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.
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Magnolia
Score 9.3 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Founded in Switzerland in 1997, Magnolia is a CMS used to build composable digital experiences. Magnolia helps create fully integrated customer experiences and speeds up digital delivery of content. Magnolia boasts 480 enterprise customers, thousands of Community Edition deployments, and more than 200 certified Magnolia Partners around the world. They further state that their enterprise customers include Sanofi, Generali, the Atlassian, The New York Times, Harley Davidson, and Union…
Magnolia is not as costly as other enterprise grade platforms and is easier to deploy, more reliable and less resource hungry. It's often also easier to use and certainly easier to use than it's Open Source counterparts. It also manages content in a much more structured manner …
Similar to how one might choose a specific programming language to solve a specific problem, Magnolia has its place among the rest, depending on the use case. While it does not have the most pleasant user experience compared to others, its customization options are streets …
Magnolia has an automatic, and speedy social media publication extension, which spread content to all social sites. Also, the insertion of extensions and plugins is more effective when on Magnolia against the opponents. Magnolia admits and adopts diversity, hence, it is a …
Magnolia was the product of choice from the wider business group when it was implemented a number of years ago. In general, it stacks up fairly well against the other products, although there could be a slightly easier interface when creating pages. Workflows are one area which …
Magnolia is the most flexible, with the best ease of use in all cases. It just has the best of both worlds. It is significantly more than just a CMS. And you have a good foundation for building up your platform without losing possibilities to change parts in the future.
Features
Contentful
Magnolia
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Contentful
8.5
10 Ratings
3% above category average
Magnolia
8.0
69 Ratings
3% below category average
Role-based user permissions
8.510 Ratings
8.069 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Contentful
9.5
12 Ratings
21% above category average
Magnolia
8.0
68 Ratings
3% above category average
API
9.311 Ratings
8.561 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language
9.79 Ratings
7.661 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Contentful
7.8
13 Ratings
0% above category average
Magnolia
8.0
74 Ratings
3% above category average
WYSIWYG editor
7.34 Ratings
8.565 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness
9.58 Ratings
8.465 Ratings
Admin section
9.311 Ratings
8.070 Ratings
Page templates
7.64 Ratings
8.972 Ratings
Library of website themes
7.52 Ratings
7.01 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design
4.57 Ratings
8.563 Ratings
Publishing workflow
9.312 Ratings
7.573 Ratings
Form generator
7.01 Ratings
7.058 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
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 .
Magnolia is a very capable DXP, that provides client with lots of flexibility in composing its own stack. While the core of the platform is a content management system, the open architecture of Magnolia DXP allows it to connect to any platform, allowing client to extend the capabilities. One scenario would be a centralized content hub - where through a single platform, content authors can choose which channel to distribute what content. For example, long form content for consumers viewing on a laptop, short form content for those using a mobile browser. This allow the client to personalized the experience based on channels. Another scenarios would be leveraging on GenAI - using Magnolia's built-in connector to ChatGPT. If that is not the service that one desire, you can always connect to another AI service such as Google Gemini. With GenAI, connected, content author can use AI as co-pilot to help them scale up their content production.
Speed of development - time to delivery from zero to MVP was excellent
Ease of use - the authoring experience is very easy to build and train
PAAS/SAAS - the managed service platform removed the traditional overhead of running in-house technologies, meaning we could focus on value add, with less time spent keeping the lights on.
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.
The documentation provides samples that are often out of context, and difficult to know where the provided example code should be implemented. More tutorials providing the full project or step-by-step instructions on how to implement subject material would help greatly. Baeldung is a resource I would consider the gold standard in how this is done in other spaces.
The use of JCR and Nodes makes object serialization/deserialization painful. Jackson compatibility or similar would be a welcome enhancement to the developer experience. Maybe leveraging code-gen from light modules to build model classes when possible could help accomplish this.
Modifying the home layout from light modules is frustrating. It seems that any configuration overrides made merge with the default rather than overwriting, which makes for a difficult combination of guess-and-check while referencing the documentation to see what should be in each row/column when making changes.
Including "mark all as read" or "delete all" in the notifications app would be a great quality of life improvement. It seems that by default, users have to individually select messages and operate them.
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.
We've shown it to a number of users both clients and our own team and despite initial apprehensions, they "get it" very quickly. It's intuitive and friendly and quick to perform daily tasks. We once had a client tell us "Using Magnolia makes me smile" which says it all for us.
I gave [it] 7/10 only because of the loading time of pages. Otherwise, I think it deserves an 8. Normally this is not an issue per [se] but considering the rating matrix and as I have been asked to honestly write about it. Yes, the page loading times could be improved.
You always get an answer based on your SLA. But you always get a solution. That's the successfactor in this case. To often i was frustrated about people in a company without even a clue what there product is about or how to solve a problem. Magnolia's Support Team does a very good job and try to help you in most of the cases
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
I've used several CMSs like AEM and EpiServer, and comparatively, they all excel at different things. Magnolia is the best to develop for/against. Episerver has the best/most fluid UI in terms of content editing, and the overall admin experience AEM is just all around sucks.
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.
Magnolia has brought about positive impacts. For instance, we need not outsource web design and marketing services because thanks to this software, we can handle most work inhouse
The software is affordable with no compromises on capabilities and therefore it is gives us value for money.
