Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Adobe Audience Manager
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Adobe Audience Manager is a data management platform (DMP) that is integrated into the Adobe Marketing Cloud.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
Google Tag Manager
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
From Google, the Google Tag Manager is a tag management application that facilitates creating, embedding, and updating tags across websites and mobile apps. It is a free option, vs. the company's enterprise-tier Google Tag Manager 360.
$0
Pricing
Adobe Audience ManagerAdobe Experience ManagerGoogle Tag Manager
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe Audience ManagerAdobe Experience ManagerGoogle Tag Manager
Free Trial
NoNoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Adobe Audience ManagerAdobe Experience ManagerGoogle Tag Manager
Considered Multiple Products
Adobe Audience Manager

No answer on this topic

Adobe Experience Manager
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Experience Manager proofs to be the right solution for large corporations with multiple business units and brands, since most of the functionalities are oriented to that. Other similar tools are more basic with regards to the available options and are also not that …
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
This tool was not very helpful. We switched to unbounce since Experience Manager was not a complete solution. Our team members have worked with several of these tools and found this one to be the least comprehensive.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
AEM provides a better way to control user permissions which Content Marketer is lacking. Moreover, the ability to integrate with the Adobe Target product provides a wider range of audience segments that can be targeted besides the default author-targeted functionalities. It …
Google Tag Manager
Chose Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager is the only tag management tool I have used.
Chose Google Tag Manager
The other tag management systems are not free.
Features
Adobe Audience ManagerAdobe Experience ManagerGoogle Tag Manager
Data Collection
Comparison of Data Collection features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Audience Manager
8.6
16 Ratings
5% above category average
Adobe Experience Manager
-
Ratings
Google Tag Manager
-
Ratings
Collection of first-party data8.116 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Collection of third-party data8.116 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Access to Third-party Data Providers9.616 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Classification
Comparison of Data Classification features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Audience Manager
7.3
16 Ratings
12% below category average
Adobe Experience Manager
-
Ratings
Google Tag Manager
-
Ratings
Audience taxonomy7.916 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Tag Management6.215 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Analysis Dashboard7.816 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Ad Network Integration
Comparison of Ad Network Integration features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Audience Manager
8.9
16 Ratings
11% above category average
Adobe Experience Manager
-
Ratings
Google Tag Manager
-
Ratings
Data Transfer8.916 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
DSP integration8.815 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
DMP Analytics
Comparison of DMP Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Audience Manager
6.8
16 Ratings
14% below category average
Adobe Experience Manager
-
Ratings
Google Tag Manager
-
Ratings
Campaign Analytics5.516 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Audience Analytics8.116 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Audience Manager
-
Ratings
Adobe Experience Manager
8.4
38 Ratings
3% above category average
Google Tag Manager
8.3
58 Ratings
1% below category average
Role-based user permissions00 Ratings8.438 Ratings8.358 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Audience Manager
-
Ratings
Adobe Experience Manager
8.0
33 Ratings
1% below category average
Google Tag Manager
-
Ratings
API00 Ratings7.829 Ratings00 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language00 Ratings8.129 Ratings00 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Audience Manager
-
Ratings
Adobe Experience Manager
7.5
38 Ratings
4% above category average
Google Tag Manager
-
Ratings
WYSIWYG editor00 Ratings7.433 Ratings00 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness00 Ratings6.734 Ratings00 Ratings
Admin section00 Ratings7.034 Ratings00 Ratings
Page templates00 Ratings7.637 Ratings00 Ratings
Library of website themes00 Ratings7.326 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design00 Ratings7.835 Ratings00 Ratings
Publishing workflow00 Ratings8.135 Ratings00 Ratings
Form generator00 Ratings7.629 Ratings00 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Audience Manager
-
Ratings
Adobe Experience Manager
7.3
37 Ratings
8% above category average
Google Tag Manager
-
Ratings
Content taxonomy00 Ratings7.731 Ratings00 Ratings
SEO support00 Ratings7.133 Ratings00 Ratings
Bulk management00 Ratings7.236 Ratings00 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions00 Ratings7.534 Ratings00 Ratings
Community / comment management00 Ratings7.130 Ratings00 Ratings
Tag Management
Comparison of Tag Management features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Audience Manager
