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Adobe Experience Manager Reviews

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Score 7.9 out of 101

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Reviews (1-25 of 28)

Tolulope Lawal profile photo
April 01, 2019

Adobe Experience Manager is one of the most useful products in the Adobe ecosystem

Tolulope Lawal
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Adobe Experience Manager keeps your content separate from your layout which allows for a lot of flexibility in how you display your content.
  • Adobe Experience Manager integrates really well with other Adobe products like Adobe Analytics.
  • Adobe Experience Manager 's drag and drop interface makes it fairly easy to utilize with minimal familiarity.
  • A decent amount of technical knowledge is needed to set up templates for sites.
  • The capabilities of the different kind of users don't align very well with the different roles/job functions at some organizations.
Read Tolulope Lawal's full review
No photo available
April 09, 2019

Adobe Experience Manager review - a comprehensive but often complex solution

Verified User
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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Pros and Cons

  • Adobe Experience Manager is great for maintaining large websites with lots of content. It has a comprehensive repository and folder structure which makes it easy to organize and break down your website into sections.
  • Although we have not personally used it much yet, Adobe Experience Manager has integrations with the other Adobe Experience Cloud products such as Campaign, Target, and Analytics. The newest version(s) also have integrations with Creative Cloud products like Photoshop, which allows creatives to upload assets directly into the DAM.
  • Adobe Experience Manager has powerful live copy/translation tools that allow you to clone and translate webpages into other languages for alternate language versions of your site.
  • The new Touch UI interface could use a lot of improvement. Many of it is smaller detail items/features, but when using the system extensively it can become cumbersome.
  • There is a bit of a learning curve because of the depth of what Adobe Experience Manager can do. Even basic editing and page creation, while relatively simple at the most basic level, is not as intuitive and easy to use as other systems like WordPress.
  • Development can be complicated. Although I've not personally done much in terms of dev work, my experience and what I've heard from my colleagues indicates that there are some complexities that make it not as easy to develop in as other systems.
  • The source edit option within the rich text editor does not include syntax coloring for the code, or even a different serif/monospaced font. It is the same sans serif font as the regular rich text, which makes it hard to read.
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December 07, 2018

Adobe Experience Manager is a Great Fit for Efficiency, Room for Improvement with Creativity

Verified User
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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Pros and Cons

  • Adobe Experience Manager allows our company to manage multiple sites simultaneously.
  • Adobe Experience Manager make it easy to share review sites for necessary sign-offs.
  • Adobe Experience Manager is a flexible resource and can always be what you make of it.
  • Searching for and organizing images can be a clunky experience.
  • Standard components frequently do not meet our needs. New components must constantly be in production to run what I usually consider pretty standard functionality.
  • Steep learning curve for people not used to web design or development. Not intuitive at all levels.
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No photo available
December 20, 2018

AEM is robust CMS with some features but it has a learning curve

Verified User
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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Pros and Cons

  • You can create robust templates in this CMS and reuse later
  • Managing small or big sites become easier
  • You can use it with Adobe Cloud
  • It has a learning curve, not everything is straightforward even if you are familiar with other CMS's
  • Depending how big your site is, it can become a bit slow
Read this authenticated review
Vanessa Suarez profile photo
October 22, 2018

AEM, great and easy CMS for small and big sites!

Vanessa Suarez
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
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Pros and Cons

  • It's a drag and drop kind of platform, so building pages is very easy and you don't need coding abilities.
  • The ability to copy existing blocks and section from other pages is excellent! Instead of creating content from scratch, you can actually copy the section you want from an existing page, and paste it in your new page and update the content. This saves a lot of time!
  • The block/brick system is very clean and the results look very good!
  • You can easily embed videos from Youtube only by adding the Youtube ID. Very easy!
  • There is no easy way to change a template if it has been built a certain way. Sometimes it would be nice to have an option to add an extra item on the spot. Instead, you have to ask your IT team to create for you.
  • You can set up a staging site and a site to publish... but sometimes the 2 environments doesn't connect correctly, meaning some changes in the staging sites doesn't show of on the live site.
  • The quick publish button is dangerous and not that helpful: pages can be published with the "quick publish" option even if they are blocked... however, the purpose of a blocked page is to prevent it from publishing until you unblock it. Also, the "quick publish" option will publish your age and every other page connected to it! so be careful!!
Read Vanessa Suarez's full review
Meghan Hays profile photo
December 13, 2017

