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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Magnolia

    Score9.9 out of 10
    Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
    Founded in Switzerland in 1997, Magnolia is a CMS used to build composable digital experiences. Magnolia helps create fully integrated customer experiences and speeds up digital delivery of content. Magnolia boasts 480 enterprise customers, thousands of Community Edition deployments, and more than 200 certified Magnolia Partners around the world. They further state that their enterprise customers include Sanofi, Generali, the Atlassian, The New York Times, Harley Davidson, and Union…

    $3,500

    per month

    Meltwater

    Score7.6 out of 10
    N/AMeltwater Media Intelligence platform is a set of public relations software tools for media monitoring, social media monitoring, and collecting brand insights. The four areas of functionality are Monitor, Analyze, Distribute, and Engage. (Note that this product combines features from the vendor Meltwater's former Buzz, Press, and News products.)N/A
    Pricing
    MagnoliaMeltwater
    Editions & Modules
    DX Core
    $3500
    per month
    DX Cloud
    $6000
    per month
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    MagnoliaMeltwater
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Features
    MagnoliaMeltwater
    Security
    Comparison of Security features of Magnolia and Meltwater
    Feature
    Magnolia
    8.1
    69 Ratings
    2% below category average
    Meltwater
    -
    Ratings
    Role-based user permissions8.169 Ratings00 Ratings
    Platform & Infrastructure
    Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Magnolia and Meltwater
    Feature
    Magnolia
    8.1
    68 Ratings
    4% above category average
    Meltwater
    -
    Ratings
    API8.561 Ratings00 Ratings
    Internationalization / multi-language7.761 Ratings00 Ratings
    Web Content Creation
    Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Magnolia and Meltwater
    Feature
    Magnolia
    8.0
    74 Ratings
    2% above category average
    Meltwater
    -
    Ratings
    WYSIWYG editor8.565 Ratings00 Ratings
    Code quality / cleanliness8.465 Ratings00 Ratings
    Admin section8.070 Ratings00 Ratings
    Page templates8.972 Ratings00 Ratings
    Library of website themes7.01 Ratings00 Ratings
    Mobile optimization / responsive design8.563 Ratings00 Ratings
    Publishing workflow7.573 Ratings00 Ratings
    Form generator6.958 Ratings00 Ratings
    Web Content Management
    Comparison of Web Content Management features of Magnolia and Meltwater
    Feature
    Magnolia
    7.5
    69 Ratings
    0% below category average
    Meltwater
    -
    Ratings
    Content taxonomy7.663 Ratings00 Ratings
    SEO support7.263 Ratings00 Ratings
    Bulk management7.657 Ratings00 Ratings
    Availability / breadth of extensions7.962 Ratings00 Ratings
    Community / comment management6.951 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    MagnoliaMeltwater
    Small Businesses
    Umbraco CMS
    Score7 out of 10
    Help a Reporter Out (HARO)
    Score5 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Square Online
    Score7.7 out of 10
    Cision Communications Cloud
    Score8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    RWS Tridion Sites
    Score9 out of 10
    Cision Communications Cloud
    Score8 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    MagnoliaMeltwater
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.1
    (78 ratings)
    7.2
    (73 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.1
    (9 ratings)
    10.0
    (10 ratings)
    Usability
    8.0
    (68 ratings)
    5.6
    (5 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    8.5
    (67 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.1
    (3 ratings)
    10.0
    (29 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Online Training
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.1
    (2 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    1.0
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    MagnoliaMeltwater
    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.
    Read full review
    Meltwater
    Meltwater is well-suited for agencies that have an engagement team who is looking to service a variety of client needs such as social media reporting, public relations outreach, and community management. If you're looking to have a platform serve just one need, you can still use Meltwater but will get more bang for your buck if you are needing a variety of tools.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Read full review
    Meltwater
    • Media research - you can search for relevant publications and journalists to add to your media list.
    • Earned media coverage - you can search for coverage of your brand and find news stories that also include data that may be useful (how many people did the story reach for example).
    • Building media lists - if you have no current existing list, you can build and export one in Excel for example.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Meltwater
    • The dashboards are not user-friendly, customizable (color, font size, etc.), or worthy of presenting to a client. All of the insights from a dashboard get pulled from the platform and placed into a more client-friendly presentation.
    • Paywalls for certain publications connected to who-knows-what. DowJones racket limits media monitoring capabilities and results in manual searches for a growing number of publications.
    • TVeyes, the broadcast monitoring arm of the media monitoring capabilities, just needs TLC and to become more client-facing. Currently, the links produced to share clips look sketchy, and they have a relatively short shelf life.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Meltwater
    Meltwater works well for our organization and has allowed us to meet our internal goals. We are always open to new products and services that may be able to provide similar or better features; however, our experience has been that many of Meltwater's competitors are not up to the task.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Meltwater
    Once you get some basic training it's pretty easy to use. I would like to see training manuals, or instructional videos to help me explore features I'm not currently using.
    Read full review
    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.
    Read full review
    Meltwater
    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
    Read full review
    Meltwater
    Our account rep at Meltwater went dark for a long time. Then, a couple of weeks ago, our new account manager reached out to set up a meeting. Apparently, they had a big shakeup in the company, and there were some personnel changes. Our new account rep was great in discussing the platform's capabilities that were available to us and even offered to schedule a follow-up meeting with his technical team to introduce our new social media team members to the platform and how it could help them with their jobs.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    In-Person Training
    Magnolia
    No answers on this topic
    Meltwater
    Again, really in-depth and helpful for a program that is really easy to use.
    Read full review
    Online Training
    Magnolia
    No answers on this topic
    Meltwater
    Walked step by step through program. Very informative on a program that doesn't require much training.
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Magnolia
    No answers on this topic
    Meltwater
    You are only allowed 15 users, so make sure you've identified who will have access to use the tool.
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Meltwater
    I was looking for a full-service option. I did some research. What really sold me was the presentation. They offered products that were helpful, and I wasn’t even aware of them. It is more expensive than the other products that are out there, but you get more. The other companies are good, but Meltwater Media Intelligence is more full service.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Meltwater
    • As a PR firm, we rely on the media databases that [Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform] supplies to deliver the media exposure that they expect from us.
    • We utilize their tracking of media hits for our overall reporting to our clients.
    • Both of these are advantageous in helping us to not only keep our existing clients happy but also to gain new clients (and, in turn - revenue), as well.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Magnolia Screenshots

    Screenshot of the Magnolia App Launcher, used to switch between workspaces and manage pagesScreenshot of the customer experience. This brings together content and audiovisual digital assets to form more compelling digital experiences.Screenshot of global search that brings relevant content, no matter where it resides.Screenshot of customizing the ecommerce experience.Screenshot of Magnolia Orchestratem where users can manage and track campaignsScreenshot of the WYSIWYG page editor