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Adobe Experience Manager vs Drupal 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
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 January 2025, in the Web Content Management category, the mindshare of Adobe Experience Manager is 12.5%, down from 15.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Drupal is 6.1%, down from 7.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Content Management
 

Featured Reviews

Thomas Becker - PeerSpot reviewer
Impressive integration of customer behavior with an easy setup and okay support
I've worked with all major content management systems. Currently, I work with the leaders such as Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, and Acquia Working with big companies, I help them either consider setting up a new content management system or address issues they might have with their existing…
it_user628050 - PeerSpot reviewer
The best features are its extensibility and plug-ability. It has a very good authentication/authorization system.
The learning curve is the thing that scares most people away from using Drupal. With Drupal Version 8, it has taken a more standardized way by teaming up with the Symfony framework. This, however, is a double-edged sword. It takes you a step further away from the typical front-end developers that had found their gem in Drupal Versions 6 and 7. By its procedural nature, they were able to build semi-complex websites without any real programming and object oriented programming knowledge. Everything below Drupal 8 was aimed at being a procedural application where you can make changes by using hooks they provide in their code (a small amount were Object Oriented, but most people would never touch this). This allows for an easy way to modify existing pages for the non-programmers who know how to write scripts a little. But these hooks are very specific to Drupal itself (hence the steep learning curve) and aren’t very intuitive if you look at PHP frameworks/applications as a whole. The documentation on how to do things as a complete novice is only subpar in both Drupal 7 & 8. By now there are plenty how-to tutorials on how to do things in Drupal 7 luckily. With Drupal 8 they decided to use Symphony2 as the base framework for the system. This allows for best practices in that framework to be used and allow the vast community of symphony2 programmers to make a switch to Drupal since it leans closer to home than the procedural approach from the previous version. Almost everything is now Object Oriented and the amount of hooks (the old procedural approach) has been pushed back to a minimum. This makes it more difficult for the previously mentioned non-programmers. They are now looking at a huge time-investment to learn OO Programming to get started in Drupal 8. I believe this is the reason why Drupal 8 is making such a slow start compared to Drupal 6 & 7. It’s a good product but they made it so much harder for the people who can write basic PHP scripts. The main area of improvement would be better/more documentation and tutorials on how to do things in Drupal 8 at this moment. It’s a leap of faith for the non-programmers out there and some of them just completely thrown off by it. This is what incites projects like https://backdropcms.org/ where they fork Drupal 7 to keep it going after it reaches EOL.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"It's a complete package. You don't need to look elsewhere for digital marketing."
"It is easy to learn. You don't need to be an advanced Java developer."
"Easy to work with the solution."
"Adobe Experience Manager is quite a powerful product that you can use to design files and export them."
"The integration of customer behavior and website setup is impressive."
"Adobe Experience Manager is a content management system, and we use it to create and manage a website."
"The most valuable features of Adobe Experience Manager include its capability to manage content and create reusable fragments."
"It is good for big projects."
"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."
 

Cons

"The licensing model is opaque, and technical support could be improved, especially for smaller companies."
"Tool-wise, the Adobe Experience Manager support team is not very responsive when the user face issues in AEM as a Cloud Service."
"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."
"Adobe's technical support is so-so."
"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."
"Adobe Experience Manager's pricing could be improved."
"The licenses are very expensive."
"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."
"Digital experience features like target, segmentation, and campaign management have a long way to go."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Users have to pay a yearly licensing fee to use the solution, which is highly-priced."
"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."
"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
48%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Government
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
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.
Ask a question
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Also Known As

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

Learn More

 

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: January 2025.
831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.