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 6.7 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
Plone
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Plone is a free and open source content management system built on top of the Zope application server. Plone can be used for any kind of website, including blogs, internet sites, webshops, and internal websites.N/A
Pricing
Adobe Experience ManagerDrupalPlone
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe Experience ManagerDrupalPlone
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 ManagerDrupalPlone
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
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
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 …
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.
Plone
Chose Plone
Since 2004, when we first started using Plone, here hasn't been any feature or request or system that we couldn't have been done with Plone.

Sometimes there have been cases, where we pilot or test other workflow-based systems, but usually the problems come with licences …
Features
Adobe Experience ManagerDrupalPlone
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
8.4
38 Ratings
3% above category average
Drupal
8.1
73 Ratings
1% below category average
Plone
10.0
5 Ratings
20% above category average
Role-based user permissions8.438 Ratings8.173 Ratings10.05 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
Drupal
7.6
68 Ratings
2% below category average
Plone
10.0
5 Ratings
25% above category average
API7.829 Ratings7.063 Ratings10.05 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language8.129 Ratings8.159 Ratings10.05 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
Drupal
6.4
77 Ratings
20% below category average
Plone
9.4
6 Ratings
19% above category average
WYSIWYG editor7.433 Ratings5.970 Ratings10.06 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness6.734 Ratings8.074 Ratings10.05 Ratings
Admin section7.034 Ratings6.577 Ratings10.05 Ratings
Page templates7.637 Ratings5.776 Ratings10.05 Ratings
Library of website themes7.326 Ratings5.667 Ratings5.05 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design7.835 Ratings6.571 Ratings10.05 Ratings
Publishing workflow8.135 Ratings6.775 Ratings10.05 Ratings
Form generator7.629 Ratings6.271 Ratings10.05 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
Drupal
6.2
76 Ratings
18% below category average
Plone
9.4
5 Ratings
23% above category average
Content taxonomy7.731 Ratings6.770 Ratings10.05 Ratings
SEO support7.133 Ratings6.071 Ratings10.04 Ratings
Bulk management7.236 Ratings6.266 Ratings10.05 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions7.534 Ratings6.169 Ratings8.05 Ratings
Community / comment management7.130 Ratings6.168 Ratings9.05 Ratings
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Adobe Experience ManagerDrupalPlone
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Score 8.9 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
RWS Tridion Sites
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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
RWS Tridion Sites
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Score 9.0 out of 10
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User Ratings
Adobe Experience ManagerDrupalPlone
Likelihood to Recommend
8.4
(142 ratings)
6.0
(84 ratings)
10.0
(13 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(6 ratings)
1.0
(19 ratings)
10.0
(11 ratings)
Usability
7.8
(95 ratings)
6.6
(18 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Availability
8.6
(5 ratings)
9.7
(3 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(5 ratings)
8.9
(2 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
7.2
(11 ratings)
1.0
(5 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(2 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.7
(2 ratings)
5.1
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
9.5
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Professional Services
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe Experience ManagerDrupalPlone
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
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
Plone
The larger your organization, the more appropriate Plone will be. This is not to say that Plone is a worse choice for small websites, only that the minimum investment for a Plone site is certainly higher than for other platforms. If you already use Plone for your site and are looking for a redesign or an overhaul, I would only advise switching to a different platform such as WordPress or Drupal if your organization is downsizing. For any other situation, Plone is the natural choice for your growth.
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
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
Plone
  • Plone is a folder-based system, organising content in a similar way desktop-users are doing for the last two decades. No need to teach non-tech customers some relational-database like paradigm for content management.
  • Plone is secure. It is the most secure CMS you can get your hands on.
  • Plone is flexible, and makes fast development easy.
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
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
Plone
  • Not everything is configurable or editable by Plone, and when you need to adjust or add custom pieces in, you need to deal with Zope. Zope has an ugly, confusing and difficult UI and structure as a backend.
  • Using 3rd party products is difficult to do - there are a few different ways to get them installed, all of which take a bit of luck to get right.
  • Building custom products for Plone is not fun. You've got to deal with an archaic framework to tie in that is not well documented (there is documentation about many things, but not great documentation and there are a lot of holes in the documentation).
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
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
Plone
We have critical systems running on Plone so will need it in the future.
Free to use since its Open source, so we don't have to worry about licence costs.
We know how to use and develop Plone and it has no limits.
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.
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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
Plone
Compared to the amount of Plone sites, users and customizations we have in our organization, the amount of support requests and training needed is really small.
The new user interface in Plone 6 is even better, it is super fast, has lots of different blocks for enhancing the page, has flexible layout system and is easy to extend with more features.
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
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).
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Plone
Our Plone sites are very robust. We have critical systems on Plone and we have been running sites on Plone for over 20 years with very little unexpected downtime.
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.
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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
Plone
Plone is very intensive in its operations, and if not configured well it can be slow. However it is designed and built with speed in mind and with proper use of coding, templates and caching can perform extremely well under high loads. It is capable of scaling to very high load availability environments with no specific coding requirements.
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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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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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Plone
There are not too many Plone companies in the world. But the ones who are, are high level professionals
Read full review
In-Person Training
Adobe
No answers on this topic
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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Plone
I have been participating Plone training and the trainers have always been professional. Materials were good and the instructions clear
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Online Training
Adobe
No answers on this topic
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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Plone
Well organized, professional training with good materials and instructions
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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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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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Plone
No answers on this topic
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
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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.
Read full review
Plone
Drupal: Plone is cheaper, so with Drupal is more complex to reach the required ROI. However, Drupal has a lower learning curve WordPress: For our necessities it has a more expensive learning curve than plone. Joomla, is easier to use. However, it have some issues on security and web content where Plone is much better
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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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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Plone
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Adobe
No answers on this topic
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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Plone
Plone has no limits. We have massive sites and can run them just fine
Read full review
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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Open Source
No answers on this topic
Plone
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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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
Plone
  • The impact Plone has had at the University of Oshkosh is as follows: this software allows student workers to learn about IT departments and CMS's in a user-friendly way. It gives many students great jobs that look great on their resumes.
  • Since there are great training manuals for Plone, there is increased employee efficient in the workplace. Training doesn't take long, and if there's ever a question, the Plone manual is a great tool to refer to.
  • If an employee using Plone quits, its easy to find someone to replace them with quick training and great resources.
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.