Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
Adobe InDesign
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Adobe InDesign supports creating digital and print documents such as flyers, stationary, posters, and other types of media, with rich graphics, images, and more. Adobe InDesign is available standalone or as part of the Adobe Creative Suite collection of media management and creation products.
$31.49
per month
Drupal
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Drupal is a free, open-source content management system written in PHP that competes primarily with Joomla and Plone. The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features such as account and menu management, RSS feeds, page layout customization, and system administration.N/A
Pricing
Adobe Experience ManagerAdobe InDesignDrupal
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Monthly Plan
$31.49
per month
Annual Plan, Prepaid
$239.88 ($19.99)
per year (per month)
Annual Plan, Paid Monthly
$251.88 ($20.99)
per year (per month)
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe Experience ManagerAdobe InDesignDrupal
Free Trial
NoNoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Adobe Experience ManagerAdobe InDesignDrupal
Considered Multiple Products
Adobe Experience Manager
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Flawless management of digital assets and content supporting personalized content delivery. Seamless navigation and user experience on AEM platform WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor makes AEM stands out from the crowd which is not available in the Drupal Headless …
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
End to end capabilities as well as integrations with upstream and downstream systems to make work flows, easier and faster time to market
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
They all do the same thing pretty much, but we are on the Adobe architecture so it made sense to go with AEM
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
All very competent, but different tools for different purposes.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
I think AEM is more robust for an enterprise-sized company. It has more security around it, and then definitely you have to have enough knowledge to be able to use it and then interact. It enables a lot of the integration with other third-party tools. So we use Salesforce and …
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
AEM is the leader in this segment due to easy of use and flexibility of the platform with lots of OOTB features
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Experience Manager is an enterprise digital marketing platform that has an edge over other CMS platforms in multiple ways 1. Easy content authoring 2. Pre-defined authoring and publishing workflows 3. In-built multi-site authoring 4. Support for multi-lingual websites.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
First of all, I would say the technological advancement it has. AEM consists of a comprehensive web content management system, including more marketing-friendly site templates, easy-to-use developer tools, and AI-powered content generation tools for [a] better customer …
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
The main reason why we acquired Adobe Experience Manager with a lot of peace of mind is that it has very good recommendations from other people, we took the exhaustive task of investigating very well its operation, advantages and disadvantages and from all the descriptions we …
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Ease of setup and use makes Adobe Experience Manager one of the best content management systems that is available in the market. The fact that the underlying frameworks are largely open source, helps in facilitating third party integrations more seamlessly. The default options …
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Much simpler than SharePoint and by far much easier to develop as well. Getting a unique look and feel into a SharePoint is like pulling teeth compared to Adobe Experience Manager. I also felt that the authoring experience was simpler and easier in Adobe Experience Manager as …
Adobe InDesign

No answer on this topic

Drupal
Chose Drupal
Drupal is the king of enterprise opensource content management systems. It is the most robust and comes from the most forward thinking community. Drupal 8 is designed for the next evolution in web design and development. WordPress and Joomla! are stuck in the web 2.0 revolution …
Chose Drupal
It came down to budget which is why we normally target Drupal for small to mid-sized engagements.
Features
Adobe Experience ManagerAdobe InDesignDrupal
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
8.4
38 Ratings
3% above category average
Adobe InDesign
-
Ratings
Drupal
8.1
74 Ratings
1% below category average
Role-based user permissions8.438 Ratings00 Ratings8.174 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
8.0
33 Ratings
1% below category average
Adobe InDesign
-
Ratings
Drupal
7.6
69 Ratings
2% below category average
API7.829 Ratings00 Ratings7.264 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language8.129 Ratings00 Ratings8.160 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
7.5
38 Ratings
4% above category average
Adobe InDesign
-
Ratings
Drupal
6.5
78 Ratings
18% below category average
WYSIWYG editor7.433 Ratings00 Ratings6.171 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness6.734 Ratings00 Ratings8.175 Ratings
Admin section7.034 Ratings00 Ratings6.878 Ratings
Page templates7.637 Ratings00 Ratings5.577 Ratings
Library of website themes7.326 Ratings00 Ratings5.468 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design7.835 Ratings00 Ratings6.572 Ratings
Publishing workflow8.135 Ratings00 Ratings6.876 Ratings
Form generator7.629 Ratings00 Ratings6.372 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
7.3
37 Ratings
8% above category average
Adobe InDesign
-
Ratings
Drupal
6.5
77 Ratings
13% below category average
Content taxonomy7.731 Ratings00 Ratings6.971 Ratings
SEO support7.133 Ratings00 Ratings6.272 Ratings
Bulk management7.236 Ratings00 Ratings6.367 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions7.534 Ratings00 Ratings6.570 Ratings
Community / comment management7.130 Ratings00 Ratings6.569 Ratings
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User Ratings
Adobe Experience ManagerAdobe InDesignDrupal
Likelihood to Recommend
8.4
(142 ratings)
9.0
(101 ratings)
6.0
(84 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(6 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
1.0
(19 ratings)
Usability
7.8
(95 ratings)
7.5
(11 ratings)
6.6
(18 ratings)
Availability
8.6
(5 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
9.7
(3 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(5 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
8.9
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
7.2
(11 ratings)
5.0
(64 ratings)
1.0
(5 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
6.0
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.7
(2 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
5.1
(4 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
9.5
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
Professional Services
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe Experience ManagerAdobe InDesignDrupal
Likelihood to Recommend
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
Adobe
Adobe InDesign is very well-suited to creating professional-looking page designs. If you want a newspaper or magazine to have attractive pages that go beyond simple templates, InDesign is the best option out there, to my knowledge. It's less suited to scenarios where people without page design skills are responsible for creating pages, as it requires some training and skills to use effectively.
