Acquia Digital Experience Platform vs. Adobe Experience Manager

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
The Acquia Digital Experience Platform is an "Open DXP" with its two core pillars being content and data. Built on top of one of the largest open-source content management systems, Drupal, it aims to provide the flexibility and interoperability a modern organization needs. With its customer data platform, it allows organizations to understand who their customers are and deliver personalized experiences. Acquia's DXP offers variety of other tools including digital asset management,…N/A
Adobe Experience Manager
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Adobe Experience Manager is a combined web content management system and digital asset management system. The combined applications of Adobe Experience Manager Sites and Adobe Experience Manager Assets is offered by the vendor as an end-to-end solution for managing and delivering marketing content.N/A
Pricing
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformAdobe Experience Manager
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformAdobe Experience Manager
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformAdobe Experience Manager
Considered Both Products
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Frankly, I think it was just good luck that we had a developer who trusted the platform and recommended we use it!
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Much easier, less costly, and more value for the money. The support for the Acquia tools platform and operation are outstanding. Acquia has been a partner rather than a vendor.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Acquia Digital Experience Platform provides all the above features incorporated in your package.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Honestly, pantheon are a great provider too and momentum has a large amount to do with our retention here.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
We chose Acquia for a much better UI that gave non-analytical marketers and easy to use tool where they could create their own reports. The campaign side of things also had an easier to use UI as well, that made the targeting of audiences much easier.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Platform.sh is cheap and relatively easy to configure. The challenge they have when it comes to competing with Acquia is that they aren't a Drupal centric service, and don't have the same bench of Drupal products to offer, and don't have turnkey Drupal pipelines and support …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Very convenient because it's a suite of products built to work together and Drupal is open-source. The AWS products are very similar, but I really appreciate the Cloud IDE.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
we have used pantheon in the past for some use cases but now we prefer Acquia over it the reason being the availability of different products to allow us to provide a complete digital experience. A product like a site factory, Acquia personalization, site studio, etc has really …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Acquia Personalization integrates well with Drupal CMS and is more straightforward to implement than Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio (Personalization). WordPress as a CMS hosted on WP Engine is useful, but much more limited than Drupal CMS hosted on Acquia …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Drupal is Wordpress on crack. And using Acquia Digital Experience Platform is like using a managed Wordpress site: Most of the installation and maintenance is done for you.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
We stay with Acquia because they offer managed updates to Drupal core. Not everyone does. And, they are experts in supporting Drupal. They can often get a little closer to the developer side of things than other companies. Prices and support are similar for similar services …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
The customer selected Acquia since it had a better support for the US based laws (eg the PCI compliance).
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Acquia coupled with their easier interface and 24 x 7 customer service can outweigh its competitors anytime.
Acquia provides a full end to end solution for Drupal websites.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
The flexibility aspect of Acquia Site Studio is unmatched and Wordpress does not provide it on a large scale. The ability to perform bulk operations and security are also the factors in favour of Acquia Digital Experience Platform as compared to Wordpress. They also offer …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Although Acquia Digital Experience Platform is an Enterprise solution like the others, it stands from competition because it relies on Drupal's Open Source community and is one of the first Cloud-native solutions so they're building on experience.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Acquia is the go-to platform for hosting drupal sites.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Acquia Cloud is more of a hands-off approach to Drupal hosting - get the code on the server and that's basically it. AWS on the other hand requires more specialized server and networking knowledge to support a site. Our company wants to focus on content deliver and not on being …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
I'm still evaluating.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Can't compare apples to grapes. But in terms of "Drupal specific" hosting at enterprise level as a PAAS solution I think Acquia is the only one doing it at this scale.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Actually, Acquia Digital Experience Platform did not stack up against them, rather it was a great combination to implementing and configuring CloudFlare, the next generation Content Delivery Network (CDN) and different caching Architecture to embed with the Drupal Platform such …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
We had some limitations with another provider: for example, multisite was not possible. We did not encounter any particular constraints with Acquia Cloud.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Compared to other products used, Acquia Digital Experience Platform offers a good balance between configuration flexibility and hosting implementation. Some platforms provide a similar service where it takes away the need to build the hosting yourself, however, they don't allow …
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Compared to the Adobe product, Acquia is 10 points ahead in flexibility and ease of deployment, and site support.
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Acquia offers a much better page builder and personalization tool as native features than WordPress. Translation management is also a good feature from Drupal/Acquia, that is not managed well on Wordpress.
