Adobe Experience Manager vs IBM FileNet comparison

Adobe and IBM are both solutions in the Enterprise Content Management category. Adobe is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.6, while IBM is ranked #4 with an average rating of 7.9. Adobe holds a 2.8% mindshare in ECM, compared to IBM’s 10.3% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Adobe users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Adobe Experience Manager

Read 20 Adobe Experience Manager reviews

1,106 Views
702 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

IBM FileNet

Read 99 IBM FileNet reviews

3,835 Views
2,465 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

Adobe Experience Manager

IBM FileNet

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Adobe Experience Manager and IBM FileNet compete in the enterprise content management category. Adobe Experience Manager seems to have the upper hand with its strong integration with Adobe Marketing Cloud and efficient content management capabilities, although it's often more suited for larger enterprises.

Features: Adobe Experience Manager offers tight integration with Adobe Marketing Cloud, robust Digital Asset Management (DAM), 3D asset management, and handles user-generated content effectively. FileNet provides advanced business process automation, extensive scalability, and reliable storage capabilities, along with strong document and records management.

Room for Improvement: Users of Adobe Experience Manager often find the high total cost of ownership and complexity challenging, especially without skilled developers. Adobe's tech support can be slow. IBM FileNet's licensing model is costly and complex, with users wishing for more intuitive user interfaces and better support for cloud transitions. Both products could improve their integration capabilities and simplify implementation processes.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Adobe Experience Manager is available in multiple deployment options, while FileNet focuses on on-premises deployment. Adobe's tech support, despite having dedicated teams, often experiences delays. FileNet's support system is robust but the product's complexity poses challenges. Deployment can be complex for both, but FileNet benefits from a more established reputation.

Pricing and ROI: Adobe Experience Manager is pricey, matching its feature richness suitable for large enterprises, but requires careful cost management. IBM FileNet demands a significant investment with complex licensing that can result in unexpected costs. Both provide substantial value, with Adobe focusing on larger enterprises and FileNet offering flexibility for medium to large businesses.

To learn more, read our detailed Adobe Experience Manager vs. IBM FileNet Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Adobe Experience Manager vs. IBM FileNet

January 2025

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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 Enterprise Content Management

8th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Web Content Management (3rd), Enterprise Social Software (6th), Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) (1st)

IBM FileNet

Ranking in Enterprise Content Management

4th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Enterprise Content Management category, the mindshare of Adobe Experience Manager is 2.8%, down from 2.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM FileNet is 10.3%, up from 9.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Enterprise Content Management

Featured Reviews

Thomas Becker

Managing Partner(Austria) at a integrator with 11-50 employees

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…

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WolfgangPichler

Senior Consultant at pITsolutions e.U.

Easy to integrate, and enables our clients to guarantee compliance

The area of migrations to new versions must be made easier. It's quite good that they have now begun to improve the API area, to modernize the interfaces, but there's always a very big investment involved in migrating from one version to another. That prohibits rolling out new functionalities to customers. It's not so easy. You can't release a new version every three months to bring in new capabilities. That is the old-fashioned, the way it worked ten or 20 years ago. That is bad. In that area, they really must improve. We have FileNet, Content Manager, and TSM in our own installation. We migrated that installation three years ago to version 5.12. Now we have to migrate to 5.25 to bring in new facilities, and it's a big task. We have to do it in addition to our other tasks where we support customers. We need a parallel machine and to set it up there and to migrate step-by-step, then test it and roll it out. It's not so easy. That is a big area where there is much to be done to satisfy the needs of customers.

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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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I like the profiling and segmentation."

"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."

More Adobe Experience Manager pros

"The standout feature for us is undoubtedly the Google-like search functionality, which allows us to search for documents within the system effortlessly. Instead of just querying the document database, this feature retrieves all relevant documents, akin to searching on the internet. It is very easy to use."

"The document collaboration is very good. There is something called Pink Note where departments can collaborate within the document. It has a built-in viewer to see any type of document."

"Centralized our business documents."

"We are able to find the proper documents which are needed for business processes."

"It is really usable. There is a lot of support for it. You have the online components to trawl through the storage. I have a lot of fun with it."

"It is very user-friendly for business users. They can create their own searches. They are not dependent on administrators to create searches for them. It is self-service for them."

"The product has helped with compliance and governance issues. There are some archiving policies which a financial organization has to keep. Our organization can keep up with them because of the IBM product."

"For a large company, for the robustness, stability, performance, and the growth — that you can grow it within seconds — I would advise using FileNet, without any doubt."

More IBM FileNet pros

Cons

"Programming model could be improved, it's a monolithic solution."

"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."

"Adobe Experience Manager's pricing could be improved."

"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."

"The solution's pricing and stability could be improved."

