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
Orderhive (discontinued)
Score3.1 out of 10
N/A
Cin7 Orderhive was a SaaS based solution for order, shipping and inventory management functionalities. Acquired by Cin7 in 2021, it was discontinued in 2023.
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.
Setting up was covered by a dedicated account rep. It was a smooth and relatively easy process. Problems started a year in when I lost my dedicated account rep. Customer service would refer to the instructions when a question was asked. Sadly they didn't understand the question most of the time.
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.
Around 18 months ago I started conversations with Orderhive as a potential vendor to run a large portion of our ecommerce business. It seemed promising, and the idea that the Plus (now called Enterprise) solution was customisable was the reason I decided to select Orderhive.
There was a significant amount of due-diligence from my end. It took me around 6 months to get my head around what features the software currently had, and what we would need to have Orderhive complete as a customisation.
This in itself was also quite a bit of work - there were a number of revisions to the contract documents, created by a non-technical sales representative. My concerns started around this point when I was unable to speak with a technical representative to discuss, in more detail, how each feature would work.
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
shipping, I would like to be able to handle returns more easily.
I would like to be able to handle stock differently according to order delivery dates. Order hive reserves qty for all the orders we place, I would like to be able to decide which orders reserve stock and which ones shouldn't.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
Extremely poor, it is not a user-friendly automated time-saving system like what was promised. It is clunky and the development team is slow and creating very poor and unreliable results.
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
The worst I have ever experienced, they are arrogant, rude and often abusive. They then blame us when we get angry due to the poor quality of the product and the extremely bad customer service.
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Sadly I can't give Cin7 Core a review, because they haven't been able to resolve connection issues and it's been 3 months. But I'm done with this company
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
There has been a negative ROI in this case. Not only have we paid a deposit toward the customisation of our orderhive implementation, there has also been a massive sunk cost of approximately 18 months of my time and effort.
