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
Concrete CMS
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Concrete CMS (formerly Concrete5) is a free and open source, PHP built content management system for content on the web and also for intranets. It is optimized to support the creation of online magazines and newspapers.N/A
Contentful
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
Contentful is a cloud based CMS solution that provides the ability to manage content across multiple platforms.The editing interface allows for managing content interactively and provides developers the ability to deliver the content with the programming language and template framework of their choice.
$0
Pricing
Adobe Experience ManagerConcrete CMSContentful
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Lite
$300
per month
Community
Free
Enterprise
Custom
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe Experience ManagerConcrete CMSContentful
Free Trial
NoNoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Adobe Experience ManagerConcrete CMSContentful
Considered Multiple Products
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 feels more enterprise ready
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
I think AEM is specific to the client's needs and is not necessarily comparable to all other platforms. However, when compared feature to feature I think AEM many times is a leader in the industry. While WordPress has progressed in the WYSIWYG interface it is not there still …
Concrete CMS
Chose Concrete CMS
WordPress - Getting better as WCMS but still primarily for blogging sites.
Joomla - Very robust system with large community however can be complex for authoring and site management.
Adobe CQ (AEM) - Enterprise class system with large price tag.
Contentful
Chose Contentful
Contentful was affordable and much simpler than the Java based systems and preferred over a PHP solution
Features
Adobe Experience ManagerConcrete CMSContentful
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
8.4
38 Ratings
3% above category average
Concrete CMS
9.5
38 Ratings
15% above category average
Contentful
8.5
10 Ratings
4% above category average
Role-based user permissions8.438 Ratings9.538 Ratings8.510 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
Concrete CMS
9.7
33 Ratings
22% above category average
Contentful
9.5
12 Ratings
20% above category average
API7.829 Ratings9.731 Ratings9.311 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language8.129 Ratings9.730 Ratings9.79 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
Concrete CMS
8.4
42 Ratings
8% above category average
Contentful
7.8
13 Ratings
0% above category average
WYSIWYG editor7.433 Ratings9.342 Ratings7.34 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness6.734 Ratings10.037 Ratings9.58 Ratings
Admin section7.034 Ratings10.040 Ratings9.311 Ratings
Page templates7.637 Ratings10.040 Ratings7.64 Ratings
Library of website themes7.326 Ratings4.238 Ratings7.52 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design7.835 Ratings9.739 Ratings4.57 Ratings
Publishing workflow8.135 Ratings7.737 Ratings9.312 Ratings
Form generator7.629 Ratings6.639 Ratings7.01 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
Concrete CMS
6.9
40 Ratings
8% below category average
Contentful
9.4
12 Ratings
23% above category average
Content taxonomy7.731 Ratings8.939 Ratings10.011 Ratings
SEO support7.133 Ratings9.039 Ratings10.09 Ratings
Bulk management7.236 Ratings6.039 Ratings9.08 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions7.534 Ratings5.439 Ratings9.08 Ratings
Community / comment management7.130 Ratings5.439 Ratings9.01 Ratings
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Adobe Experience ManagerConcrete CMSContentful
Small Businesses
Bloomreach
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Score 9.0 out of 10
ManageWP
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Score 10.0 out of 10
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Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
RWS Tridion Sites
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Score 9.0 out of 10
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Score 9.0 out of 10
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
RWS Tridion Sites
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Score 9.0 out of 10
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User Ratings
Adobe Experience ManagerConcrete CMSContentful
Likelihood to Recommend
8.4
(140 ratings)
9.2
(59 ratings)
8.3
(13 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(6 ratings)
8.0
(22 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.8
(94 ratings)
9.1
(13 ratings)
9.0
(3 ratings)
Availability
8.6
(5 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(5 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.2
(11 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.7
(2 ratings)
9.8
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
9.5
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Professional Services
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe Experience ManagerConcrete CMSContentful
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.
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Portland Labs
Suitable if you are part of small to large scale companies or web-houses which have PHP developers and frontend engineers with some budgets. [Also suitable if] you or your client want to build a website that requires some features or uniqueness [and needs] some customization and freedom. Additionally suitable if you want this project to be DevOps based project or if the project requires very tight security and is inside of a closed network.
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Contentful
It's a great all rounder for content projects. It's easy in the basics and powerful in the complex, data heavy scenarios. Extending the platform is straightforward and the SDK gives you everything you need. If you have many many varying content types , it gets expensive and perhaps not the best choice .
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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
Portland Labs
  • As a dev, the Page object (coupled with page attributes, nav menus and page lists) makes structuring a website or web app a dream. The separation of page templates from page types also helps, the former being about layout while the latter is more conceptual.
  • As an admin, you pretty much have as much control as the developers of the site decide to give you.
  • The versioning system allows admins to roll changes back and work on changes before publishing them.
  • The permissions system is exceptionally powerful, allowing roles and/or individual users to be included or excluded from each permission.
  • The attributes system allows pages, files and users to be given custom properties of various types (e.g. text, image, colour).
Read full review
Contentful
  • Flexible. This CMS can be easily extended and provide access to dynamic content
  • Simple. The WYSWG is very easy to work with and identifying pages and content in the system is fairly easy
  • Clean Interface. The interface is clean and uncluttered keeping focus on the content and not other factors.
Read full review
Cons
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.
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Portland Labs
  • Allow end users to clear cache when updating pages.
  • Needs a few more built in forms.
