Adobe Experience Manager vs. HCL Digital Experience

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
HCL Digital Experience
Score 7.7 out of 10
N/A
HCL Digital Experience is based on the former IBM Web Content Manager and IBM WebSphere Portal products, acquired by HCL Technologies from IBM in late 2018. The product allows the user to create, manage and deliver engaging omnichannel digital experiences to audiences with responsive content, targeted offers, seamlessly integrated applications and consistent branding across channels (web, mobile, and hybrid mobile/web applications and more).N/A
Pricing
Adobe Experience ManagerHCL Digital Experience
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe Experience ManagerHCL Digital Experience
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 ManagerHCL Digital Experience
Considered Both Products
Adobe Experience Manager
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
HCL Digital Experience
Chose HCL Digital Experience
Each of the options had good points and bad points. Building a site with tight integration to HCL Commerce and SAP backend systems was just easier with HCL DX. Security is also a concern and HCL DX provided better fine-grained security across the board. HCL DX also allowed us …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Adobe Experience ManagerHCL Digital Experience
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
8.4
38 Ratings
5% above category average
HCL Digital Experience
5.0
5 Ratings
46% below category average
Role-based user permissions8.438 Ratings5.05 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
HCL Digital Experience
4.1
5 Ratings
65% below category average
API7.829 Ratings4.14 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language8.129 Ratings4.15 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
HCL Digital Experience
2.9
5 Ratings
89% below category average
WYSIWYG editor7.433 Ratings7.04 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness6.734 Ratings3.15 Ratings
Admin section7.034 Ratings3.15 Ratings
Page templates7.637 Ratings1.15 Ratings
Library of website themes7.326 Ratings1.15 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design7.835 Ratings4.04 Ratings
Publishing workflow8.135 Ratings1.14 Ratings
Form generator7.629 Ratings3.02 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
HCL Digital Experience
1.9
5 Ratings
115% below category average
Content taxonomy7.731 Ratings1.15 Ratings
SEO support7.133 Ratings2.15 Ratings
Bulk management7.136 Ratings2.13 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions7.534 Ratings2.14 Ratings
Community / comment management7.130 Ratings2.13 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Adobe Experience ManagerHCL Digital Experience
Small Businesses
Kentico Xperience
Kentico Xperience
Score 7.2 out of 10
Kentico Xperience
Kentico Xperience
Score 7.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Tridion
Tridion
Score 9.0 out of 10
Tridion
Tridion
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Tridion
Tridion
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Score 9.0 out of 10
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User Ratings
Adobe Experience ManagerHCL Digital Experience
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(83 ratings)
9.0
(11 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.8
(6 ratings)
5.7
(6 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(48 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Availability
8.6
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.4
(11 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.7
(2 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
9.5
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Professional Services
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe Experience ManagerHCL Digital Experience
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.
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HCL Technologies
HCL DX does really well at managing and maintaining the site. It allows the business to basically maintain the site while IT spent time developing new and enhanced functions. The main issue I currently have with HCL DX is not directly with the product but it does play a role. It is difficult finding skilled resources to support HCL DX in my experience.
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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.
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HCL Technologies
  • With Version 8.5, IBM Web Content Manager introduced in place editing capabilities which allow authors to make content edits on sections of the page instead of going to the content itself. This feature allows authors to make changes in context of the page and preview changes within the actual look and feel of a live page.
  • Projects provide a collaborative atmosphere for the author community so that authors can interact and work as a team to manage inter-dependent content changes under one project and publish all changes at once, instead of working separately on individual content changes. This brings awareness across authors in an organization and easy knowledge share.
  • IBM Digital Data Connector is a cool feature that allows [users] to integrate external content sources onto the portal using IBM Web Content Manager presentation components. This allows UI/UX designers to present integrated external data in any manner they want, manage UI changes with an underlying approval process and leverage syndication to push changes live immediately.
  • IBM Web Content Manager offers a targeted content feature that allows business users to deliver personalized content to customers based on customer demographic information, browsing history and other transaction related information. Any rules created follow the publishing process thereby making it just a configurable item resulting in less turn around to turn on the feature on a website.
  • IBM Web Content Manager offers 'multi lingual solution' out of the box which allows content creation for almost all popular languages.
  • Syndication feature has improved a lot and it now provides a detailed views comprising of 'failed items', 'items that have syndicated successfully, 'items in queue'. Failed items view provides detailed and clear cut information of what resulted in failure helping IT to troubleshoot problems easily.
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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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HCL Technologies
  • IBM Web Content Manager should provide some easily usable connectors through a GUI to connect to bring content from custom data sources including connecting to Salesforce and custom databases.
  • Should further optimize and enhance creation of rich and responsive content driven UIs on various digital channels.
  • Should further optimize and enhance content personalization features.
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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.
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HCL Technologies
IBM products always moves forward to adapt to new requirements and technologies. I have used versions 6, 6.1, 7 and 8 of IBM WCM, and I know IBM is ready to revamp the tool based on emerging needs, and still provide the capabilities to migrate your old system to the newer versions.
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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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HCL Technologies
New versions has increased user experience facilitating usability.
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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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HCL Technologies
No answers on this topic
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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HCL Technologies
No answers on this topic
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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HCL Technologies
We had some issues related with performing and the support was suitable and sucessful.
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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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HCL Technologies
Implementation was successful due to Websphere application server used.
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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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HCL Technologies
Magento and Prestashop are E-commerce CMS platforms. They are used in a different scale of application than WCM.
Concerning Joomla, it's a useful CMS forsmaller website. Once again this is an other scale of application than WCM Liveray can compete WCM 7 concerning the : ¤ specific development ¤ security ¤ responsive
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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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HCL Technologies
No answers on this topic
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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HCL Technologies
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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HCL Technologies
  • Negative: Very complex architecture for on-premise deployments (too many servers to installed)
  • Positive: Easy customization
  • Negative: Architecture limited to cloud solutions
  • WCM is an old product and needs an update
  • Blog, and community are not integrated in Digital Manager for discussion
  • Templates are not available to integrate basic services (FileNet, more complex BPM , e-commerce)
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ScreenShots