Adobe Experience Manager vs. Drupal

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
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 ManagerDrupal
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe Experience ManagerDrupal
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Adobe Experience ManagerDrupal
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
Drupal
Chose Drupal
Drupal is harder to begin with but it gives the developer much more access to create bespoke features.
Chose Drupal
I think Wordpress beats Drupal in every possible way. The upgrades to newer versions are almost trivial, unlike Drupal which, in our experience, requires hundreds or thousands of hours of work and untold sums of money simply to go from one version to the next! In my opinion, …
Chose Drupal
Drupal's capabilities outpace WordPress by miles. Drupal is more customizable, scales better for larger companies and has advanced content types. If you own a small business or work at a startup company, I would recommend WordPress but if your firm is trying to scale and you …
Chose Drupal
Drupal is best for complex applications. It is more suitable for large-scale applications. It is more scalable and structured than the competitor. Provides a strong API structure and a Robust headless architecture, making it perfect for progressive web apps. Highly robust, …
Chose Drupal
Drupal excels at allowing seasoned programmers to really get creative with marketing initiatives in terms of working with a theme and the core code. That being said, it is definitely much more challenging for average developers and front-end builders to use, especially at …
Chose Drupal
Drupal has some advantages and disadvantages when stacked up against Wordpress,, including that Wordpress is easier to user for beginners and requires less training to get started. I noticed that while using Drupal, more help and assistance was needed from developers to make …
Chose Drupal
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, …
Chose Drupal
I inherited Drupal from a developer who made the website for our nonprofit many years ago. It was increasingly obvious that it wasn't a fit for our organization, which has multiple staff and volunteers who need to edit or update the website but don't have coding experience. Wix …
Chose Drupal
Drupal requires less to no coding abilities to spin up sites.
Even if someone is preparing to develop sites that require technical know how then Drupal provides role based systems to seperate developers from content writers.
Drupal 8 and 9 now have a vast array of plugins. Now …
Chose Drupal
WordPress for sure has a bigger community, a lot of paid extensions which sometimes is easier to purchase and get started, a lot of pre-designed templates to get you going, but nowadays with the scale of the projects we've been working with, and the need for custom-tailored …
Chose Drupal
Drupal's commerce module features custom e-commerce functionality, allowing for customization that fits our commercial enterprise model.
Chose Drupal
We use both, for different projects (Joomla and Drupal). Drupal proved to be more robust, more secure and more integrable with PHP applications.
Drupal requires a more senior technical team but allows for more complex activities. It's great if you have a medium to a large …
Chose Drupal
We first had a WordPress-based website, that evolved to a custom third-party developed content management system. In both cases, that involved additional costs for any change request, any security or any scalability need.
WordPress didn't meet enterprise requirements. That also …
Chose Drupal
Drupal is community-backed making it more accessible and growing at a faster rate than Sitefinity which is a proprietary product built on .NET. Drupal is PHP-based using some but not all Symphony codebase. Updates for Drupal are frequent and so are feature adds.
Chose Drupal
Drupal is far more usable and stable than Joomla!, and the developer community support is significantly stronger. While Drupal is often compared to WordPress, they are fundamentally different platforms, and in most projects, it's very clear when the requirements are beyond what …
Chose Drupal
We were looking for an open source CMS. WordPress wasn't powerful enough for our needs. Joomla was too difficult for our team to use.
Chose Drupal
We have used many content management systems — WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, ExpressionEngine, and more. Drupal is more powerful and flexible than most.
Chose Drupal
We did a comparison of Drupal against Joomla, WordPress, and Ingeniux. We found that its multiple themes available for web pages, user management, comment management, and form generation stands apart from its competitors.
Chose Drupal
I've used Wordpress sparingly when helping a client with an existing website. I find it much less powerful and robust, and frankly confusing. The way Wordpress websites are set up in the backend doesn't make sense to me after getting used to how Drupal is set up. They're …
Chose Drupal
Drupal is really the only well-supported open-source CMS that is designed for large, data-rich websites. There just really weren't any good alternatives. There are plenty of CMSs that excel at small to medium-sized websites. But for a large website with lots of structured data, …
Chose Drupal
Although Drupal is not the most used, it has great performance and is more used in professional projects. It allows us to expand without starting from scratch.