AEM Asset Management

Meghan Hays
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
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Pros and Cons

  • Easily searchable with the proper meta data
  • Creating links to assets, publishing assets and sharing assets is very easy and fast
  • Uploading files and creating folders is fast and easy
  • Adding meta data to batch files would make it much more efficient
  • You still need to convert any Word or Excel docs to PDFs if this was on auto when you have multiple files, it would also save time
Read Meghan Hays's full review
Courtney E. Howard profile photo
December 05, 2017

Reaping the benefits of Adobe Experience Manager after slightly shaky start

Courtney E. Howard
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
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Pros and Cons

  • Provides instant access from anywhere with a web connection to content.
  • Enables development and use of large image repository that is well organized, promoting easy reuse and accessibility.
  • Accommodates near-real-time edits/changes; changes are reflected almost instantly, as soon as refreshed.
  • Adobe does a decent job of adding features and support, such as for new file formats (added PNG support, when previously only supported GIF and JPG).
  • User interface reminiscent of Microsoft Word, enabling fast customization.
  • Great way to add Cloud capabilities and content management to your workflow.
  • Easy to learn and use; learning curve minor.
  • In all honesty, Adobe Experience Manager is not without its glitches, like anything. Some errors have perplexed our internal IT staff.
  • Likely to require some finessing or customization to work with or port over assets in an existing system.
  • Check that it supports any ancillary, third-party or custom solutions you might already use.
  • Check on hardware requirements, to ensure your infrastructure is sufficient to take full advantage of AEM (web server capacity, speeds, etc.).
Read Courtney E. Howard's full review
No photo available
March 13, 2018

Experience Adobe Experience Manager

Verified User
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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Pros and Cons

  • AEM is great for customization. Web Dev builds the parts and authors use what they need.
  • Branding can be ensured with the ability to require brand colors, fonts, and styles.
  • It's easy to see who has built, modified, and published pages. It makes tracking changes very convenient.
  • The move to the new interface for authoring is drastically different from the previous interface. Moving has been difficult.
  • Since it is so customizable, a talented web dev team is needed to make all the parts.
  • It is not easy to tell if the page is live or draft in the new interface.
  • Integration with non-Adobe marketing automation tools is very difficult.
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No photo available
January 18, 2018

AEM review as an administrator

Verified User
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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Pros and Cons

  • Ease of use for content authors by drag and drop components.
  • Easy to manage users and permissions through grouping.
  • Built in assets management.
  • Cost. AEM is expensive.
  • Touch UI not as intuitive as classic UI.
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Sujeet Sharma profile photo
October 13, 2017

Review from AEM Consultant

Sujeet Sharma
Score 7 out of 10
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Pros and Cons

  • Easy content authoring by using drag-n-drop components.
  • Strong workflows support. You can quickly implement review-approve workflows. DAM Workflows can create different renditions of uploaded images by default.. For example create thumbnail image, small image, large image, adding text on image.. all these feature are out of the box
  • OOTB Social integration feature. You can quickly integrate with facebook, pinterest and share your content there.
  • Easy to launch multiple site from source site using live copy feature. You can launch child site from parent site with content subset. For example... for different region of same language you want to launch the site with minimal content.
  • Content fragment, Experience fragment making authors life easy..They can create content in advance that can be used on multiple pages.
  • OOTB integration feature provided for Adobe analytics, Adobe target. Obviously, you need separate license for analytics and target
  • OSGi support. Project can be divided into multiple sub-projects and can be deployed/un-deployed without affecting other deployed projects. Using runmodes, you can impose different configurations for different environments.
  • Easy User management and permission control.
  • Adobe provides OOTB caching plug-in for webserver that can be used to clear cache automatically on content change. You can specify the rule what you want to cache or not.
  • Reporting made easy... DAM asset reports, page reports, click reports are available OOTB..
  • Components were introduced to reduce the development & authoring time by reusing them. With some clients, it worked very well because they had page structure and content like that. But if you have UI requirements that can not support component re-usability then your life will be difficult. You will end up creating more and more components in the hope that they will be utilized one day some where on some page... Although you can achieve re-usability by creating smaller customizable component but then again it will increase your development time. In a Nutshell, you will not save development time.
  • Osgi was a great concept. AEM Developer used to write the most of business logic in them but due to adaptation of micro-services, now everybody wants to implement business logic in there instead of AEM internal OSGi. If your architecture had micro services then power of Osgi is useless for you, you will just use 10-20% of it which will bring no big value.
  • License of AEM is super costly, not every organization can afford it. Once you have implemented AEM, it will be hard to get rid of it. Getting rid will mean another investment.
  • Like other products, AEM also releases new versions. Upgrades to new versions never happens smoothly. Means organization needs to spend more money to upgrade the servers.
  • You need a big infrastructure to deploy AEM server setup. Each setup needs at least 3 machines, one for author, one for publisher and one for dispatcher. This means spending more money on maintenance.
  • TouchUI is confusing sometimes for everyone i.e business, authors, developers.
Read Sujeet Sharma's full review
Diana Williams profile photo
September 06, 2016