-
Ratings
Adobe Experience Manager
-
Ratings
Google Tag Manager
8.5
68 Ratings
5% above category average
Tag library00 Ratings00 Ratings8.863 Ratings
Tag variable mapping00 Ratings00 Ratings8.855 Ratings
Ease of writing custom tags00 Ratings00 Ratings6.767 Ratings
Rules-driven tag execution00 Ratings00 Ratings7.662 Ratings
Tag performance monitoring00 Ratings00 Ratings10.056 Ratings
Page load times00 Ratings00 Ratings8.549 Ratings
Mobile app tagging00 Ratings00 Ratings9.434 Ratings
Library of JavaScript extensions00 Ratings00 Ratings8.538 Ratings
Data Management & Integrity
Comparison of Data Management & Integrity features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Audience Manager
-
Ratings
Adobe Experience Manager
-
Ratings
Google Tag Manager
7.5
69 Ratings
8% below category average
Event tracking00 Ratings00 Ratings8.666 Ratings
Mobile event tracking00 Ratings00 Ratings9.047 Ratings
Data distribution management00 Ratings00 Ratings8.741 Ratings
Universal data layer00 Ratings00 Ratings8.158 Ratings
Automated error checking00 Ratings00 Ratings3.045 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Adobe Audience ManagerAdobe Experience ManagerGoogle Tag Manager
Small Businesses
MediaMath
MediaMath
Score 7.4 out of 10
Bloomreach
Bloomreach
Score 9.0 out of 10
Adobe Experience Platform Launch
Adobe Experience Platform Launch
Score 7.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Adobe Real-Time CDP
Adobe Real-Time CDP
Score 8.3 out of 10
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
Adobe Experience Platform Launch
Adobe Experience Platform Launch
Score 7.9 out of 10
Enterprises
Adobe Real-Time CDP
Adobe Real-Time CDP
Score 8.3 out of 10
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
Tealium Customer Data Hub
Tealium Customer Data Hub
Score 8.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Adobe Audience ManagerAdobe Experience ManagerGoogle Tag Manager
Likelihood to Recommend
8.1
(16 ratings)
8.4
(140 ratings)
9.1
(71 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(6 ratings)
7.0
(7 ratings)
Usability
8.5
(10 ratings)
7.8
(94 ratings)
8.1
(16 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(5 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.8
(10 ratings)
7.2
(11 ratings)
2.0
(12 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(2 ratings)
9.8
(2 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
9.5
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe Audience ManagerAdobe Experience ManagerGoogle Tag Manager
Likelihood to Recommend
Adobe
If you are already using multiple other pieces of the Adobe Experience Cloud stack, adobe audience manager is an easy choice. It allows for quick and easy data activation for your first and potentially brokered 2nd party data. However this product will likely be absorbed into the adobe experience platform (AEP) soon. In the end I would wait to see where adobe is truly headed with this product before investing heavily without additional heavy adobe investments.
Read full review
Adobe
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.
Read full review
Google
I have found Google Tag Manager as the go to solution for managing all of your event and conversion tags for your website. Not only does it make it easy to manage all of your tags in the one place, it is fairly intuitive to use and there is plenty of videos and help documentation online to help set up what ever you need. No scenarios come to mind at the moment on where it is less appropriate to use.
Read full review
Pros
Adobe
  • We are able to generate reports that provide valuable insights into potential customer behavior, allowing us to better focus our marketing efforts.
  • By allowing us to understand who are key audiences are and how they overlap with other brands and products, AAM allows us to get a fuller picture of how we should target our audience.
  • Reporting in AAM is wonderful in that it is easy to understand and exportable. The use of graphics and updates make it easier to share insights with various team members--even those with minimum experience in marketing and analytics.
Read full review
Adobe
  • 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.
Read full review
Google
  • Selecting elements on a site [object, class, cookie, etc] (to later fire an event, send some data, etc) is very easy with triggers. Want to add an event when someone clicks on a button? Super easy. It was many many DOM selectors and you can even add custom functions if you need to do something more specific
  • In general, firing events in different circumstances is very easy mixing triggers and tags. You can track almost any element of the DOM and do whatever you want with it.
  • Testing is a great functionality. Only you can see what's on the site and you can debug it easily by seeing which events or tags were triggered and all the DOM elements involved (and why they matched the trigger).
  • Working in environments (staging, production) and versioning is easy to do, deploying changes in 2 clicks.
Read full review
Cons
Adobe
  • Biggest challenge we faced is teaching the use of it to our employees how to use it. The UI Should be easy and to understand for all fields.
  • The AdWords integration is not easy to do.
  • UI is sometimes slow and doesn't load Analyticals for more than 24 hours.
Read full review
Adobe
  • 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.
Read full review
Google
  • There are several good integrations, but there can always be more. Native tracking for call tracking solutions, analytics providers, non-Google advertisers would be top of my list.
