Adobe Experience Manager vs. Concrete CMS

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Adobe Experience Manager
Score 7.9 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
Pricing
Adobe Experience ManagerConcrete CMS
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe Experience ManagerConcrete CMS
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Adobe Experience ManagerConcrete CMS
Considered Both Products
Adobe Experience Manager
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.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Adobe Experience ManagerConcrete CMS
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
8.4
38 Ratings
5% above category average
Concrete CMS
9.4
38 Ratings
16% above category average
Role-based user permissions8.438 Ratings9.438 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
23% above category average
API7.829 Ratings9.731 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language8.129 Ratings9.730 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
7.5
38 Ratings
1% below category average
Concrete CMS
8.4
42 Ratings
10% above category average
WYSIWYG editor7.433 Ratings9.242 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness6.734 Ratings10.037 Ratings
Admin section7.034 Ratings10.040 Ratings
Page templates7.637 Ratings10.040 Ratings
Library of website themes7.326 Ratings4.438 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design7.835 Ratings9.739 Ratings
Publishing workflow8.135 Ratings7.837 Ratings
Form generator7.629 Ratings6.539 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
7.3
37 Ratings
3% above category average
Concrete CMS
7.1
40 Ratings
3% below category average
Content taxonomy7.731 Ratings8.839 Ratings
SEO support7.133 Ratings9.039 Ratings
Bulk management7.136 Ratings6.139 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions7.534 Ratings5.739 Ratings
Community / comment management7.130 Ratings5.739 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Adobe Experience ManagerConcrete CMS
Small Businesses
Progress Sitefinity
Progress Sitefinity
Score 7.7 out of 10
Divi
Divi
Score 9.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Tridion
Tridion
Score 9.0 out of 10
Image Relay
Image Relay
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
Tridion
Tridion
Score 9.0 out of 10
Tridion
Tridion
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Adobe Experience ManagerConcrete CMS
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(83 ratings)
9.2
(59 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.8
(6 ratings)
8.0
(22 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(48 ratings)
9.0
(12 ratings)
Availability
8.6
(5 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(5 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
7.4
(11 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.7
(2 ratings)
9.8
(6 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
9.5
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Professional Services
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe Experience ManagerConcrete CMS
Likelihood to Recommend
Adobe
So one of the primary focuses in the company has been SEO, and it does not seem well suited to SEO. For instance, how we set up the alt image tags. It's pretty tricky and there are multiple steps to do that. So I would like to see an Adobe Experience Manager that is more focused on out-of-the-box solutions for SEO, schema coding, alt image tags, and other sorts of SEO functionality to have that more built into the vanilla version of the product. Well suited? It's very good at scalability. And because we're managing such a large number of hotel properties, it works well for an enterprise.
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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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Pros
Adobe
  • It is able to support our incoming volume. We're one of the largest in what we do in the country, and we've not had any issues in terms of how it performs, or how it scales our customers coming in. It's a fairly stable platform. It is also a very intuitive platform in us being able to give our business users the ability to come make changes and request additions without going through a huge lift in getting those requests implemented. It has also been a very developer-friendly platform for my team to be able to develop, adapt, and build. We're also expanding on being able to use AEM both as a pure content management solution and also as a headless content solution. So that way we are trying to build a unified content platform that would allow us to create, publish, and manage content across channels from one place. So it's fairly intuitive that way. It's fairly scalable. Obviously, the modern tooling helps, but overall I think it's been a good experience.
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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).
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Cons
Adobe
  • I think some of the key things that can be done better is today we have more point solutions for different things like personalization. We have Adobe Target and for email marketing, we have Adobe Campaign Marketer and all that kind of stuff. But truly I have worked both as an implementation partner for Adobe as well as now I'm a client of Adobe. Being in both those shoes, I can say that we can do a lot better in terms of beefing up the capabilities of AEM, bringing personalization and search and content search experience closer together. It would definitely put Adobe Experience Manager in a different league if we can bring all those personalization capabilities together. I think initially the content management systems, the market was mostly meant to serve static sites. It never matured into that full-scale content personalization being married together. I think that's one area where if those integrations rather than being point solutions, if those capabilities can be made more native to AEM, I think it would definitely be a big sell for a lot of customers.
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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.
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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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Usability
Adobe
From our learning curve until we got better. I'd say as we're moving forward and we're making more customizations and we're getting used to it, I'd say it's about a seven or an eight. But as more innovations and more information comes out from Adobe as they make more changes and they make improvements, I'd say they're getting probably about an eight right now.
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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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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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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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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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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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Alternatives Considered
Adobe
At Canadian Tire Financial, in the time I've been there, we've always used AEM, but in past places I've used WordPress, I've used Squarespace. Things that are more general user-friendly where you're like building your own blog or you're creating a small business website where it's basically just text, you're not intaking information or something like that. I think the customization options in AEM are huge. My experiences with WordPress were pretty straightforward. Again, it was like, I don't know, like college newspaper website or something like that where you're just like putting content up for people to look at. You're not necessarily taking in any other information. Maybe you might allow people to log in or something and save articles or something pretty straightforward, but then even then I remember that stuff taking me forever to do, to figure out and scroll through tons and tons and tons of documentation. It's just not fun. No one enjoys doing that and then even then you might not have the answer available to you. And that's so frustrating. Hey, it's super user-friendly, figuring out the content editor is pretty straightforward. You're not clicking around and being, "what the heck am I looking at?" Or you're not looking at a bazillion menus to be like, "maybe the thing I want is in here." I can't stand that. I want to be able to look at a page, see what I'm going to be getting in production, and then publish it. I don't want to look around in menus to figure out how to add something to a page.
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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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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
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
Return on Investment
Adobe
  • This actually has been great for our websites. In the time that I've been with the company, we've seen at least the profitability of our websites because we are measuring that through analytics. We've seen it double since using it. We were using it when I first started with the company, but we've gotten better at how we're using it and really optimizing the use as well as the design. I think that that's made a huge difference. We've seen a huge jump in the performance of our websites with maintaining users and the e-commerce side of it.
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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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ScreenShots

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.