"Adobe's technical support is so-so."

"The licenses are very expensive."

More Adobe Experience Manager cons

"The only downside is that it takes a dedicated staff to maintain it and the learning curve is pretty steep."

"This solution could be improved with the ability to present the file system from FileNet."

"Needs a better administration tool."

"We'd like to use the docker, to have it containerized."

"Sometimes, there can be issues with the database connections. FileNet has too many outages because things are broken in the database."

"The analytics in FileNet are too complicated and they consume too much infrastructure, memory, and CPU. They're too expensive to work with."

"There is room for improvement in the scanning solution, Datacap. It's improving all the time. But since it's more an end-user software, the end-users are constantly improving their processes, and I believe that sometimes we're not catching up with their requirements."

"We know that they're looking at documents, but we don't know what documents they're actually going and finding the most, or where the bottlenecks might be. It would be nice if there was some interconnectivity back into Bluemix to say, "Ok, you've got a workflow problem here." That would be a neat feature moving forward because we've got a lot of users that would just say, "The system is not working." We had a few threads would get hung up because they were just constantly banging on these few documents. If that were the case, if we knew that ahead of time, then we could fix that, change the search sequences to make it more efficient. But we were blind to that until the users said it's not working."

More IBM FileNet cons

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."

"Users have to pay a yearly licensing fee to use the solution, which is highly-priced."

"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."

"For small scale industries, they allow different options. They can do open source. It is the complexity of the data security that they should think about before they choose."

"FileNet is quite expensive, although Documentum is expensive too."

"The cost is about $40,000, plus yearly maintenance."

"There are lots of components to the product. Make sure before you invest that you know which components you need."

"It is still a leading ECM solution provider, however the cost to implement and maintain are higher than other solutions."

"The biggest issue is the cost of the FileNet, because the license cost is very high. If a customer doesn't have good technical guides that are aware of the license calculation, they will pay too much. FileNet's license calculation depends on the processor and number of users. So my advice to a new customer is to be very careful with your calculations before purchasing FileNet."

"1. It will be more expensive than estimated to setup. 2. You will need to double the staff while you are running the old system and installing the new system. 3. Depending on the number of documents to be migrated, make sure you understand the potentially massive amount of time and effort required to migrate the existing content to the new platform."

"It has reduced operating costs by reducing the amount of manual work needed."

More IBM FileNet pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

48%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

11%

Insurance Company

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What do you like most about IBM FileNet?

The product is robust and can process a lot of documents for enterprise content management.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM FileNet?

It depends on the business partner providing the solution to the customer. We have an ESA contract with IBM which allows us to offer the solution at a competitive price, providing added value when ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM FileNet?

The setup process is very complex, and I would prefer if it were easier. A modern interface would also be an enhancement.

See all answers

Comparisons

Adobe CQ5 vs Adobe Experience Manager

Compared 12% of the time

Liferay Digital Experience Platform vs Adobe Experience Manager

Compared 9% of the time

SDL Tridion DX vs Adobe Experience Manager

Compared 8% of the time

Oracle Content Management vs Adobe Experience Manager

Compared 7% of the time

OpenText Extended ECM vs Adobe Experience Manager

Compared 6% of the time

More Adobe Experience Manager Competitors

SharePoint vs IBM FileNet

Compared 17% of the time

OpenText Documentum vs IBM FileNet

Compared 17% of the time

OpenText Extended ECM vs IBM FileNet

Compared 16% of the time

Hyland OnBase vs IBM FileNet

Compared 9% of the time

IBM ECM vs IBM FileNet

Compared 7% of the time

More IBM FileNet Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Adobe Experience Manager

January 2025

Download Adobe Experience Manager product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM FileNet

January 2025

Download IBM FileNet product report

Also Known As

Adobe Day CQ5, Ektron Social Marketing, Episerver Content Cloud

No data available

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Adobe

IBM

Overview

Adobe Communique 5 (Adobe CQ5), currently manifested as Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), is a web-based content management system which is developed to help businesses in offering high-end digital experience to their customers.

IBM FileNet is a leading IBM enterprise content management product family. IBM FileNet is one of the ECM solutions that can change the way a company does business by enabling users to capture, activate, socialize, analyze, and govern content throughout its lifecycle.

There are many IBM FileNet products available, all of which are integrated and based on the FileNet P8 Platform.

Sample Customers

Metra

Suncorp Group Limited, St. Vincent Health, Citigroup, SRCSD, and UK Dept for Work and Pensions.

Buyer's Guide

Adobe Experience Manager vs. IBM FileNet

January 2025

Free Report: Adobe Experience Manager vs. IBM FileNet

Find out what your peers are saying about Adobe Experience Manager vs. IBM FileNet and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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