  • The CMS is not multilingual by default. Even though I managed to 'hack' it so, it would be nice to have it included.
  • It'd be nice to make use of custom PHP modules through shortcodes more straight forward. It seems the hooks are a bit contrived.
Read full review
Contentful
  • Contentful uses "references" to allow you to build very modular content. If I have a "slider" content type, I can create a "slide" content type which references a "button" content type, and so forth. This works well, but I occasionally wish there was a better solution for one-off content, like a settings page. Currently, this is done for creating an entire content type called "settings" with a single entry. Not a big deal, but not ideal, either.
  • There are a few quirks with GatsbyJS integration, etc, but these issues are being fixed and improved upon very quickly.
  • A minor gripe, but Contentful does not have a way to organize fields within an entry. Entries with many fields are somewhat tiresome to scroll through.
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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.
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Portland Labs
Its a very solid, very consistent package that never lets you down or leaves you frustrated. It gets a 10/10 because its so much better than anything else currently available. It also gets a 10/10 because, even if not compared to others, it does not leave you wanting for features or functionality. It is an excellent piece of software that will answer almost every CMS need.
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Contentful
No answers on this topic
Usability
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
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Portland Labs
I have used it on over 30 projects in the past 3 years and it's still a pleasure to work in. Doesn't always have all the answers, no CMS does, but I still find it very easy to use from prototyping to working to final project. Also there is no problem working on a localhost then moving to a live site, like there is with WordPress. It's my go to app in my CMS quiver.
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Contentful
It is a very easy to use and configure application. I find that it is on the user to manage the content after the models have been created, yet I still do not encounter issues finding or creating new components for our site. It is easy to set up and easy to navigate.
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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.
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Portland Labs
Since it's not tied to a central server (other than for authorizing updates and assigning licenses to specific sites), it's available pretty much 100% of the time.
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Contentful
No answers on this topic
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.
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Portland Labs
The site works extremely well, the front end flies, searches and form submissions are very fast indeed. The reason its a 9 not a ten? the back end can be a little slow at times, and this is unfair, because for the backend to be so amazing, it has to do a huge amount of work!
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Contentful
No answers on this topic
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.
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Portland Labs
Concrete5 is open-source and has an incredibly strong, polite, and supportive community. You can get an answer to nearly anything you want to do with Concrete5 by googling for it, searching the Concrete5 discussion forums or stack overflow, or posting your question to the forum. Members are very courteous and do not look down on those with less knowledge. And answers are always quick, informative, and supportive.
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Contentful
No answers on this topic
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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Portland Labs
Build off of an existing theme to speed up the creation of custom designed themed. Bootstrap is a good one but there are many others that are probably much simpler to build from than the Bootstrap one was. Make sure you host on a Unix/Linux server so you don't have to install PHP or MySQL separately. It's just smoother on those platforms.
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Contentful
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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
Read full review
Portland Labs
WordPress at the time was riddled with security breaches in the news and while Concrete5 was smaller (and therefore a smaller attack vector), after eleven years of use, Concrete5 has only had one published incident with an add-on that resolved within hours and with excellent communication. You can talk to the CEO and the CTO (or the rest of the team). They are very engaged and you're working with a small company of people who care, not a call-center with people just waiting to go home.
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Contentful
Easy to use and much more organized as a single platform versus multi. The layout is clean and easy to read and we don’t have to worry about certain users safe guarding data or content then losing it when they leave the company. It’s a one stop shop for imagery
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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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Portland Labs
No answers on this topic
Contentful
No answers on this topic
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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Portland Labs
No answers on this topic
Contentful
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.
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Portland Labs
  • Concrete5 is the customer-facing side of our business. It's where we host the site that potential customers see before they choose to purchase and create an account with us. We are able to keep that site clean, user-friendly, and with a lot of available options for customers to interact with thanks to Concrete5
  • The ability to have multiple users and admins for the site means that we all members of our team can go in and create new content, fix or troubleshoot issues, and edit the site easily.
  • Our CRM isn't directly integrated with Concrete5, so when customers go to make a purchase with us, they have to leave our Concrete5 site.
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Contentful
  • Contentful has saved us valuable development time that was previously spent doing deploys for minor content updates.
  • Contentful has helped us maintain consistent documentation, reducing time needed to review for consistency.
  • Can't say we've really experienced any negative ROI impacts from using Contentful, but we've run into some limitations in adding too many content models and the next pricing tier is substantially more expensive.
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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.

Concrete CMS Screenshots

Screenshot of In-context editing is simple to understandScreenshot of Change text just like a word processorScreenshot of Versioning and workflow built on top of powerful permissionsScreenshot of Flexible backend to power complex communities and intranets.

Contentful Screenshots

Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of