Craft CMS vs. Magnolia

Suitable for mid-size to large websites (20 pages+). If you have a massive project with dozens or hundreds of content contributors, complex editorial process/workflow, are tied to a non-Linux platform (Microsoft Server), you may want an enterprise CMS like Episerver. If you need a small, cheap, theme-based, basic website with 5-15 pages, you'll probably go to WordPress.

Incentivized

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.

• Design-agnostic templating system. No themes. This means you can use whatever HTML, CSS, JS you want, and integrate it with Craft.
• Versatile field types, with 3rd party plugins providing a bunch more. Everything from plain text to address, color picker, date/time, file assets, one-to-many relationships, and more.
• Control panel with clean, responsive UI makes content updates easy for clients.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Could use a more robust implementation of rich text editor.
• Some functionality that requires plugins, for example, advanced field management, should be part of the core install.
• It should be a bit easier to brand the control panel w/logo and color scheme.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

We have invested a lot of time and energy into tailoring a solution that works for the company.

We think the new features in v6.2 will help us get to the next level

We also don't have the resources to rebuild a website platform from scratch even if we wanted to

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Craft was originally developed in response to ExpressionEngine's shortcomings. While ExpressionEngine has caught up in some regards, it still looks and feels a bit unpolished by comparison. Additionally, ExpressionEngine's vendor has never gotten UI right - not on their website, nor in their CMS. Craft remains easier to use, more polished and provides a wider feature set in its base install (without needing plugins). As for WordPress - while I recognize its massive popularity, I find its reliance on themes, third-party plugins, along with security shortcomings, make it a poor fit for the larger custom projects we build. On the other hand, if you want to throw up a passable website in a day, you can't beat WordPress.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• We don't have hard numbers on Craft's impact on our ROI, but we recognize that its feature set, ease of use, and integrated ECommerce allows offering a superior product to clients.

Incentivized

• 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.
• The templates makes the whole process easy

Incentivized