Read full review
Open Source
If you want to set up a basic Not For Profit (NFP) Membership system and content base, Word Press is easier than Drupal. However, if you have specific needs that require a fair bit of customisation then Drupal is the best CRM available. If the webmaster is confident with PHP and SQL, Drupal allows a lot of creativity.
Read full review
Pros
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
Adobe
  • Customization - With Adobe InDesign, as well as many other applications in the Adobe Creative Suite, I can fully customize my workspaces and save different workspaces. This makes it easy to navigate through my project and have the panels and tools I need easily accessible and configured based on my project needs.
  • Styles - Adobe InDesign has character styles, object styles, and tables styles. This speeds up my workflows and allows me to easily apply the same format across multiple elements. This is super helpful, especially when working with length documents.
  • File compatibility - I can easily export my files into so many different file types.
  • The Book feature - This feature is really helpful when creating books or very long documents with multiple sections.
Read full review
Open Source
  • Drag and drop functionality is easy to use
  • Easy to switch between straight text and HTML content
  • Ability to easily have multiple environments so that pages can be built in b/c-stage before they are approved and published
  • Solid user experience where it's clear how to navigate the platform
Read full review
Cons
Adobe
  • Can sometimes be difficult to troubleshoot bugs/issues as they arise
  • Sometimes difficult to set up restrictions on how components can be designed to make sure they fit in with existing content
  • While the integration with Adobe target works fairly well, the process can be a bit opaque and hard to understand, making it difficult to troubleshoot when issues arise
Read full review
Adobe
  • Not naturally a WYSIWYG display (this is an option, and doesn't always work as intended)
  • Moving images and photos around while holding an additional key
  • Layers or objects are not easily clickable behind other objects.
  • Adobe InDesign does require some fair system resources to work smoothly
Read full review
Open Source
  • This is not an easy CMS to work with if you don't have a good understanding of website development. It isn't "plug-and-play" like Wordpress or Shopify.
  • Over time, doing major updates to the system can be taxing, especially if you aren't well-versed enough in doing system updates in line with your "child" theme and code.
  • The CMS can become somewhat cumbersome with server resources if not carefully optimized while you build and customize it to your liking.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
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
Adobe
I've had great experiences with the product and plan to continue to use it. It has been my go-to product for designing and creating materials. I have had great luck with it and have been able to create all of the needed marketing materials that have been requested for our company.
Read full review
Open Source
The time and money invested into this platform were too great to discontinue it at this point. I'm sure it will be in use for a while. We have also spent time training many employees how to use it. All of these things add up to quite an investment in the product. Lastly, it basically fulfills what we need our intranet site to do.
Read full review
Usability
Adobe
It depends if it is from an administrator point of view or from a business content author point of view. I think from business author point of view the solution is good and with the GEN AI capabilities coming it is doing better and better, however from an administration point of view there are still a lot of improvements to ease the maintenance of user access management and as well as the integration configuration aspect.
Read full review
Adobe
If you know what you are doing it is an amazingly granular and powerful application. You can control pretty much any aspect of the design and layout of your documents and make changes globally and rapidly. But, if you don't know what you are doing...you will be staring at your screen in bewilderment for a long time. You can learn it, but be ready for a hefty time investment.
Read full review
Open Source
As a team, we found Drupal to be highly customizable and flexible, allowing our development team to go to great lengths to develop desired functionalities. It can be used as a solution for all types of web projects. It comes with a robust admin interface that provides greater flexibility once the user gets acquainted with the system.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
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
Adobe
I've needed Adobe InDesign team very little which is a bonus in and of itself.
