Likelihood to Recommend I would recommend GraphCMS to anyone who is also using Gatsby to build their website. If not, I would recommend them to consider GraphCMS but also consider other options. GraphCMS is a tool in which you are responsible to make the most out of it, but sometimes this requires more time and knowledge than a normal engineer may be able to handle. But with more time and attention, the reward of off-lifting content creation from the developers is a huge time saver in the long run.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros GraphCMS is easy to work with from the "non-engineer" side of things. GraphCMS is very flexible on what data models we can create and how those models are formed. GraphCMS uses Graph API, which is easy to write (compared to older API patterns). Read full review 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. Read full review Cons GraphCMS is very expensive at the enterprise level. GraphCMS requires deep knowledge of the system and requires lots of time to be efficient with it (especially around creating specific data patterns/relationships). Multiple times a day, the system will give us errors when attempting to save something but the errors are unclear as to what went wrong (can be irritating). Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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
Read full review Alternatives Considered We picked GraphCMS since it used Graph API and easily integrated it into our Gatsby website. It was also cheap (free) and easy to test out the product, making it easier to prove to our company we should pay for the product in the long run. Lastly, it seems to have a bunch of support from other developers which makes us confident will be around for a while (and we won't need to replace it anytime soon). Note: I also looked at Directus and DatoCMS but these were not options within TrustRadius
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment Better use of time for our engineers in the long run. More control of content for people outside of the engineer team. Allows people to edit the content on their own, so they don't need to wait until a developer is available to add something to the website. Read full review 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 Read full review ScreenShots