  • Documentation is just dreadful. Luckily there are some awesome folks out there doing crowdsourced tutorials (shout out to Simo Ahava) but by and large the Google Tag Manager instructions are worth what you pay for them.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Adobe
No answers on this topic
Adobe
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.
Read full review
Google
I haven't found another option for us to use especially one that is free. Down the road we may go a different route but for now GTM is a good option and does what we need it to do. It'd be nice to get more support or more integrations but with the free version there's only so much one can expect to get I suppose.
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Usability
Adobe
Overall usability is great, as are most of Adobe's software. Maybe a UI refresh could make it a bit easier to do advanced functions or reporting but, overall, it works very well. This is something you take for granted with Adobe solutions because when you try another vendor you realize how bad it can be.
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Adobe
Adobe Experience Manager overall is fairly easy to use and caters to a wide range of users when it comes to their technical abilities. It has the flexibility to enable UI/UX designers to pop in and easily design new content with drop in components. It also has sufficient capabilities for those who are more technically inclined and want to dig more into custom code or solutions
Read full review
Google
No difficult obstacle to overcome but Google Tag Manager can still be difficult for many users to deploy. Sure the basic HTML script can be deployed quite easily, but when you start to require triggers, variables, etc, it can be a little daunting.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Adobe
No answers on this topic
Adobe
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.
Read full review
Google
No answers on this topic
Performance
Adobe
No answers on this topic
Adobe
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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Google
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Adobe
AAM has good support, but the support is not as available, due to waiting time and queue. The instructions presented are available, but it navigation is not easy between pages. However, instructions are usually direct and straightforward, but any underlying thoughts or questions won’t be easily answered without support from their service.
Read full review
Adobe
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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Google
GTM does not provide support. This is one of GTM's biggest issues but it's due to the level of customization for each website. If your team thinks they would heavily rely on the need for a support staff it is probably better to invest in a paid service with a team that can support your needs.
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Online Training
Adobe
No answers on this topic
Adobe
No answers on this topic
Google
I thought there was a little bit too much emphasis on AdWords stuff, not enough on the generic application of GTM.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Adobe
No answers on this topic
Adobe
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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Google
Planning and communication will help greatly with an in-house implementation. If there are large teams, try to limit the number of people involved to 1-2 developers (back-end dev may be necessary depending on your platform), one analytics marketer and one project manager.
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Alternatives Considered
Adobe
I personally like the Adobe Audience Manager interface and it's easier to use for beginners. It also has some features that Google does not, nor do its other competitors. It is worth the money and time spent, overall. I feel like it gives a bigger and more in-depth picture to our company's audience than other programs.
Read full review
Adobe
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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Google
We moved to GTM from a standard Google Analytics implementation. GTM is much more flexible and easier to make changes, especially as the changes relate to multiple sites and environments. While there is a learning curve when figuring out how to use GTM, I believe the change has been worth it because it helps us understand at a more fundamental level how our tracking works and gives us a lot more control over what we track and how.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Adobe
No answers on this topic
Adobe
Instead of being directly involved in the tool purchase, I am involved in analysis or what we can use to maximize the tool. Small organizations may find it expensive. However, if the team or organization focuses more on your ROI or the features you will get, then it will definitely be worth it. Pricing is based on a number of factors, including team size or the use of the tool. The user can select the pricing option that best fits their needs based on the number of form submissions they make or the number of pages they wish to publish on their global/multisite sites.
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Google
No answers on this topic
Professional Services
Adobe
No answers on this topic
Adobe
The professional services team within adobe is one of the best in terms of technical and solutioning knowledge. However, considering the billing charges of adobe professional services team, it is always recommended to involve them during platform initial setup or when a complex solution is to be built with platform customizations.
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Google
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Adobe
  • Overall a Positive Return for Business who go All in on the Adobe Stack
  • Solid work for brokering and anonymously sharing data between first and second parties
  • The death of TRUE 3rd party data has lessened the effectiveness of all DMPs
Read full review
Adobe
  • too soon to tell on increased conversion rates based on external marketing factors in play but having increased visibility into customer engagement trends will most likely lead to improvement of our conversion rates.
  • There have been productivity gains from the perspective of actually migrating all of our externally managed sites to the same in-house Adobe Experience Manager platform and then being able to utilize those universal components.
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Google
  • GTM is very useful to determine if a particular element on the site is useful (i.e. is it being watched, is it being clicked, does it help customers navigate through more pages). As an SEO person, I can use this information to decide what to optimize for but also to track progress and see improvements in engagement.
  • With the use of Google Tag Manager, I was able to easily inject an A/B testing tool which lead to several improvements in lead generation.
Read full review
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.