Adobe Experience Manager vs. RWS Tridion Sites

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Adobe Experience Manager
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Adobe Experience Manager is a combined web content management system and digital asset management system. The combined applications of Adobe Experience Manager Sites and Adobe Experience Manager Assets is offered by the vendor as an end-to-end solution for managing and delivering marketing content.N/A
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
RWS Tridion Sites provides web content management capabilities, connecting people, processes, and information across teams, brands, and markets, to deliver impactful online experiences globally. RWS Tridion Sites' DPX platform enables the use of either traditional or headless publishing. It includes advanced features such as automated personalization, multilingual capabilities and Semantic AI. The BluePrinting® technology at the core of RWS Tridion Sites simplifies reuse and…N/A
Pricing
Adobe Experience ManagerRWS Tridion Sites
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe Experience ManagerRWS Tridion Sites
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Adobe Experience ManagerRWS Tridion Sites
Considered Both Products
Adobe Experience Manager
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Experience Manager, built on Java, means that the pool of developers available to work on the platform is large. Adobe Experience Manager's front-ends and client library management tooling mean that front-end developers can feel at home despite a lack of Java knowledge.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
We wanted a CMS which is known in market, which have a good ecosystem. With Adobe Experience Manager, we get integration with Target, Tag management, and other Adobe products.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
AEM is much more vast than Photoshop. Photoshop can be run by one person. AEM requires more people. AEM is waaay costlier.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Target, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Brand Concierge and Adobe Experience Platform
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
It was the in-place product when I joined the team.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Experience Manager provides way more. It is a much more holistic tool to help us manage the entire customer Journey. I, however, do not have enough power to make those decisions. I did not in fact choose Adobe Experience Manager, but I do like it better.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
AEM is infinitely better. Drupal does not compare.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe's integration with all of its other products requires digital marketing, making its system stand out from the rest. AI integration takes it to the next level.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Commerce and Adobe Target
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Analytics and Adobe Marketo Engage
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
integration with other Adobe tools
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
I selected Adobe Experience Manager because it was the easiest to connect to our platforms, the best cost for the size of our company, and I was using Adobe for almost everything else at the time. I think this was the best solution for our smaller company at the time.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
We chose Adobe Experience Manager over these platforms for security and Time to market. It was difficult to manage multi-site in other CMS.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Squarespace, Django and Python IDLE
RWS Tridion Sites
Chose RWS Tridion Sites
Interwoven teamsites, Documentum, Adobe - teamsites and documentum are old and limited. Adobe rocks but I like where I am and Tridion does a lot of the same things. No need to reinvent the wheel or move to a lateral product.
Chose RWS Tridion Sites
It is a nuclear missile compared to the other handguns and knives on the market today. But it also requires nuclear technicians and expertise that a handgun doesn't require. Do you need to decimate your competition and you have the investment capabilities necessary to put a …
Chose RWS Tridion Sites
Tridion is much better for multi-site installations, though Sitecore is a bit easier for content editors to know content types are being used based on visual icon indicators. We've had content editors pick the wrong templates by accident, but Sitecore's visual indicator …
Chose RWS Tridion Sites
Adobe CQ is SDL Tridion main competitor. Sitecore is designed for smaller companys. Adobe CQ is all java and thus has limitations. Sitecore is also all .net and has limitations. Both use a dynamic model and everything is compiled at runtime. SDL Tridion can be published in a …
Chose RWS Tridion Sites
Tridion again seemed to be more enterprise level then EpiServer, EpiServer allowed for faster ramp up time of a intuitive .NET framework, but Tridion seemed to have more tools and overall functionality once the CMS was customized towards the needs of the customer.
Chose RWS Tridion Sites
I did not play a role in selecting this product so I can't say how it stacked up. I do know that Tridion is an improvement over the last CMS.
Chose RWS Tridion Sites
I feel that SDL Tridion's User Interface is to difficult for content authors to understand. I worked with a client that used Tridion for years and she still would get lost in the UI and had to ask questions. There was close to 30% of continual time spent on the project simply …
Chose RWS Tridion Sites
SDL Tridion is far superior to CommonSpot. It is much more user friendly and increases efficiency.
Chose RWS Tridion Sites
I believe the biggest selling factor for SDL was its customer service and it ability to be responsive. We knew that it was a company that was going to be around for a long time and would continue to provide the support that we would need in the long term.