AEM delivers an Exception Crop of websites for Ag Education

Diana Williams
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
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Pros and Cons

  • It is easy for people who are not web designers to achieve an attractive and useful website
  • It is easy to manage users and their permissions
  • It allows users to assemble their digital assets in one place, for use on the web site
  • Upgrading and applying patches can be hit or miss - I recommend backups because of the potential to damage the existing infrastructure
  • Space management is an issue - every change or request takes up space that can be reclaimed, but only through a complicated procedure done through command prompts. There was no documentation for this on their site and we had to use a third party to create the procedure. It has to be run manually.
  • There isn't a good backup system, particularly one that can be scheduled to run reliably.
Read Diana Williams's full review
Mike Plant profile photo
May 09, 2016

AEM is a leader in the CMS industry

Mike Plant
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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Pros and Cons

  • Media library and asset management is simplified, separating storage and also allowing developers to manage the workflow of the publishing process.
  • No addition of API services are required, using the same requests and data access layer for both front end and back end development simplifies the project lifecycle.
  • Duplicating code is easy, developers can simply copy components and reuse or rework for each use case.
  • Styling the front-end of the author interface can sometimes be challenging. Built in styles and HTML can be overwhelming until you get used to it. Having a less intrusive author output or defining a standard output per site could speed development.
  • Documentation is often outdated, keeping docs up to date and readily available is needed.
  • The local build process is slow and takes a lot of space. Reducing the overhead with local testing would be great!
Read Mike Plant's full review
Shishir Srivastava profile photo
April 06, 2016

Great platform for developers to build complex websites

Shishir Srivastava
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
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Pros and Cons

  • Concept of iparsys enabling inheritance
  • MSM support for multi site
  • Digital Asset management
  • Concept of preview
  • Workflow GUI
  • Widget customization is extremely challenging
  • Ability to create Custom Dashboard is missing
  • Portal support is inadequate
Read Shishir Srivastava's full review
Tea Dejanovic profile photo
February 29, 2016

Great fit for a variety of industries!

Tea Dejanovic
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
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Pros and Cons

  • User friendly interface is easy to learn for people that do not have a technical background and it is easy to train employees how to use it.
  • The flexibility of content management. The content hierarchy on the website is easily changeable because it allows the user to move things around at any stage of the content management process, before or after publishing.
  • The structure of the system in templates and components is very logical and easy to explain to the senior management and/or project sponsors.
  • In Touch UI interface the authoring dialogue can not be expanded which prompts the user to scroll when authoring and makes it a cumbersome user experience.
  • Moving the page hierarchy within AEM structure is not intuitive.
  • Re-sizing of the assets often does not work as expected and the user needs to refresh the page before they see the final outcome.
Read Tea Dejanovic's full review
Nadia Sweeting, MS profile photo
February 23, 2016

Adobe Experience Manager Great Tool for Innovative Digital Marketing

Nadia Sweeting, MS
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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Pros and Cons

  • Ease of image upload
  • Ease of content changes on the spot
  • Workflow systems for production
  • Allow all vested parties to a project to be notified once any changes occur to a page
  • Allow for paid media campaign management
Read Nadia Sweeting, MS's full review
Curtis Mortensen profile photo
August 20, 2015