Chose Drupal
Security-wise and traffic-wise Drupal is built to handle a lot. While the other platforms mentioned ( mainly Wordpress ) are great and have a large community, I would only use Drupal for an Enterprise level platform to build a website on. I first learned about Drupal about 10 …
Chose Drupal
Drupal supports lots of devices like Mac, Windows, Linux etc. easily, and it is an open source product so there's no cost required. Lots of other products require purchasing, costing a high amount. The support system of Drupal is also good in comparison to other products. The …
Features
Adobe Experience ManagerDrupal
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
8.4
Ratings
3% above category average
Drupal
8.2
Ratings
0% below category average
Role-based user permissions8.40 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
8.0
Ratings
1% below category average
Drupal
7.7
Ratings
1% below category average
API7.80 Ratings7.30 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language8.10 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
7.5
Ratings
4% above category average
Drupal
6.5
Ratings
18% below category average
WYSIWYG editor7.40 Ratings6.30 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness6.70 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Admin section7.00 Ratings6.90 Ratings
Page templates7.60 Ratings5.60 Ratings
Library of website themes7.30 Ratings5.50 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design7.80 Ratings6.50 Ratings
Publishing workflow8.10 Ratings6.70 Ratings
Form generator7.60 Ratings6.50 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
7.3
Ratings
8% above category average
Drupal
6.5
Ratings
14% below category average
Content taxonomy7.70 Ratings6.90 Ratings
SEO support7.10 Ratings6.30 Ratings
Bulk management7.20 Ratings6.30 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions7.50 Ratings6.60 Ratings
Community / comment management7.10 Ratings6.70 Ratings
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Adobe Experience ManagerDrupal
Small Businesses
Bloomreach
Bloomreach
Score 9.1 out of 10
ManageWP
ManageWP
Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
RWS Tridion Sites
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User Ratings
Adobe Experience ManagerDrupal
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(0 ratings)
6.8
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(0 ratings)
1.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.1
(0 ratings)
6.9
(0 ratings)
Availability
8.6
(0 ratings)
9.7
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(0 ratings)
8.9
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.2
(0 ratings)
1.0
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.7
(0 ratings)
5.1
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe Experience ManagerDrupal
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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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.
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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.
Read full review
  • Content Types... these are amazing. Whereas a more simplistic CMS like Wordpress will basically allow you to make posts and build pages, Drupal 8 gives you the ability to define different types of content that behave differently, and are served up differently in different areas of the website.
  • Extensibility... it scales, ohhhh does it scale. They've really figured out server-side caching, and it makes all the difference. Once a page has been cached, it's available instantly to all users worldwide; and when coupled with AWS, global redundancy and localization mean that no matter where you're accessing the site, it always loads fast and crisp.
  • Workflows... you have the ability to define very specific roles and/or user-based editorial workflows, allowing for as many touchpoints and reviews between content creation and publication as you'll require.
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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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  • Security and new release notifications are a hassle as they happen too often
  • Allowing them to write PHP modules is a big advantage, but sometimes integrating them is a small challenge due to the version the developer is working on.
  • Steep learning curve, but worth it
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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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I really like Drupal, and besides the one major issue with not being able to update from version 6 to version 7 and I am happy to continuing using it. Hopefully as time goes on they will make it easier to upgrade or provide better tools for mid-level web designers like myself to build out new sites without the help of expensive 3rd party's.
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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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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.
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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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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).
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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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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.
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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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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
No answers on this topic
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
No answers on this topic
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
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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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
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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Drupal's capabilities outpace WordPress by miles. Drupal is more customizable, scales better for larger companies and has advanced content types. If you own a small business or work at a startup company, I would recommend WordPress but if your firm is trying to scale and you have more than 50 employees I would recommend Drupal.
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Scalability
No answers on this topic
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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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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  • Drupal helped us launch a creative, marketing- and product-focused website with custom coding integrations tailored to our goals.
  • Drupal allows us to rely on secure and consistently updated core code.
  • Drupal's code taxing on the server does start to get a bit heavy as you go along with customizations, so at some point, we decided to stop. We want to ensure our Google Page Score remains high, including paying close attention to page load speed.
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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.