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
OpenText Web CMS
Score 5.0 out of 10
N/A
OpenText
Web CMS (TeamSite) accelerates and simplifies the end-to-end digital content and campaign
lifecycle, from content creation and rich media management to omnichannel
publication, optimization, automation, commerce, and community. According to the vendor, with
TeamSite, users can:
Capture diverse digital
audiences with amazing brand experiences – Give customers and prospects consistent, high-quality brand
experiences across devices and channels, and foster closer…
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.
OpenText TeamSite is well-suited to large, enterprise-wide implementations where customization, content governance, and dynamic content distribution is needed or prioritized. It is probably not ideal for smaller sites with simple architecture and few resources to manage custom implementation.
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.
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.
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.
Overall, it's a solid package with the potential to offer much functionality with appropriate resources applied. There are a few issues with the authoring interface that OpenText should address before its a top shelf authoring experience.
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
Our technical resources engage with OpenText TeamSite so I don't have direct experience. However, critical issues that we need help with seem to get the attention they deserve without issue. However, training and user resources for business owner roles are a bit lacking and some annoying issues with the authoring interface should be addressed sooner.
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.
It offers more content editing features at a relatively low cost thus overall deployment is lower in cost. It has great customer support who are always there to support and answer to our needs thus making the process of deployment seamless at every stage and offering training for working with their product.
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.
We integrated with google analytics, now we have the proper comprehension of our audience data reception and behaviors - we've greatly improved on personalized marketing.
Quick publication of content across the main digital channels.
We run our digital campaigns swiftly.
We've maintained our brand consistency for three years.
