Enterprise Social Software (4th), Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) (1st)
Adobe Web Experience Manage...
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
4.4
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Customer Experience Management (8th)
 

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 4.0%, up 3.3% compared to last year.
Adobe Web Experience Management, on the other hand, focuses on Customer Experience Management, holds 2.2% mindshare, up 2.0% since last year.
Enterprise Content Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Adobe Experience Manager4.0%
SharePoint11.8%
Alfresco7.1%
Other77.1%
Enterprise Content Management
Customer Experience Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Adobe Web Experience Management2.2%
Qualtrics XM Platform3.6%
Genesys Cloud CX3.3%
Other90.9%
Customer Experience Management
 

Featured Reviews

Hilax Chamberlain - PeerSpot reviewer
Digital Marketing Manager at Ford Motor Company
Centralized content management has unified our digital channels and delivers consistent experiences
Adobe Experience Manager offers enterprise-level digital assets management and very robust customization, brand value consistency, and omnichannel delivery. It saves development and maintenance time. The digital asset management and omnichannel delivery features have benefited my team by managing our digital assets, ensuring brand consistency, and enabling us to deliver customized content easily to our clients. Organizing and obtaining information from results is beneficial. Strengthening our online experience as a brand is valuable. Easy integration with other Adobe services improves productivity and provides a smooth experience. Adobe Experience Manager has positively impacted my organization by enabling component and page reuse, which reduces application size. It saves manual effort for maintaining all applications, improves traffic, and ensures consistency across all our applications. It provides better security, scalability, and makes our applications more robust.
Somnath Shelke - PeerSpot reviewer
Tech Architect at IBM
Content as a service has improved omnichannel delivery but deployment and debugging still need work
There is room for improvement in Adobe Web Experience Management, particularly concerning single-page applications. It has certain aspects that need improvement regarding content exposure. While content as a service has been introduced, there are some difficulties when implementing it, as customizations are required, which are not out-of-the-box features or APIs provided. Additionally, the deployment strategy employed for Adobe Cloud Services has room for improvement, particularly in the time taken for deployment and debugging. Developers find it challenging to debug issues in the environment, as previous on-premises versions provided more visibility. This aspect definitely needs improvement. Normally, for the cloud, deployment takes around thirty to forty-five minutes, but I have seen situations where it takes more than one hour, sometimes even one and a half hours. For the production environment, at least half an hour may be acceptable, but one and a half hours is not acceptable. This contrasts with the on-premises version, which has a different architecture for deployment. This should be improved, and they need to look into it because one and a half hours for deployment is too much.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The integration of customer behavior and website setup is impressive."
"Easy to work with the solution."
"Being able to connect everything to one universal system was a game changer for us, giving us an overall better digital experience."
"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."
"The cost can be high, but for large websites with a lot of dynamic data like e-commerce, or for clients looking for user-data based campaigning, the solution can be very efficient in the long-term."
"Adobe Experience Manager offers several best features, including user-friendliness and a more secure platform than any other content management systems I have worked with."
"Adobe Experience Manager is pretty stable."
"The most valuable features of Adobe Experience Manager include its capability to manage content and create reusable fragments."
"The user interface of Adobe Web Experience Management is user-friendly, and that is the main reason most clients are moving to Adobe from other vendors."
"This product is very efficient at managing end-to-end content publishing flows."
"Good content and digital management capabilities."
"Overall, I find this product to be good because it is a hundred percent Java-based tool and supports the integration of other frameworks seamlessly, providing visibility for developers while offering considerable feasibility to integrate different frameworks comfortably."
"When new clients come for a requirement of a new site, we suggest Adobe Experience Manager because this is one of the best content management systems; it is easy to author, easy to manage, and easy to maintain."
"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."
 

Cons

"The tech support from Adobe is slow to respond and takes a lot of time to fix product related bugs."
"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."
"Because of the improvement needed with the client-side framework and because page loading takes time, I rate Adobe Experience Manager at seven out of ten."
"The licenses are very expensive."
"The licensing plus implementation and maintenance cost is very expensive, making it not suitable for small organizations, and the setup is very complex."
"AEM, when setup using Mongo, rapidly gains size; hence it consumes a lot of storage space in a very short period of time."
"The solution's pricing and stability could be improved."
"Adobe Experience Manager needs more optimization. The frequency of components where we have vitals of a page or an app needs to be optimized because these are heavy Java codes along with some AEM developments."
"This product is unable to handle very large video files and related elements."
"Sometimes, they take a good amount of time to react to the issues."
"From a technical support point of view for Adobe Web Experience Management, I would rate them a five. They attempt to resolve issues promptly, but response times can vary, and sometimes clients need to wait at least a month for more complex queries related to product parts as the support team has to consult with the core product team, which can take time."
"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."
"Additionally, the deployment strategy employed for Adobe Cloud Services has room for improvement, particularly in the time taken for deployment and debugging."
"Unable to handle very large video files."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Users have to pay a yearly licensing fee to use the solution, which is highly-priced."
"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
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise24
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Adobe Experience Manager?
I find the drag-and-drop form builder in Adobe Experience Manager to be mostly intuitive, especially for basic forms, but it has some quirks when things get complex. You can drag fields, text, drop...
What is your primary use case for Adobe Experience Manager?
I have been using Adobe Experience Manager for over three years, focusing on building scalable content solutions, managing workflow, and implementing AEM Forms for enterprise use cases. My main use...
What advice do you have for others considering Adobe Experience Manager?
In our setup, Adobe Experience Manager integrates with tools such as Adobe Analytics for tracking user behavior, Adobe Target for personalization, and backend APIs for CRM systems for handling form...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Adobe Web Experience Management?
Adobe Web Experience Management is a little bit costlier compared to other products. I would rate the pricing for Adobe Web Experience Management as a high price, probably around three or four, ind...
What needs improvement with Adobe Web Experience Management?
Regarding AI-driven analytics in Adobe Web Experience Management, AI analytics is not yet used; however, since recently there was a push at a global market level to move to AI part, Adobe also intr...
What is your primary use case for Adobe Web Experience Management?
My main use case for Adobe Web Experience Management is for static websites. Recently, it has been started for certain other channels for the headless content one, and it is being used.
 

Also Known As

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

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)
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, IBM, Adobe and others in Enterprise Content Management. Updated: April 2026.
895,151 professionals have used our research since 2012.