Adobe Experience Manager
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Experience Manager, built on Java, means that the pool of developers available to work on the platform is large. Adobe Experience Manager's front-ends and client library management tooling mean that front-end developers can feel at home despite a lack of Java knowledge.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
We wanted a CMS which is known in market, which have a good ecosystem. With Adobe Experience Manager, we get integration with Target, Tag management, and other Adobe products.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
AEM is much more vast than Photoshop. Photoshop can be run by one person. AEM requires more people. AEM is waaay costlier.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Target, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Brand Concierge and Adobe Experience Platform
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
It was the in-place product when I joined the team.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Experience Manager provides way more. It is a much more holistic tool to help us manage the entire customer Journey. I, however, do not have enough power to make those decisions. I did not in fact choose Adobe Experience Manager, but I do like it better.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
AEM is infinitely better. Drupal does not compare.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe's integration with all of its other products requires digital marketing, making its system stand out from the rest. AI integration takes it to the next level.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Commerce and Adobe Target
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Analytics and Adobe Marketo Engage
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
integration with other Adobe tools
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
I selected Adobe Experience Manager because it was the easiest to connect to our platforms, the best cost for the size of our company, and I was using Adobe for almost everything else at the time. I think this was the best solution for our smaller company at the time.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
We chose Adobe Experience Manager over these platforms for security and Time to market. It was difficult to manage multi-site in other CMS.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Squarespace, Django and Python IDLE
Features
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformAdobe Experience Manager
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
8.0
Ratings
0% below category average
Adobe Experience Manager
8.4
Ratings
4% above category average
Role-based user permissions8.00 Ratings8.40 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
7.7
Ratings
4% below category average
Adobe Experience Manager
8.0
Ratings
0% above category average
API7.80 Ratings7.80 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language7.60 Ratings8.10 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
7.9
Ratings
11% above category average
Adobe Experience Manager
7.5
Ratings
6% above category average
WYSIWYG editor7.30 Ratings7.40 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness8.10 Ratings6.70 Ratings
Admin section7.90 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Page templates8.00 Ratings7.60 Ratings
Library of website themes8.20 Ratings7.30 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design7.80 Ratings7.80 Ratings
Publishing workflow7.90 Ratings8.10 Ratings
Form generator7.90 Ratings7.60 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
7.0
Ratings
6% above category average
Adobe Experience Manager
7.3
Ratings
10% above category average
Content taxonomy7.70 Ratings7.70 Ratings
SEO support6.00 Ratings7.10 Ratings
Bulk management6.90 Ratings7.20 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions7.40 Ratings7.50 Ratings
Community / comment management7.20 Ratings7.10 Ratings
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Acquia Digital Experience PlatformAdobe Experience Manager
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Score 9.2 out of 10
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Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
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Score 9.0 out of 10
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Enterprises
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User Ratings
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformAdobe Experience Manager
Likelihood to Recommend
8.4
(0 ratings)
8.6
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.9
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.7
(0 ratings)
8.1
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
7.2
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(0 ratings)
8.7
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.3
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformAdobe Experience Manager
Likelihood to Recommend
It made it super easy to upgrade 300+ Drupal sites to the latest major version in 12 weeks, end to end. It is easy to deploy legal changes and updates to components at scale. Turnkey service to deploy new environments and to clone sites. There are no ecosystem lock-in principles for Customer service/success services and professional services for new approaches.
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I'll answer the second one because I mean, the first one I don't have an issue with. The second scenario is we oftentimes have the need to spin off very small campaign style sites or sites that generate leads but are unbranded and that sort of thing. So that's hard to do in AEM because you have to then create another organization within AEM to do that. And we're talking about sites that are maybe five to 10 pages in size. So we've been investigating Edge, but then that's a different workflow, so we'd have to train people on that. So it would be nice if there was something within the AEM structure that could allow you to do something very similar to Edge, where you make some small micro sites that are not necessarily branded, that you could still host within the platform and not have to retrain everybody on a completely different platform.
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Pros
  • Acquia keeps the site up and available. I don't think we've had a second of downtime caused by Acquia.
  • Their administration UI makes it pretty easy to manage the websites at a high level. Check stats, change key configuration values, backup code and databases, manage SSL, create support tickets and manage development teams (users).
  • Their support team can do performance reviews of your website and give you tips for improving performance.
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  • It allows us to scale so that we can make a change on a global footer. And it applies to all of the different property websites. It allows us to set up components and compartmentalize things in a way. The big thing is that it's scalable. And then it also ties into Adobe Analytics and other Adobe products. So we are a complete Adobe shop. Every Adobe product that we can use, we use. I don't think we do it for marketing so much, but for doing target testing and analytics, data scientists are using the same product and so it all speaks.
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Cons
  • the support portal can be hit and miss. sometimes there are very helpful people who get back to you in a timely manner, but more often there's a lot of lag time for the ticket to get picked up and in between responses, which can also be less than helpful.
  • it seems like the different departments within acquia (support, management, build teams) don't communicate with each other.
