Founded in 1997 with a vision to create the first truly open content management system, Magnolia is presented as the fastest 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, the vendor states a new wave of companies in industries ranging from automotive to telecommunications have made Magnolia their DXP of choice to move fast, using the DXP's enterprise power and…
N/A
Optimizely Content Management System
Score 8.3 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Optimizely Content Management System hosts is powered by AI-driven personalization that enables the user to deliver individualized content to each visitor. The solution helps define creative recommendations, artificial intelligence, assisted segmentation and contextual data personalize experiences can be created with minimal effort. The solution's goal is to drive a higher ROI, quicker conversions, improved lead generation, and better customer service.
A colleague here being another business. Magnolia is on its way to being a 'good' product but the 6.2 implementation simply isn't there yet (6.2.26 as of this writing). The admincentral UI could use a complete overhaul to be better streamlined for devs and content editors (the two who actually use it).
Optimizely CMS is well suited for standalone content-rich sites. The templating system and localization along with the platform's extensibility allow designers and developers to build highly functional components that business users can use to build pages that provide customers with great website experiences. It works extremely well when paired with Optimizely Commerce. I feel that Optimizely CMS is less well suited for very media-heavy sites. The media management features are not as fully functional as what you would find in a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, but Optimizely CMS can be integrated with a DAM which would solve the issue.
Versatility of defining actions for custom handlers.
Reloading classes when code is modified in a local dev environment is nice. While it doesn't seem to work when changes extend beyond the method body (i.e., adding methods), it remediates the pain of long startup times.
There should be a search option in the Projects list. Very necessary for people managing so many sites
There could be more reminders about picture dimensions.
More of a breadcrumb trail in the search boxes for assets and pages so it is easier to identify the source of the content since so many pages have the same name.
Adding at least a partial breadcrumb trail in the project overview area with the file name would be helpful.
Changing projects does not always work even though it looks correct. Users who change projects a lot can edit up putting tasks in the wrong project.
The preview defaults to the last published draft for school sites now vs the draft. Doesn't really make sense to not automatically be able to preview the draft of a page.
Since I work on the implementation side of things, and do not directly own licensing for Ektron CMS, I have to base this rating off of how I think it will be received or presented to customers looking to start a new site deployment. I try to remain CMS agnostic, though my specialty is with the .NET and Microsoft stack. Because of the experience I have working with Ektron, I tend to be more forgiving with the shortcomings as I am familiar with how to work around them or past them from experience. Being familiar with the community available also helps, as you become familiar with the best approaches to find solutions to your issues. Each product has it's ups and downs and all of them are only going to be as good as the company or development team implementing them can make them. This is EXTREMELY important to remember when choosing a CMS, as it can make or break your expensive investment.
I see two main pains: 1. A new user need training to be able even to start using the platform, the onboarding is difficult 2. The platform needs a server with a relevant amount of memory to run properly, the dependency on the memory is really high
UI is user friendly. However, there are some areas where new user needs more time to understand the functionality before, they execute actions in the tool. Like content organization and filtering out information based on keywords. But overall, it doesn't take much time to get hands with the tool once user is get used to it.
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
Ektron is one of the best solution for .Net platform. Over the years have improved the performance issues that the previous versions had. My only complain is right now you can't do Page builder pages if you choose to have a MVC architecture
Prior to using Magnolia as an enterprise CMS solution, different teams leveraged different website platforms including WordPress, Weebly, and others. While these other platforms may be slightly more user friendly to the content editor, they don't offer nearly the same amount of customization and digital best practices out of the box that are customizable by web development teams like Magnolia does. The other solutions may work better for a quicker/simpler web implementation without technical resources but don't have the depth and breadth of capability and functionality that Magnolia has and fall flat.
I was not involved in the evaluation process for any of these systems. We chose Episerver CMS because it met the highest number of features for our use cases, and seemed to have great support and a good team running it. We were able to find an implementation partner and transfer multiple sites into one contained project
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.
