Founded in 1997 with a vision to create the first truly open content management system, Magnolia is presented as a fast 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, Magnolia DXP supports industries ranging from automotive to telecommunications, offering enterprise features and headless agility to help them stay ahead. From humble beginnings in Basel, Magnolia's…
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Paligo
Score 9.9 out of 10
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Paligo, headquartered in Stockholm, offers their component content management system (CCMS), supporting the creation and publishing of technical documentation and help systems.
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.
Paligo is particularly well suited for developing similar document sets for multiple products or product lines. It is not a page layout application, so don't expect the same capabilities as popular applications for graphics-heavy documentation. With some up-front time developing good layouts, however, Paligo does manage to create very usable PDF output for customer-facing documents.
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 review mode is super convenient. Comparing a snapshot of the previous versions with the current one clearly outlines the respective changes and reduces the necessary content to review tremendously.
The option to reuse text fragments is another handy feature. Text fragments will be updated whenever the original text fragment is altered is also extremely helpful.
Managing a content's structure was never easier. An intuitive drag & drop functionality allows you to design your document's structure however you like.
You can also fork content, in addition to reuse text fragments. This is another helpful option that no longer requires you to create repetetive chapters over and over.
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.
The amount of CSS/JS required to customize a site's appearance can be cumbersome
Product documentation can be lacking, specifically with integrations; in some cases, support offered no real help when trying to solve a problem with an integrated service
Some features require extensive development experience to use, which can sometimes be an obstacle to less-experienced team members
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.
Generally, I'm very happy with Paligo and the productivity gains that I get from using it. There are a few arbitrary limitations on structure, and when applying conditional formatting, that I don't really understand. Unlinking / editing reused text uses this broadly inscrutible colour-coding that I just hate. It would be nice to double-click a component, make edits, then respond to a popup asking if I want to confirm the edit for all linked content, or unlink this instance. Likewise converting from an informal topic insertion to duplicates of its raw contents.
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
All the support requests I've submitted have been resolved in one way or another. Sometimes it takes some back and forth, which is to be expected. This is where being on a different continent becomes a drawback. Since we became Enterprise users, we've also had an additional level of help and support from a dedicated account manager in the US, and the resolutions seem to come more quickly
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.
We moved from Flare to Paligo. One of the main reasons was the fact that Paligo is a cloud product. Collaboration with anyone outside of our team was more difficult with Flare. Also, maintaining a server for Flare content was going to become an issue, and overall I felt the Flare desktop product was prone to errors and issues. The flexibility of assigning Paligo licenses was a huge factor, as was the stability of the cloud platform.
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.
I am not involved in the financial decisions for my company regarding Paligo; the decision to migrate our content to this environment predates my hiring. However, I know that the migration effort from WordPress to Paligo was an initially heavy lift, but any content migration effort would be. I believe that ultimately, getting our content out of WordPress was a positive move, and I look forward to seeing what Paligo will help us accomplish in the future. Sorry, no hard numbers from me. :)
