Magnolia vs. Sitecore Experience Platform

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Magnolia
Score 8.2 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
Sitecore Experience Platform
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
N/AN/A
Pricing
MagnoliaSitecore Experience Platform
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
MagnoliaSitecore Experience Platform
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
Community Pulse
MagnoliaSitecore Experience Platform
Considered Both Products
Magnolia
Chose Magnolia
Pricing was the major concern for us and we found this to be our option.
Sitecore Experience Platform

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
MagnoliaSitecore Experience Platform
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Magnolia
8.1
70 Ratings
1% above category average
Sitecore Experience Platform
-
Ratings
Role-based user permissions8.170 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Magnolia
8.0
69 Ratings
4% above category average
Sitecore Experience Platform
-
Ratings
API8.462 Ratings00 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language7.662 Ratings00 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Magnolia
8.0
75 Ratings
5% above category average
Sitecore Experience Platform
-
Ratings
WYSIWYG editor8.566 Ratings00 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness8.466 Ratings00 Ratings
Admin section8.071 Ratings00 Ratings
Page templates8.973 Ratings00 Ratings
Library of website themes7.01 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design8.564 Ratings00 Ratings
Publishing workflow7.574 Ratings00 Ratings
Form generator7.059 Ratings00 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Magnolia
7.5
70 Ratings
2% above category average
Sitecore Experience Platform
-
Ratings
Content taxonomy7.564 Ratings00 Ratings
SEO support7.164 Ratings00 Ratings
Bulk management7.858 Ratings00 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions8.063 Ratings00 Ratings
Community / comment management7.152 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
MagnoliaSitecore Experience Platform
Small Businesses
Divi
Divi
Score 9.8 out of 10
Progress Sitefinity
Progress Sitefinity
Score 7.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Image Relay
Image Relay
Score 9.5 out of 10
Tridion
Tridion
Score 9.0 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
MagnoliaSitecore Experience Platform
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(79 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.1
(9 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(69 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
8.5
(68 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(3 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Online Training
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
MagnoliaSitecore Experience Platform
Likelihood to Recommend
Magnolia
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.
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Sitecore
3 Scenarios where Sitecore Experience Platform is well suited: 1. Customized AI/ML Model development - Developing and deploying ML/AI models to automate tasks related to the process. e.g., image classification, sentiment analysis or text classification, etc.2. RPA & Chatbots - RPA scripts to automate simpler tasks and integrate with legacy systems (UI path, opensource RPA scripts). Implementation of chatbots training by human agents to respond to redundant queries 3. Data Enrichment - Structuring and enriching data using automated techniques in ML as well as human agent labeling
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Pros
Magnolia
  • 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.
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Sitecore
  • Sitecore has a decent supply of out of the box components and capabilities that can be fairly easily styled to meet business needs without much customization needed. This often helps speed to market.
  • Sitecore has had the flexibility of offering on-premise hosting or cloud hosting to meet different needs of clients, though recently they have strongly pushed their cloud-based hosting. This is in alignment with the industry and very helpful for organizations that aren't looking to add another product to the portfolio of packages that their internal IT teams need to manage
  • Sitecore has a capable UI for editing content. Though some competition may do better in this regard, Sitecore's editing interface is fully capable.
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Cons
Magnolia
  • 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.
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Sitecore
  • While the UI is capable, some other products in this space have a much more intuitive editing interface. Sitecore could do better in providing an easy to use editing UI.
  • It would be nice to see a fully managed Sitecore instead of just cloud hosted
  • The price falls more to the premium side of things. Making the value proposition a bit harder to justify
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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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Sitecore
No answers on this topic
Usability
Magnolia
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.
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Sitecore
Implemented for various projects such as:›Market and sales intelligence Competitor tracking Management moves Social media tracking Customized information sourcing. Use web-scraping and parsing for data harvesting where the search is keyword-based and, the content and data extractions are required from various websites•Implemented for diverse requirements:›Social media tracking›Image recognition›Pricing comparison›Competitor content mapping›e-Commerce products’ cataloging, etc.
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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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Sitecore
No answers on this topic
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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Sitecore
1. Customized software development & maintenance. 2. Technology Consulting - Consulting-based services for technology solutions data engineering or cloud solutions. 3. Used for tapping into multiple data sources such as CRM and marketing automation systems and, creating automated data extracts with a high-end visual representation of data. 4. Implemented for scheduling an existing report to automatically refresh and be delivered to specific users at a specific regular interval.
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Alternatives Considered
Magnolia
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.
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Sitecore
All of these platforms have their pros and cons. Selecting the best fit is a matter aligning corporate need vs features provided. Have a .NET shop with an advanced marketing team looking to push UX forward and willing to pay a premium, then Sitecore may be the right fit. Have an organization centered around Java and only looking for basic CMS capabilities or looking for a budget-friendly option, then there may be better options beyond Sitecore.
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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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Sitecore
  • For mature marketing organizations, the analytics that Sitecore allows you to capture have been valuable in pushing forward marketing objectives and giving insight into how to tailor content for the best UX
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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.