Adobe Experience Manager vs. Drupal

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
Drupal
Score 8.2 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
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
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
WordPress has been there in the market for a while but the impact Adobe Experience Manager is creating is so much better. The way to understand the shift in trend can be seen in big companies migrating to Adobe Experience Manager. In comparison to WordPress, the Adobe …
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.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Adobe Experience ManagerDrupal
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
8.4
38 Ratings
5% above category average
Drupal
10.0
65 Ratings
22% above category average
Role-based user permissions8.438 Ratings10.065 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
9.5
62 Ratings
21% above category average
API7.829 Ratings9.158 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language8.129 Ratings10.053 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
Drupal
9.3
68 Ratings
20% above category average
WYSIWYG editor7.433 Ratings9.161 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness6.734 Ratings9.166 Ratings
Admin section7.034 Ratings9.568 Ratings
Page templates7.637 Ratings9.567 Ratings
Library of website themes7.326 Ratings8.658 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design7.835 Ratings10.063 Ratings
Publishing workflow8.135 Ratings9.167 Ratings
Form generator7.629 Ratings10.063 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
Drupal
9.5
67 Ratings
26% above category average
Content taxonomy7.731 Ratings10.063 Ratings
SEO support7.133 Ratings10.062 Ratings
Bulk management7.136 Ratings10.059 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions7.534 Ratings8.661 Ratings
Community / comment management7.130 Ratings9.161 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Adobe Experience ManagerDrupal
Small Businesses
Kentico Xperience
Kentico Xperience
Score 7.2 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 ManagerDrupal
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(83 ratings)
10.0
(77 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.8
(6 ratings)
8.2
(18 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(48 ratings)
10.0
(9 ratings)
Availability
8.6
(5 ratings)
9.7
(3 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(5 ratings)
8.9
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
7.4
(11 ratings)
5.0
(4 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.7
(2 ratings)
5.1
(4 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
9.5
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
Professional Services
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe Experience ManagerDrupal
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.
Read full review
Drupal.org
Well, I'm definitely biased, I've been working with Drupal for 12+ years, and I can say it's appropriate for any size/scale of a project, whether it's a small catalog website or a huge corporation. If I want to dial it down to a specific use case, Drupal is best what most customers/clients that have high-security standards, and need to have extensive editorial experience and control over their website's architecture. Due to its core design, Drupal can connect with each part of its own and any external third-party resources quite easily. For a less-suited scenario, I might say that if you don't have enough budget to get proper work done, sometimes just using WordPress with a pre-designed theme might sound better to you, but if you have the budget and the time, always go with Drupal
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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.
Read full review
Drupal.org
  • 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
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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Drupal.org
  • 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
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
Drupal.org
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
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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Drupal.org
It's a great CMS platform and there are a ton of plugins to add some serious functionality, but the security updates are too complex to implement and considering the complexity of the platform, security updates are a must. I don't want my site breached because they make it too difficult to keep it up to date.
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.
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Drupal.org
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
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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Drupal.org
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
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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Drupal.org
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
Adobe
No answers on this topic
Drupal.org
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
Adobe
No answers on this topic
Drupal.org
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
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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Drupal.org
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
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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Drupal.org
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.
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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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Drupal.org
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Adobe
No answers on this topic
Drupal.org
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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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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Drupal.org
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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Drupal.org
  • Drupal has allowed us to build up a library of code and base sites we can reuse to save time which has increased our efficiency and thus had a positive financial impact.
  • Drupal has allowed us to take on projects we otherwise would not have been able to, having a further impact.
  • Drupal has allowed us to build great solutions for our clients which give them an excellent ROI.
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ScreenShots