Magnolia vs. Plone

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Magnolia
Score 8.3 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Founded in 1997 with a vision to create the first truly open content management system, Magnolia is presented as a fast way to launch digital experiences. With a mission to help clients move fast and stay flexible and boasting users among brands like Atlassian and The New York Times, Magnolia DXP supports industries ranging from automotive to telecommunications, offering enterprise features and headless agility to help them stay ahead. From humble beginnings in Basel, Magnolia's…N/A
Plone
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Plone is a free and open source content management system built on top of the Zope application server. Plone can be used for any kind of website, including blogs, internet sites, webshops, and internal websites.N/A
Pricing
MagnoliaPlone
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
MagnoliaPlone
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Features
MagnoliaPlone
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Magnolia
8.1
66 Ratings
1% above category average
Plone
8.0
5 Ratings
0% below category average
Role-based user permissions8.166 Ratings8.05 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Magnolia
8.0
64 Ratings
4% above category average
Plone
8.5
5 Ratings
10% above category average
API8.457 Ratings9.05 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language7.557 Ratings8.05 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Magnolia
8.0
70 Ratings
5% above category average
Plone
8.0
6 Ratings
5% above category average
WYSIWYG editor8.561 Ratings8.06 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness8.461 Ratings8.05 Ratings
Admin section7.966 Ratings7.05 Ratings
Page templates8.968 Ratings10.05 Ratings
Library of website themes7.01 Ratings8.05 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design8.559 Ratings7.05 Ratings
Publishing workflow7.569 Ratings8.05 Ratings
Form generator7.056 Ratings8.05 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Magnolia
7.5
65 Ratings
2% above category average
Plone
7.8
5 Ratings
6% above category average
Content taxonomy7.560 Ratings7.05 Ratings
SEO support7.159 Ratings10.04 Ratings
Bulk management7.954 Ratings5.05 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions8.058 Ratings8.05 Ratings
Community / comment management7.148 Ratings9.05 Ratings
Best Alternatives
MagnoliaPlone
Small Businesses
Divi
Divi
Score 9.8 out of 10
Divi
Divi
Score 9.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Image Relay
Image Relay
Score 9.5 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
MagnoliaPlone
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(74 ratings)
9.0
(13 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.1
(9 ratings)
8.3
(10 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(69 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
8.5
(68 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
MagnoliaPlone
Likelihood to Recommend
Magnolia
Magnolia is very well suited to scenarios where there are multiple end points for content eg. apps, remote devices, websites etc. and with multiple users. Magnolia is very good at working with different "shapes" of content so it's not necessarily all about HTML content for the web which tends to be the default for a number of other products of this nature. This means that it's more logical for people to work with structured data and easier for the applications to sort and manage that content when they receive it.
This works really well when you have multiple team members (often in multiple locations). We've had clients who've had people in twelve European locations with sixteen languages and they can share skills and resources between them but still manage their own content.
Magnolia is less appropriate for SMEs who have fewer digital assets and content. It's not to say that it can't be done but it's more that the budget would not necessarily fit.
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Plone
The larger your organization, the more appropriate Plone will be. This is not to say that Plone is a worse choice for small websites, only that the minimum investment for a Plone site is certainly higher than for other platforms. If you already use Plone for your site and are looking for a redesign or an overhaul, I would only advise switching to a different platform such as WordPress or Drupal if your organization is downsizing. For any other situation, Plone is the natural choice for your growth.
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Pros
Magnolia
  • Use of YAML to define content models with code.
  • Versatility of defining actions for custom handlers.
  • Reloading classes when code is modified in a local dev environment is nice. While it doesn't seem to work when changes extend beyond the method body (i.e., adding methods), it remediates the pain of long startup times.
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Plone
  • Plone is a folder-based system, organising content in a similar way desktop-users are doing for the last two decades. No need to teach non-tech customers some relational-database like paradigm for content management.
  • Plone is secure. It is the most secure CMS you can get your hands on.
  • Plone is flexible, and makes fast development easy.
Read full review
Cons
Magnolia
  • As a developer the learning curve is long, you can start developing relatively quickly but getting to know the platform in depth takes time.
  • Having a history of modifications not only at the page level but also at the Content Apps level would be very useful.
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Plone
  • Not everything is configurable or editable by Plone, and when you need to adjust or add custom pieces in, you need to deal with Zope. Zope has an ugly, confusing and difficult UI and structure as a backend.
  • Using 3rd party products is difficult to do - there are a few different ways to get them installed, all of which take a bit of luck to get right.
  • Building custom products for Plone is not fun. You've got to deal with an archaic framework to tie in that is not well documented (there is documentation about many things, but not great documentation and there are a lot of holes in the documentation).
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Likelihood to Renew
Magnolia
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
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Plone
I no longer use Plone because I got an internship in the web development field and my current place of employment uses their own content management system that they created. After getting to know other CMS's and similar software and comparing them to Plone, I would enjoy using Plone again in the future, but there are more complicated software that I'd like to learn as I progress in my field of study.
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Usability
Magnolia
There are a ton of small things that could make this CMS great Off the top of my head... 1) Better navigation between a component and its corresponding node in the jcr ( devs often have to flip between a page and a spot in the jcr even though there could be a button to take you from a page/component in the pages app to its location in the JCR) 2) Why does a content editor need to open the page to edit the page properties? They could just as easily edit the dialog from the tree view if they have many pages to touch, and it would save them time by not having to render the page.
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Plone
Compared to the amount of Plone sites, users and customizations we have in our organization, the amount of support requests and training needed is really small
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Performance
Magnolia
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.
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Plone
Plone is very intensive in its operations, and if not configured well it can be slow. However it is designed and built with speed in mind and with proper use of coding, templates and caching can perform extremely well under high loads. It is capable of scaling to very high load availability environments with no specific coding requirements.
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Support Rating
Magnolia
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
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Plone
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Magnolia
Prior to using Magnolia as an enterprise CMS solution, different teams leveraged different website platforms including WordPress, Weebly, and others. While these other platforms may be slightly more user friendly to the content editor, they don't offer nearly the same amount of customization and digital best practices out of the box that are customizable by web development teams like Magnolia does. The other solutions may work better for a quicker/simpler web implementation without technical resources but don't have the depth and breadth of capability and functionality that Magnolia has and fall flat.
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Plone
Drupal: Plone is cheaper, so with Drupal is more complex to reach the required ROI. However, Drupal has a lower learning curve WordPress: For our necessities it has a more expensive learning curve than plone. Joomla, is easier to use. However, it have some issues on security and web content where Plone is much better
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Return on Investment
Magnolia
  • 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
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Plone
  • As a development company Plone allows us to provide complex web applications in a short amount of time.
  • Plone is quite robust and reliable so when you customize some parts you do not risk to damage other parts. This is quite positive for a web development framework,
  • Plone allows our clients to spread their activities among different employees improving the efficiency of content generation and management.
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ScreenShots

Magnolia Screenshots

Screenshot of the customer experience: Brings together content and audiovisual digital assets to form more compelling digital experiences.Screenshot of the Magnolia App Launcher, used to switch between workspaces and manage pagesScreenshot of Magnolia's native analytics integration framework, used to take advantage of data directly in the authoring UI, coupled to content.Screenshot of global search that brings relevant content, no matter where it resides.Screenshot of customizing the ecommerce experience.