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Adobe Experience Manager vs Drupal comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Adobe Experience Manager
Ranking in Web Content Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Content Management (8th), Enterprise Social Software (6th), Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) (1st)
Drupal
Ranking in Web Content Management
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Web Content Management category, the mindshare of Adobe Experience Manager is 12.1%, down from 15.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Drupal is 6.3%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Content 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.
it_user635487 - PeerSpot reviewer
Being free to extend or alter it is important for us.
The open source nature of Drupal, being free to extend or alter it is massively important for us. We also use it to build communications. Not being tied to a single vendor means that we can have scale for developers It gives the company the ability to quickly spin up ideas, and the scalability to…

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."
"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."
"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 integration of customer behavior and website setup is impressive."
"The most valuable features of Adobe Experience Manager include its capability to manage content and create reusable fragments."
"Easy to work with the solution."
"I like the profiling and segmentation."
"It's a complete package. You don't need to look elsewhere for digital marketing."
"The feature I find most valuable is that Drupal is a framework and not only a CMS."
"You can build websites on it very quickly."
"We use a part of the solution called Acquia. The personalization portion of this is the most valuable aspect fo the solution."
"It is good for big projects."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"Programming model could be improved, it's a monolithic solution."
"Adobe's technical support is so-so."
"Tool-wise, the Adobe Experience Manager support team is not very responsive when the user face issues in AEM as a Cloud Service."
"The licenses are very expensive."
"The licensing model is opaque, and technical support could be improved, especially for smaller companies."
"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."
"Digital experience features like target, segmentation, and campaign management have a long way to go."
"It is a little bit simplified."
"The user experience in designing layouts should be much easier or much more helpful."
"I think the support needs to improve, as well as the integration with tracking and analytics systems."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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 really costly."
"I would like to see better pricing."
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Comparison Review

it_user8925 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 23, 2013
Jive vs Sharepoint vs Drupal Commons
At Mediacurrent we often get requests to compare Drupal to other platforms used for intranet sites and social business platforms (like https://dev.twitter.com/ for example). This is often referred to as “Social Business Software”, which has grown in popularity in recent years. I decided to do a…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
47%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Government
15%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
13%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Metra
BMJ, The Economist, New Republic, SpaceX, Lush, Danone, Tesla Motors, Peugeot, Stanford Law, Harvard, Oxford University, MIT Media Lab, The Beatles, MTV UK, The Weather Channel, NBC, BBC, grammy.com, Mus_e du Louvre, Whitehouse.gov, London.gov.uk, Gouvernment.fr, New Zealand Government, The Prince of Wales, British Council, NYC Metropolitan Transport Authority, Gatwick Obviously
Find out what your peers are saying about Adobe Experience Manager vs. Drupal and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.