Adobe CQ from the Perspective of a Software Developer

Curtis Mortensen
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
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Pros and Cons

  • Adobe CQ's biggest strength is allowing marketing departments at our clients to build out their website with minimal tech involvement (once an implementation is in place.) Marketing folks can create pages and arrange pieces on the page to build out a very professional and complex design without requiring a developer to deploy the update.
  • Adobe CQ is built on various open source platforms that make it possible to extend functionality in a lot of complex ways.
  • Adobe CQ also does a good job integrating with many of Adobe's other marketing products, which many clients find useful.
  • I've found that CQ isn't quite as stable as I'd expect an enterprise piece of software to be. There are a few out of the box components that are finnicky/fragile.
  • Supposedly this has been improved in the latest release (6.0), but up until 5.6.1 there were no true coding standards, so business logic could be found scattered all over in scriptlets and servlets. The scriplets would be part JSTL/Expression Language, part scriplet code. This is kind of a nitpick, but as a developer it definitely has an impact.
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Vagner Polund profile photo
April 24, 2015

An experience exclusively for the Author.

Vagner Polund
Score 8 out of 10
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Pros and Cons

  • Manages web content with an intuitive WYSIWYG authoring experience.
  • Manages Digital Assets used by your website such as images, audio, documents, etc.
  • Creates an simple easy to use experience to generate web content. Centers all web content generation around the author.
  • A lot of the OOB (Out Of the Box) components are still a little buggy and not fully ready to go without some minor tweaks.
  • Since the software was acquired not too long ago by Adobe, a lot of Adobe integrated solutions are not fully baked yet. That is getting better with time.
Read Vagner Polund's full review
Ali Alkhafaji profile photo
July 07, 2015

Adobe CQ Content Management

Ali Alkhafaji
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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Pros and Cons

  • Scalable, testable and extensible architecture
  • A large feature set out of the box
  • Intuitive Interface and modulization
  • Adobe CQ could do a better job at providing more intuitive user and developer documentation
Read Ali Alkhafaji's full review
Fernando Galeano profile photo
July 30, 2014

Adobe CQ (AEM) strongly delivers.

Fernando Galeano
Score 8 out of 10
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Pros and Cons

  • Allows non-technical staff to author and publish content by focusing on the content itself and the needs of a given campaign instead of technical implementations.
  • Content workflows allow varying degrees of complexity for content review and quality assurance before providing approvals on any piece before going live.
  • Development teams can build very robust and complex component for handling virtually all posible needs: from integrating back-end web services to UI Widgets for content authoring; from multisite suites to multi-language components, CQ can handle it all thanks to the power of Java and the flexibility of Sling and JCR.
  • Easy to scale for high-traffic sites and thanks to the Publisher/Dispatcher infrastructure, very flexible for caching and load balancing.
  • Steep learning curve for both Authors and Developers when it comes to customized components and workflows.
  • Development community is small and somewhat closed. It keeps growing with the years as CQ becomes more popular, which is a good thing.
  • Expensive, both to purchase, train and certify. This makes it harder to learn unless companies are willing to spend thousands on official training.
Read Fernando Galeano's full review
Cassie Lyn Dusute profile photo
July 25, 2014

I'd Adobe CQ. Would you?

Cassie Lyn Dusute
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
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Pros and Cons

  • Customization. Although this is important for any CMS to allow, CQ does a pretty good job at allowing for customization.
  • Easy to use. Adobe CQ requires a little bit of up-front work to get you started, but after you start, it's easy to continue.
  • Versioning. A huge plus when you're constantly changing pages. The versioning available is amazing and super helpful
  • Migration. We had multiple environments that we were constantly moving content back and forth on. Moving the content over through CQ was a bit of a challenge.
  • Integration. In some instances, Adobe CQ's built in modules would fight with custom modules. Usually the problems went away on their own.
  • Forms. Sometimes when adding a form to the page, the TO and CC sections would show up as empty when they had email addresses. Then when you went to change them, you couldn't close the settings window without clicking cancel.
Read Cassie Lyn Dusute's full review
No photo available
December 14, 2016

