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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
31
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 3.9%, up 3.2% compared to last year.
Adobe Web Experience Management, on the other hand, focuses on Customer Experience Management, holds 2.1% mindshare, up 1.9% since last year.
Enterprise Content Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Adobe Experience Manager3.9%
SharePoint11.7%
Alfresco6.7%
Other77.7%
Enterprise Content Management
Customer Experience Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Adobe Web Experience Management2.1%
Qualtrics XM Platform3.5%
Genesys Cloud CX3.2%
Other91.2%
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

"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 most valuable features of Adobe Experience Manager include its capability to manage content and create reusable fragments."
"Ease of use for content authors and tight integration with Adobe Marketing Cloud Products like Target, Analytics, Campaign; a complete solution for organizational digital marketing needs."
"I think DAM (Digital Asset Management) is most valuable to me; the data is increasing, and in order to manage millions of assets which a large enterprise has, it provides lots of capabilities (searching, reporting, managing, workflows for automation, etc.)."
"A certain client has definitely seen approximately fifteen to twenty percent improvement in their web engagement and conversions on the personalized pages, especially when those experiences were connected and retargeted with other engagement campaigns in MoEngage."
"Using Adobe Experience Manager has positively impacted our organization by improving our efficiency significantly."
"The best feature is the experience fragment; if you want to replicate content across multiple websites with 1,000 or 20,000 pages, this feature helps accomplish it in a fraction of seconds."
"It's a complete package. You don't need to look elsewhere for digital marketing."
"Good content and digital management capabilities."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"A little bit of background knowledge of coding and website structure is required."
"The solution's pricing and stability could be improved."
"This review attempts to sum up the miserable experience of using Ektron from a developer's perspective, a server administrator's perspective, and the actual end content editor's perspective."
"The pricing and setup cost for Adobe Experience Manager is a bit higher compared to different content management tools."
"The UI for handling complex logic, especially in forms, could be more intuitive, and debugging issues is not always straightforward and could be simplified."
"Last but not least, Adobe AEM TCO (total cost of ownership) is very high with return on investment is slow (ROI is not necessarily low), which is why Adobe's focus is mostly large companies with deep pocket"
"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."
"There is a feature missing where if content is created on the UAT environment and needs to be transferred or synced to the production environment, there is no direct way of doing the sync."
"Additionally, the deployment strategy employed for Adobe Cloud Services has room for improvement, particularly in the time taken for deployment and debugging."
"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."
"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."
"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

"It's really costly."
"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."
"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."
"Users have to pay a yearly licensing fee to use the solution, which is highly-priced."
"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
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Construction Company
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise24
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Adobe Experience Manager?
One common challenge that I have heard of is that Adobe Experience Manager can feel complex and resource-intensive during implementation, especially for organizations without strong technical or Ad...
What is your primary use case for Adobe Experience Manager?
I personally have not used Adobe Experience Manager, but I have observed a retail client that uses Adobe Experience Manager to manage their personalized website content, and while they use MoEngage...
What advice do you have for others considering Adobe Experience Manager?
Adobe Experience Manager should be evaluated as a long-term digital experience platform rather than just a CMS. It delivers the most value for organizations that need personalization, multi-channel...
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?
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 co...
What is your primary use case for Adobe Web Experience Management?
Adobe Web Experience Management is mainly used for static websites where frequent content changes occur. The tool is utilized in parallel for websites where content is configured in one place and c...
 

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: May 2026.
899,645 professionals have used our research since 2012.