  • because features are so dense and granular, sometimes the workflow or how they are connected can be really complex to access.
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  • There are some glitches in permissions inheritance that require us to toggle a save on permissions in groups that inherit from a group that was recently updated.
  • Large packages require stopping the workflow launcher OSGi components or many workflows will slow down the server.
  • Locked pages are hard to find unless I use /siteadmin... I often hear that the CQ tools will go away, but if we lose that, some small things might be harder to do, like finding locked pages.
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Likelihood to Renew
We're moving away from Drupal as a platform. Drupal 8 and 9 were simply too overburdened and difficult to maintain compared to other offerings. PHP seems like a dying language so we are currently in the process of migrating all of our Drupal 7 functionality and custom modules to a Python/Django/Wagtail platform. This doesn't mean Acquia isn't a great service, they are professional and top-knotch, but the only way we'd say with them is if I didn't complete the migration.
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We had and still have a fantastic experience using Adobe CQ. Lots of flexibility, great integration with other Adobe products we already use and a powerful technology make it a great fit for our corporate environment. Also as the community grows, it makes it easier to network with other developers and users to get new ideas on how to continue to get the best out of the software.
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Usability
It's a great user interface. It's always being updated and I've never noticed a bad update that increased the complexity or reduced
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Considering I'm completely self-taught on Adobe Experience Manager, I have to rate usability quite high since plenty of aspects were easy to figure out on my own. With its cloud-based platform, access from anywhere it super great for overall usability. Edits can also be made pretty quick and easy, which is another great feature.
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
Being part of Adobe Suite means you are already notified when the tool has any outages. However, I have never faced unplanned outages. Whenever you face any issue with the site, it is clearly stated if there were any planned outages and how quickly you will be back to normal. So, I will say that even the outages are planned and managed in a great way like their other services.
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Performance
No answers on this topic
With respect to performance, Adobe experience manager is one of the best in the CMS space. We didn't observe frequent slowness on platform, however the systems which are accessing experience manager should be of good specifications without which slowness would be observed. Adobe experience manager works well in integration with other solutions, unless the destination application is designed to trigger frequent calls to AEM.
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Support Rating
Every time we have had an issue, Acquia support has responded promptly and worked with us as a team to solve the problem. The Acquia support team is global and we have literally had interactions with all of their support offices, yet the experience has been the same - top notch
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Adobe Experience Manager, in all its capacity, is a great alternative to any other CMS you are using. It helps in rapid development and makes life easier for maintaining the website for multi-language sites. Technical know-how is eliminated at content authoring. Better documentation in terms of live examples with videos would be appreciated.
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Implementation Rating
It was implemented when I got there. I don't know how it was prior.
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Depending on your individual needs, It is really quite simple to create an authoring experience for a website that looks really good. I have been part of many implementations and many teams and have seen many projects that were super successful and others that were not implemented well. AEM has room for a lot of flexibility in the implementation process compared to other CMS like SharePoint
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Alternatives Considered
We chose Acquia for a much better UI that gave non-analytical marketers and easy to use tool where they could create their own reports. The campaign side of things also had an easier to use UI as well, that made the targeting of audiences much easier.
Read full review
SSO is one fits all, so we don't have to have a separate SSO for each application of Adobe The integration with Analytics works perfectly and bring directly value really quickly Target remains more complicated to set up, but can also bring a lot of value once integrated with the rest of the Adobe platform The fact that the solution is Cloud services is also a big advantage for maintenance
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Scalability
The DXP tools can handle millions of requests and can scale automatically to fit your needs. We have clients that use only part of the DXP tools and have a small usage, but even in these cases they see great value in using tools like personalization and CDP.
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No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
  • A reliable platform = happy user base!
  • Ours is a non-profit service, we are happy that people appreciate and recommend the site for its content.
  • FLEXspace.org rapidly grew to over 6,000 users from 1,400 educational institutions across 75 countries - it is a joy to watch educators contributing content and sharing ideas.
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  • Makes it easy to reuse components across multiple pages and site, which reduces the overhead needed to create all the individual components.
  • Improves business process agility by allowing users to easily create entirely new pages or content by using existing templates
  • Increases conversion rates across our sites by enabling a more consistent experience for users
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ScreenShots

Adobe Experience Manager Screenshots

Screenshot of AEM Forms - Creates an adaptive formScreenshot of AEM Forms - themes libraryScreenshot of AEM Forms - where to create a templateScreenshot of AEM Forms - the interactive communications editorScreenshot of Adobe Experience Manager Sites - document-based authoring enables marketers to create and publish content with familiar tools.Screenshot of Adobe Experience Manager Sites - Universal Editor, an advanced visual editor, empowers marketers to edit and publish content.