Chose RWS Tridion Sites
Tridion's strength is really hosting multiple websites across development, test stage and production.
Chose RWS Tridion Sites
The decision to purchase Tridion was made at a corporate level removed from the technical teams. Against our previous open source solution, this has been wildly expensive, impossible to find experienced developers for, and has required completely retooling our organization.
Chose RWS Tridion Sites
SDL has a better API and also handles high server load much better. Also, the built-in integrations for translations are more suited for performing lots of translations for many sites. However, Umbraco, like Tridion, has a great community and finding solutions with both …
Chose RWS Tridion Sites
We didn't chose WordPress because can't handle the traffic we generate. Sitecore is what we are currently looking at and it looks like a much better alternative to Tridion.
Chose RWS Tridion Sites
Adobe does a great job in managing sites. Its user interface for authors is intuitive and leaps and bounds better than SDL Tridions new 2013 UI. The ease of install and management makes Adobe CQ a much better product. However, Adobe CQ (AEM) has limitations. It cannot scale as …
Features
Adobe Experience ManagerRWS Tridion Sites
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
8.4
Ratings
3% above category average
RWS Tridion Sites
9.0
Ratings
9% above category average
Role-based user permissions8.40 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
8.0
Ratings
1% below category average
RWS Tridion Sites
9.1
Ratings
16% above category average
API7.80 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language8.10 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
7.5
Ratings
4% above category average
RWS Tridion Sites
8.5
Ratings
8% above category average
WYSIWYG editor7.40 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness6.70 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Admin section7.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Page templates7.60 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Library of website themes7.30 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design7.80 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Publishing workflow8.10 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Form generator7.60 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
7.3
Ratings
8% above category average
RWS Tridion Sites
7.6
Ratings
1% above category average
Content taxonomy7.70 Ratings9.00 Ratings
SEO support7.10 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Bulk management7.20 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions7.50 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Community / comment management7.10 Ratings3.00 Ratings
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Adobe Experience ManagerRWS Tridion Sites
Small Businesses
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ManageWP
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Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
Storyblok
Storyblok
Score 9.9 out of 10
Enterprises
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
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User Ratings
Adobe Experience ManagerRWS Tridion Sites
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(0 ratings)
9.9
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(0 ratings)
6.3
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.1
(0 ratings)
8.5
(0 ratings)
Availability
8.6
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.7
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe Experience ManagerRWS Tridion Sites
Likelihood to Recommend
I'll answer the second one because I mean, the first one I don't have an issue with. The second scenario is we oftentimes have the need to spin off very small campaign style sites or sites that generate leads but are unbranded and that sort of thing. So that's hard to do in AEM because you have to then create another organization within AEM to do that. And we're talking about sites that are maybe five to 10 pages in size. So we've been investigating Edge, but then that's a different workflow, so we'd have to train people on that. So it would be nice if there was something within the AEM structure that could allow you to do something very similar to Edge, where you make some small micro sites that are not necessarily branded, that you could still host within the platform and not have to retrain everybody on a completely different platform.
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SDL Tridion works well for organizations with a large website with a lot of content to continuously create and manage. The use of page templates and component presentations makes creating new pages fairly straightforward. It can be a little cumbersome when it comes to trying to "break from the norm" and build web pages that are outside of the template-driven format; however, there are ways around this to create pages that break away from the normal page-template format of the website. In this regard, SDL Tridion can be pretty flexible, allowing us to create a lot of custom functionality to keep up with constantly changing web trends.
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Pros
  • It allows us to scale so that we can make a change on a global footer. And it applies to all of the different property websites. It allows us to set up components and compartmentalize things in a way. The big thing is that it's scalable. And then it also ties into Adobe Analytics and other Adobe products. So we are a complete Adobe shop. Every Adobe product that we can use, we use. I don't think we do it for marketing so much, but for doing target testing and analytics, data scientists are using the same product and so it all speaks.
Read full review
  • Makes it easy to spin up a new site quickly
  • Allows for numerous users to work on the same site without conflicting with each other's changes
  • Allows you to unpublish changes or revert to old versions if you make a mistake
  • Allows you to time publishing actions (for example, you can set it to happen overnight)
Read full review
Cons
  • There are some glitches in permissions inheritance that require us to toggle a save on permissions in groups that inherit from a group that was recently updated.
  • Large packages require stopping the workflow launcher OSGi components or many workflows will slow down the server.
