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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

    Opal

    Score9.1 out of 10
    Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
    Opal is a platform for brands, used to plan, create, and calendar their content - across teams and channels. Opal aims to enable tight alignment and high levels of efficiency. Marketing teams from companies such as Starbucks, Microsoft, and Target use Opal to collaborate, plan, and visualize, while ensuring an always-unified brand voice. Users can: Plan every facet of the brand experience, to ensure consistency throughout every moment and across every…

    $8.29

    per month

    Pricing
    MagnoliaOpal
    Editions & Modules
    DX Core
    $3500
    per month
    DX Cloud
    $6000
    per month
    Opal Pro
    $8.29
    per month
    Opal
    Free Forever
    Teams Pro
    Custom Pricing
    per month
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    MagnoliaOpal
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    MagnoliaOpal
    Considered Both Products
    Magnolia
    No answer on this topic
    OPAL
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    58 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    49 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    58 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    98%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    39 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    98%
    Implementation went as expected
    53 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    MagnoliaOpal
    Security
    Comparison of Security features of Magnolia and Opal
    Feature
    Magnolia
    8.1
    69 Ratings
    2% below category average
    Opal
    -
    Ratings
    Role-based user permissions8.169 Ratings00 Ratings
    Platform & Infrastructure
    Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Magnolia and Opal
    Feature
    Magnolia
    8.1
    68 Ratings
    4% above category average
    Opal
    -
    Ratings
    API8.561 Ratings00 Ratings
    Internationalization / multi-language7.761 Ratings00 Ratings
    Web Content Creation
    Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Magnolia and Opal
    Feature
    Magnolia
    8.0
    74 Ratings
    2% above category average
    Opal
    -
    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 Opal
    Feature
    Magnolia
    7.5
    69 Ratings
    0% below category average
    Opal
    -
    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
    MagnoliaOpal
    Small Businesses
    Umbraco CMS
    Score7 out of 10
    monday marketer (discontinued)
    Score10 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Square Online
    Score7.7 out of 10
    Adobe Marketing Cloud
    Score9.3 out of 10
    Enterprises
    RWS Tridion Sites
    Score9 out of 10
    Adobe Marketing Cloud
    Score9.3 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    MagnoliaOpal
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.1
    (78 ratings)
    9.2
    (5 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.1
    (9 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    8.0
    (68 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    8.5
    (67 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.1
    (3 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Online Training
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    MagnoliaOpal
    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
    OPAL
    I honestly cannot recommend this tool enough. Opal is such a valuable tool for brand content creators and there is nothing like it available. If you're serious about content marketing and have a need to find ways to collaborate, plan and provide more visibility among teams, then Opal really is the only way to go. One more thing that's not being mentioned: The tool is simply amazing but it's only as amazing is the team behind the tool. Their customer support and willingness to quickly be in touch when needed is a key feature within itself. Seriously, such a good team of people.
    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
    OPAL
    • Content planning: you can look at one asset and see how it is being used across multiple channels by multiple teams.
    • Content collaboration: it is really easy to see what other people and teams are contributing to an asset, or how they are using it. We can also duplicate content that was created by another team to use as a starting point in our own content collaboration.
    • High level/big picture overview: Opal allows us to see content that is being created, planned and scheduled very easily; it goes beyond social content (which we can also see in Sprinklr) to show us content created across multiple channels.
    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
    OPAL
    • No publishing capabilities, for the most part.
    • No analytics tie-ins.
    • Rather pricey.
    • Requires someone to really manage the structure in order to keep the tool organized and use it effectively. When this is done right, though, it's worthwhile.
    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
    OPAL
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    OPAL
    No answers on this topic
    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
    OPAL
    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
    OPAL
    No answers on this topic
    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
    OPAL
    You get for what you paid for. Opal has more features
    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
    OPAL
    • Opal allows for more discipline in marketing as teams are better aligned on messaging and big moments.
    • Opal cuts down on communication breakdowns and mistakes, which in the end leads to more happy customers.
    • I think Opal provides the team with more confidence as everyone is on the same page. With everything in one place rather than communications being lost in emails, etc., everyone is more efficient and can work knowing that there is one source of truth.
    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

    Opal Screenshots

    Screenshot of Preview content exactly as it will appear in market to the audience. Collaborate with teammates and track changes in the  Chat & Activity window.Screenshot of View scheduled Moments across all campaigns on the Calendar -- by day, week, or month.Screenshot of Plan marketing content and campaigns using Boards, a free-form space for brainstorming, briefing, and scenario planning.