Adobe Experience Manager vs. Contentful

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
Contentful
Score 7.6 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.
$300
per month
Pricing
Adobe Experience ManagerContentful
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Lite
$300
per month
Community
Free
Enterprise
Custom
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe Experience ManagerContentful
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Adobe Experience ManagerContentful
Considered Both 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 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
Contentful
Chose Contentful
I used DatoCMS and in a nutshell, Contentful is more mature in terms of tooling and documentation.
Chose Contentful
Better, easier, mostly cheaper.
Chose Contentful
Webflow is stronger in terms of being a WYSIWYG platform. Contentful however is easier for us to integrate with our many other services that need to be orchestrated by a single application, which we accomplish by creating and referencing Contentful components and entries. …
Chose 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.
Chose Contentful
Contentful was affordable and much simpler than the Java based systems and preferred over a PHP solution
Chose Contentful
In the past we've used WordPress to manage documentation content. Wordpress was more flexible than Contentful but also prone to inconsistencies and we ended having a lot of hacks to accomplish various Wordpress tricks. With Contentful there's less ambiguity so content producers …
Chose Contentful
Contentful offers a great deal of features for a relatively low price. This is what ended up persuading us to purchase it. We also gathered that this was one of the more well-rated products out there, which was encouraging. It definitely stacks up well against its competitors.
Chose Contentful
Very similar to WordPress, but has more organizational properties than square space.
Chose Contentful
For custom solutions, Contentful blows every other CMS I've used out of the water. Unlike WordPress, there's no clutter to wade through, and you can simply build the infrastructure you need. It's more secure by far, and works seamlessly with modern frontend technologies, like …
Chose Contentful
Contentful was the most user-friendly platform that everyone in our company could understand. It doesn't have the integrations that Wordpress does, but it was easier for everyone in our organization to use. We've also seen good ranking and traffic from the pages created in …
Chose Contentful
Contentful is easy and fast and cheap. I went from zero experience to loading data out of my contentful space in about an hour or more. The cost is very reasonable and compared to options like CloudCMS are a fraction of the cost. The benefit is that with a lower cost entry …
Features
Adobe Experience ManagerContentful
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
8.4
Ratings
4% above category average
Contentful
8.5
Ratings
3% above category average
Role-based user permissions8.40 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
8.0
Ratings
0% above category average
Contentful
9.5
Ratings
20% above category average
API7.80 Ratings9.30 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language8.10 Ratings9.70 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
7.5
Ratings
6% above category average
Contentful
7.8
Ratings
0% below category average
WYSIWYG editor7.40 Ratings7.30 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness6.70 Ratings9.50 Ratings
Admin section7.00 Ratings9.30 Ratings
Page templates7.60 Ratings7.60 Ratings
Library of website themes7.30 Ratings7.50 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design7.80 Ratings4.50 Ratings
Publishing workflow8.10 Ratings9.30 Ratings
Form generator7.60 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
7.3
Ratings
10% above category average
Contentful
9.4
Ratings
23% above category average
Content taxonomy7.70 Ratings10.00 Ratings
SEO support7.10 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Bulk management7.20 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions7.50 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Community / comment management7.10 Ratings9.00 Ratings
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Adobe Experience ManagerContentful
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Score 9.0 out of 10
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Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
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User Ratings
Adobe Experience ManagerContentful
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(0 ratings)
8.3
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.1
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
8.6
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.7
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe Experience ManagerContentful
Likelihood to Recommend
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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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
  • 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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  • 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.
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Cons
  • 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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  • 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
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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No answers on this topic
Usability
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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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
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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No answers on this topic
Performance
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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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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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No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
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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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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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For custom solutions, Contentful blows every other CMS I've used out of the water. Unlike WordPress, there's no clutter to wade through, and you can simply build the infrastructure you need. It's more secure by far, and works seamlessly with modern frontend technologies, like GatsbyJS. In contrast to website builders like Squarespace and Wix, Contentful gives developers (like myself) free range to create high-quality, unique, scalable frontends that aren't limited by preexisting design and layout structures.
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Return on Investment
  • 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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  • 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.

Contentful Screenshots

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