  • Locked pages are hard to find unless I use /siteadmin... I often hear that the CQ tools will go away, but if we lose that, some small things might be harder to do, like finding locked pages.
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  • If you are hoping to orbit the planet with a CMS, Tridion is built to leave the solar system. It is a very very powerful solution built for very serious enterprise businesses in hope of robust capabilities, which could be good or bad.
  • Supporting business users is a hefty lift and requires significant training and regular retraining, and support.
  • It's a niche solution that originally came out of Europe and was largely unknown in America. But today it's growing in popularity across the United States.
  • Finding capable support, and developers specializing in Tridion capabilities isn't always easy. And 8 years ago it was nearly impossible, involving finding European developer support shops in order to get the assistance needed. This is changing though and American developer firms are becoming more widely available.
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Likelihood to Renew
We had and still have a fantastic experience using Adobe CQ. Lots of flexibility, great integration with other Adobe products we already use and a powerful technology make it a great fit for our corporate environment. Also as the community grows, it makes it easier to network with other developers and users to get new ideas on how to continue to get the best out of the software.
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I am giving this a semi-high rating because we have already got Tridion up and running and we are still in the process of moving the sites over to Tridion. It is unlikely we will be moving things to a new CMS AGAIN in the near future as the cost to get Tridion was high.
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Usability
Considering I'm completely self-taught on Adobe Experience Manager, I have to rate usability quite high since plenty of aspects were easy to figure out on my own. With its cloud-based platform, access from anywhere it super great for overall usability. Edits can also be made pretty quick and easy, which is another great feature.
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The editor user interface is very user friendly and in-site editing makes simple updates fast and easy. The extensibility of Tridion is a big plus and the ability to add our own options into the default Tridion interface helps us integrate with external systems. Finally, the user permissions and security system helps us deploy it within our large organization.
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Reliability and Availability
Being part of Adobe Suite means you are already notified when the tool has any outages. However, I have never faced unplanned outages. Whenever you face any issue with the site, it is clearly stated if there were any planned outages and how quickly you will be back to normal. So, I will say that even the outages are planned and managed in a great way like their other services.
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No answers on this topic
Performance
With respect to performance, Adobe experience manager is one of the best in the CMS space. We didn't observe frequent slowness on platform, however the systems which are accessing experience manager should be of good specifications without which slowness would be observed. Adobe experience manager works well in integration with other solutions, unless the destination application is designed to trigger frequent calls to AEM.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Adobe Experience Manager, in all its capacity, is a great alternative to any other CMS you are using. It helps in rapid development and makes life easier for maintaining the website for multi-language sites. Technical know-how is eliminated at content authoring. Better documentation in terms of live examples with videos would be appreciated.
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No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Depending on your individual needs, It is really quite simple to create an authoring experience for a website that looks really good. I have been part of many implementations and many teams and have seen many projects that were super successful and others that were not implemented well. AEM has room for a lot of flexibility in the implementation process compared to other CMS like SharePoint
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Alternatives Considered
SSO is one fits all, so we don't have to have a separate SSO for each application of Adobe The integration with Analytics works perfectly and bring directly value really quickly Target remains more complicated to set up, but can also bring a lot of value once integrated with the rest of the Adobe platform The fact that the solution is Cloud services is also a big advantage for maintenance
Read full review
Interwoven teamsites, Documentum, Adobe - teamsites and documentum are old and limited. Adobe rocks but I like where I am and Tridion does a lot of the same things. No need to reinvent the wheel or move to a lateral product.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • Makes it easy to reuse components across multiple pages and site, which reduces the overhead needed to create all the individual components.
  • Improves business process agility by allowing users to easily create entirely new pages or content by using existing templates
  • Increases conversion rates across our sites by enabling a more consistent experience for users
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  • SDL is a very complex system. Creating custom components by external vendors turned out to be expensive.
  • The learning curve is very slow, so training takes a lot of time and cost.
  • The revamped corporate site looks clean, modern, and is mobile-friendly.
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ScreenShots

Adobe Experience Manager Screenshots

Screenshot of AEM Forms - Creates an adaptive formScreenshot of AEM Forms - themes libraryScreenshot of AEM Forms - where to create a templateScreenshot of AEM Forms - the interactive communications editorScreenshot of Adobe Experience Manager Sites - document-based authoring enables marketers to create and publish content with familiar tools.Screenshot of Adobe Experience Manager Sites - Universal Editor, an advanced visual editor, empowers marketers to edit and publish content.