AEM Review from a Web/Mobile Designer

Verified User
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • One central location to manage all sites.
  • All assets can be easily accessed, managed, and published from one central location.
  • Easy for authors to create and publish content.
  • User interface can be buggy at times.
  • The touch interface can be confusing and/or unintuitive.
  • Cost. AEM by itself is good, but needs some additional services (Analytics, Target) to really make it more effective.
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No photo available
November 18, 2016

Adobe Experience Manager Review

Verified User
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Give content editors an easy and intuitive interface to manage content. For example the WCM allows users to create and edit pages. The page editor allows the users to navigate the DAM and drag/drop images onto the page. Once done editing, they can submit the page into a workflow for manager review.
  • Give managers the tools to establish an editorial workflow to better control what is published. Managers can create custom workflows, often with out of the box components (there is a workflow editor) to allow them to control the review and publishing of content.
  • Based on Open Source so it is easier for developers to work with. There are at least 2 major OSS libraries out there, ACS Commons and WCM.IO.
  • Out of the box integrations with many other systems, especially the Adobe Marketing Cloud.
  • It is hard to find people with the skill to develop solutions on AEM.
  • The TouchUI pales in comparison to the features found in the Classic UI. Developers have a hard time implementing solutions in the new Touch UI because the framework is lacking, where as in the Classic UI the framework is more robust. For example there are some out of the box classic UI widgets that allow developers to create key/value pair lists in dialogs. In touch ui that does not exists and developers are forced to implement custom solutions.
  • It is based on open source, so a lot of the code base is out there (except the proprietary AEM stuff, i.e. WCM). This means that between versions of AEM, there are major changes (they are good at backward compatibility however). This could be a good thing, but may be a bad thing if your company is more sensitive to big changes that come hard and fast. There are people out there developing on AEM 6.2, as if it were still AEM 5.6. They don't even know how to take advantage of the new features.
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No photo available
November 04, 2015

My experiences with the Experience Manager

Verified User
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Pros and Cons

  • Ease of use and highly customizable
  • Lots of feature integration with other marketing and analytics tools
  • A lot of default options, which when used correctly reduce the need for custom development
  • Designer friendly as it integrates well with several other design and creative tools from Adobe
  • Commerce platform integrations are really hard
  • Developer documentation is not up to the mark
  • Certain issues are very hard to detect and there is little log information
  • Rapidly changing features are compromising the stability of the system
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Adobe Experience Manager Scorecard Summary

Likelihood to Recommend (164)
7.9
Likelihood to Renew (5)
9.0
Usability (2)
10.0
Support (1)
9.0
Implementation (2)
8.7

Feature Scorecard Summary

Role-based user permissions (23)
8.6
API (17)
7.3
Internationalization / multi-language (18)
8.1
WYSIWYG editor (20)
7.5
Code quality / cleanliness (20)
7.1
Admin section (20)
7.6
Page templates (22)
7.1
Library of website themes (15)
5.2
Mobile optimization / responsive design (21)
6.6
Publishing workflow (21)
7.3
Form generator (17)
6.7
Content taxonomy (18)
7.1
SEO support (20)
6.1
Bulk management (22)
6.4
Availability / breadth of extensions (20)
5.2
Community / comment management (18)
5.3

About Adobe Experience Manager

Adobe Experience Manager is a content management system from Adobe designed to help businesses manage their marketing and web presence, and track customer data to optimize the visitor experience and conversion. It allows businesses to create customer profiles for site visitors using both authenticated and anonymous data, dynamic tag management, mobile services and accessibility, and connection with third-party data and applications via the Adobe Marketing Cloud Exchange. It features multi-site management with regionalization and localization and editing, templates to ensure consistency across sites, and pre-built integration with other Adobe tools and services. Marketing campaigns and assets are centrally managed, and out-of-the-box integration with Adobe Analytics, Target, and Adobe Campaign help expand features. E-commerce systems can be integrated and product information can be synchronized, allowing Experience Manager's analytic features to test and improve the online shopping experience. Pricing varies considerably as implementation needs will vary.
Categories:  Customer Experience Management,  Digital Asset Management,  Digital Experience,  Content Management

Adobe Experience Manager Competitors

Adobe Experience Manager Technical Details

Operating Systems: Unspecified
Mobile Application:No