Read full review
Open Source
Drupal itself does not tend to have bugs that cause sporadic outages. When deployed on a well-configured LAMP stack, deployment and maintenance problems are minimal, and in general no exotic tuning or configuration is required. For highest uptime, putting a caching proxy like Varnish in front of Drupal (or a CDN that supports dynamic applications).
Read full review
Performance
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.
Read full review
Adobe
One of the advantages of Adobe InDesign is it is faster and less glitchy than Microsoft Word.
Read full review
Open Source
Drupal page loads can be slow, as a great many database calls may be required to generate a page. It is highly recommended to use caching systems, both built-in and external to lessen such database loads and improve performance. I haven't had any problems with behind-the-scenes integrations with external systems.
Read full review
Support Rating
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.
Read full review
Adobe
Adobe support is ok but not great. Chat support often doesn't initially understand the question at-hand and it takes awhile to get to the right agent. Phone support has long wait times, and though I've had more luck there, it does take quite a time investment if you are looking for help. However, Adobe does have some online learning solutions available as well as a knowledgebase for frequently asked questions. If you're looking to learn how to use the platform, there are lots of resources which can typically be found in a few Google searches. If you have a technical issue with the system, that's going to be a bit more of a time investment as far as getting a tech's assistance to resolve the problem.
Read full review
Open Source
As noted earlier, the support of the community can be rather variable, with some modules attracting more attraction and action in their issue queues, but overall, the development community for Drupal is second to none. It probably the single greatest aspect of being involved in this open-source project.
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In-Person Training
Adobe
No answers on this topic
Adobe
Attending Adobe MAX each year is extremely valuable.
Read full review
Open Source
I was part of the team that conducted the training. Our training was fine, but we could have been better informed on Drupal before we started providing it. If we did not have answers to tough questions, we had more technical staff we could consult with. We did provide hands-on practice time for the learners, which I would always recommend. That is where the best learning occurred.
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Online Training
Adobe
No answers on this topic
Adobe
The online training works well and is not wholly necessary as it is user-friendly and you can learn by doing.
Read full review
Open Source
The on-line training was not as ideal as the face-to-face training. It was done remotely and only allowed for the trainers to present information to the learners and demonstrate the platform online. There was not a good way to allow for the learners to practice, ask questions and have them answered all in the same session.
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Implementation Rating
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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Adobe
Implementation was smooth and easy.
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Open Source
Plan ahead as much you can. You really need to know how to build what you want with the modules available to you, or that you might need to code yourself, in order to make the best use of Drupal. I recommend you analyze the most technically difficult workflows and other aspects of your implementation, and try building some test versions of those first. Get feedback from stakeholders early and often, because you can easily find yourself in a situation where your implementation does 90% of what you want, but, due to something you didn't plan for, foresee, or know about, there's no feasible way to get past the last 10%
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Alternatives Considered
Adobe
Overall, I prefer AEM as an enterprise site management tool. It allows levels of access control and delegation, while leaving the server management and updates to a specialized team. I do miss the flexibility of being able to search and replace that I have in a WordPress site, and I miss the ability to have one file for redirects like I had in percussion
Read full review
Adobe
Microsoft products do not match the aesthetic tools that [Adobe] InDesign offers, cannot support the customizable options available for export, and do not produce documents with as high a degree of accessibility. That said, they do have their place in collaboration in a team- I'd consider Office to be the first step and [Adobe] InDesign to be the final product.
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Open Source
Drupal can be more complex to learn, but it offers a much wider range of applications. Drupal’s front and backend can be customized from design to functionality to allow for a wide range of uses. If someone wants to create something more complex than a simple site or blog, Drupal can be an amazing asset to have at hand.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
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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Adobe
No answers on this topic
Open Source
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Adobe
No answers on this topic
Adobe
Working in a cloud environment makes it easy to scale and share resources.
Read full review
Open Source
Drupal is well known to be scalable, although it requires solid knowledge of MySQL best practices, caching mechanisms, and other server-level best practices. I have never personally dealt with an especially large site, so I can speak well to the issues associated with Drupal scaling.
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Professional Services
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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Adobe
No answers on this topic
Open Source
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
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.
Read full review
Adobe
  • A great ROI for time in my small architectural practice, [especially] when a design has been updated and a report needs to be submitted. We can be submitting many reports that all look similar, clean and beautiful. We just save as the file and replace the images with more updated images. This way the client finds it easy to navigate updated reports, as many as they can be.
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Open Source
  • Given the endless possibilities that Drupal can have, we tend to have great support going on when we get a website launched
  • It has become much much faster and easier for us to launch a new project due to reusability
  • Configuration management in Drupal helps greatly with CI/CD, saves us costs
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.