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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

    Microsoft Access

    Score7.5 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft Access is a database management system from Microsoft that combines the relational Microsoft Jet Database Engine with a graphical user interface and software-development tools.

    $139.99

    per PC

    Pricing
    MagnoliaMicrosoft Access
    Editions & Modules
    DX Core
    $3500
    per month
    DX Cloud
    $6000
    per month
    Microsoft Access
    $139.99
    per PC
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    MagnoliaMicrosoft Access
    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
    Community Pulse
    MagnoliaMicrosoft Access
    Considered Both Products
    Magnolia
    No answer on this topic
    Microsoft
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    58 Answers
    97%
    Would buy again
    29 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    49 Answers
    97%
    Delivers good value for the price
    29 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    58 Answers
    93%
    Happy with the feature set
    28 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    98%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    39 Answers
    86%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    19 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    98%
    Implementation went as expected
    53 Answers
    91%
    Implementation went as expected
    21 Answers
    Features
    MagnoliaMicrosoft Access
    Security
    Comparison of Security features of Magnolia and Microsoft Access
    Feature
    Magnolia
    8.1
    69 Ratings
    2% below category average
    Microsoft Access
    -
    Ratings
    Role-based user permissions8.169 Ratings00 Ratings
    Platform & Infrastructure
    Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Magnolia and Microsoft Access
    Feature
    Magnolia
    8.1
    68 Ratings
    4% above category average
    Microsoft Access
    -
    Ratings
    API8.561 Ratings00 Ratings
    Internationalization / multi-language7.761 Ratings00 Ratings
    Web Content Creation
    Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Magnolia and Microsoft Access
    Feature
    Magnolia
    8.0
    74 Ratings
    2% above category average
    Microsoft Access
    -
    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 Microsoft Access
    Feature
    Magnolia
    7.5
    69 Ratings
    0% below category average
    Microsoft Access
    -
    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
    Relational Databases
    Comparison of Relational Databases features of Magnolia and Microsoft Access
    Feature
    Magnolia
    -
    Ratings
    Microsoft Access
    7.7
    3 Ratings
    5% below category average
    ACID compliance00 Ratings7.02 Ratings
    Database monitoring00 Ratings8.02 Ratings
    Database locking00 Ratings8.03 Ratings
    Encryption00 Ratings7.02 Ratings
    Disaster recovery00 Ratings7.73 Ratings
    Flexible deployment00 Ratings8.02 Ratings
    Multiple datatypes00 Ratings8.03 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    MagnoliaMicrosoft Access
    Small Businesses
    Umbraco CMS
    Score7 out of 10
    Amazon RDS
    Score8.1 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Square Online
    Score7.7 out of 10
    SingleStore
    Score8.2 out of 10
    Enterprises
    RWS Tridion Sites
    Score9 out of 10
    SAP IQ
    Score5.4 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    MagnoliaMicrosoft Access
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.1
    (78 ratings)
    7.4
    (102 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.1
    (9 ratings)
    10.0
    (15 ratings)
    Usability
    8.0
    (68 ratings)
    7.6
    (8 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    8.5
    (67 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.1
    (3 ratings)
    6.4
    (5 ratings)
    Online Training
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    5.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    MagnoliaMicrosoft Access
    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
    Microsoft
    As a Material Purchasing/Planning/inventory tracking application, Microsoft Access serves its purpose well. It's presentation is clean, data entry is simple and the ability to customize search fields is welcome. It does, however, come with some caveats; namely, when setting search filters and the need arises to back up a step or two, with Microsoft Access you have to reset, or "clear all", adding extra steps/time to a query.
    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
    Microsoft
    • Very easy to create entity-relationship diagrams for various tables and designing mock layouts.
    • Really easy to navigate as it hold[s] the classic Microsoft UI. Another good thing is that it comes with the complete MS Office Suite.
    • It is really fast when joining multiple tables no matter what type of join.
    • Works on pretty much same SQL scripts so no need to learn a new language!
    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
    Microsoft
    • Microsoft Access has not really changed at all for several years. It might be nice to see some upgrades and changes.
    • The help info is often not helpful. Need more tutorials for Microsoft Access to show how to do specific things.
    • Be careful naming objects such as tables, forms, etc. Names that are too long can get cut off in dialog boxes to choose a table, form, report, etc. So, I wish they would have resizable dialog boxes to allow you to see objects with long names.
    • I wish it could show me objects that are not in use in the database for current queries, tables, reports, forms, and macros. That way unused objects can be deleted without worrying about losing a report or query because you deleted the underlying object.
    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
    Microsoft
    I and the rest of my team will renew our Microsoft Access in the future because we use and maintain many different applications and databases created using Microsoft Access so we will need to maintain them in the future. Additionally, it is a standard at our place of work so it is at $0 cost to us to use. Another reason for renewing Microsoft Access is that we just don' t have the resources needed to extend into a network of users so we need to remain a single-desktop application at this time.
    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
    Microsoft
    Microsoft Access is easy to use. It is compatible with spreadsheets. It is a very good data management tool. There is scope to save a large amount of data in one place. For using this database, one does not need much training, can be shared among multiple users. This database has to sort and filtering features which seem to be very useful.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Magnolia
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    I don't think the program has ever failed me. It is one of those programs where there is always a solution if you know where to look.
    Incentivized
    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
    Microsoft
    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
    Microsoft
    While I have never contacted Microsoft directly for product support, for some reason there's a real prejudice against MS Access among most IT support professionals. They are usually discouraging when it comes to using MS Access. Most of this is due to their lack of understanding of MS Access and how it can improve one's productivity. If Microsoft invested more resources towards enhancing and promoting the use of MS Access then maybe things would be different.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Magnolia
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    there is no key idea, since it is easy to implement Microsoft Access
    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
    Microsoft
    Excel is a fantastic - robust application that can do so much so easily. Its easy to train and understand. However - excel does not provide a reporting function and that is typically where we will suggest a move to [Microsoft] Access. [Microsoft] Access requires a little more knowledge of data manipulation.
    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
    Microsoft
    • Not having to recreate queries or reports every time you want to use them.
    • Once an item is created and saved as part of the database, you save manpower by not having to recreate them.
    • ROI from a usability standpoint is great. Solid product with great functionality that requires low maintenance usually.
    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