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…
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Quantum Metric
Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Quantum Metric is designed to help organizations build better digital products faster. Their platform for Continuous Product Design gives business and IT teams a single version of truth which the vendor describes as fast, quantified, and grounded on what customers actually experience. The solution ultimately aims to help teams agree on priorities, build products customers love, and innovate with speed and confidence.
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.
Quantum Metric is a true professional, and I love the level of insight and industry knowledge they bring to the table. We use it at the departmental level, including marketing, customer service, and IT. Session replay allows our data consumers to derive insights faster and easier than digging through data. It lets us see or understand how users feel and work to enhance those feelings. The quality of support and the time to respond are also noteworthy. They have great coverage, but the learning curve is very steep and requires a lot of technical support and hand-holding.
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.
Identifying user pain points and frustrations. Quantum Metrics has a data point called Rage Click which shows when a customer has clicked multiple times back to back on a particular section of the website.
Replaying a session to see everything that is loading on the front end to the customer, as well as the backed end of the website, has been critical in troubleshooting the experience.
Heatmaps are a awesome tool we have found very useful in showing engagement with different content on the page, how far user scroll & drop off and to see a split side by side view of the same page in an a/b test.
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.
Quantum is a nice tool and is user friendly however I believe there always room for improvement. We have experienced minor issues with a few sessions which were solved by Quantum support reps in a timely manner and some of the dashboards are not as robust as other tools we use
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.
For a new user, it's pretty intuitive to onboard and start doing the basic functionalities. But QM has a lot of functionalities which can be leveraged by more team members (especially when you don't have analysts dedicatedly using this) if further enhancements to usability are made.
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
I've been very impressed with the support Quantum Metric has provided. Our amazing Customer Success team has provided excellent service and has gone above and beyond in helping us use and understand the tool. We hold weekly calls with multiple teams and QM has been proactive in bringing things to our team's attention and making suggestions. The support has been one of the most important aspects of having QM and has allowed us to make great strides in improving how we use data and user research in our work.
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.
We have used - as an organization - multiple products that each fill a roll or task Quantum Metric provides...however I think there are very few tools or SaaS solutions out there that bundle so much into one solution. QM was better than the replay tool another group was utilizing (Mouseflow) because with our contract we could capture and review way more replays as well as have those replays married to actual, quantifiable data. From an analytics point, is so much easier to install event tracking as opposed to our basic Google Analytics implementation. However, I would still use GA as a primary record for measuring overall site performance since QM doesn't have robust product sales tracking. At one point we did review a competitor called Content Square. They seemed very focused on heat mapping.
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.
