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Magnolia

Magnolia

Overview

What is Magnolia?

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…

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Recent Reviews

Magnolia CMS

10 out of 10
March 30, 2024
Incentivized
Magnolia is our front end CMS serving the content for our B2B website serving 24 countries and 18 different languages. The Magnolia CMS …
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Personalisation is key

7 out of 10
October 16, 2023
About 3 years ago we looked at updating our CMS solution to something that was more adaptable and allow us to be more personalised with …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 16 features
  • Page templates (73)
    8.9
    89%
  • Role-based user permissions (70)
    8.1
    81%
  • Admin section (71)
    8.0
    80%
  • Publishing workflow (74)
    7.5
    75%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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N/A
Unavailable

What is Magnolia?

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…

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Would you like us to let the vendor know that you want pricing?

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ExpressionEngine is a content management system from EllisLab in 2002, a successor to pMachine Pro, a blogging system, which is written in object-oriented PHP and uses MySQL for data storage. ExpressionEngine is their flagship Content Delivery Platform.

What is Adobe Business Catalyst (Discontinued)?

Adobe Business Catalyst was a cloud-hosted system for building and managing web content and online stores with a built-in CRM framework in addition to sales, service, and marketing features including eCommerce and Email Marketing tools. It has been end of life (EOL) since 2020.

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Features

Security

This component helps a company minimize the security risks by controlling access to the software and its data, and encouraging best practices among users.

8.1
Avg 8.0

Platform & Infrastructure

Features related to platform-wide settings and structure, such as permissions, languages, integrations, customizations, etc.

8
Avg 7.7

Web Content Creation

Features that support the creation of website content.

8
Avg 7.6

Web Content Management

Features for managing website content

7.5
Avg 7.3
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Product Details

What is Magnolia?

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 footprint is now global with offices on five continents and more than 200 certified Magnolia Partners strategically located around the world.

Magnolia Features

Web Content Creation Features

  • Supported: WYSIWYG editor
  • Supported: Code quality / cleanliness
  • Supported: Content versioning
  • Supported: Admin section
  • Supported: Page templates
  • Supported: Mobile optimization / responsive design
  • Supported: Publishing workflow
  • Supported: Form generator
  • Supported: Content scheduling

Web Content Management Features

  • Supported: Internal content search
  • Supported: Content taxonomy
  • Supported: SEO support
  • Supported: Browser compatibility
  • Supported: Bulk management
  • Supported: Page caching
  • Supported: Availability / breadth of extensions
  • Supported: Built-in e-commerce / shopping cart
  • Supported: E-commerce / shopping cart extension
  • Supported: Community / comment management
  • Supported: Import / export
  • Supported: Website analytics

Platform & Infrastructure Features

  • Supported: API
  • Supported: Internationalization / multi-language

Security Features

  • Supported: Role-based user permissions
  • Supported: User-level audit trail
  • Supported: Version history
  • Supported: Simple roll-back capabilities

CMS programming language or framework Features

  • Supported: Java

Magnolia Screenshots

Screenshot of the customer experience: Brings together content and audiovisual digital assets to form more compelling digital experiences.Screenshot of the Magnolia App Launcher, used to switch between workspaces and manage pagesScreenshot of Magnolia's native analytics integration framework, used to take advantage of data directly in the authoring UI, coupled to content.Screenshot of global search that brings relevant content, no matter where it resides.Screenshot of customizing the ecommerce experience.

Magnolia Videos

The strengths of Magnolia in 100 seconds.
How to manage content in Magnolia more efficiently
Magnolia headless with no limits
Introducing the Magnolia Visual SPA Editor
Magnolia - Built for speed

Magnolia Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux, Mac
Mobile ApplicationMobile Web
Supported CountriesGlobal

Frequently Asked Questions

Reviewers rate Page templates highest, with a score of 8.9.

The most common users of Magnolia are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).

Magnolia Customer Size Distribution

Consumers0%
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)10%
Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees)57%
Enterprises (more than 500 employees)33%
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(120)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 79)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Open Architecture
  • APAC Team, always willing to work with Client to expand our use case
  • Visionary Product Road-map, allowing them to stay ahead of time to leverage on the best technology out there
  • Easy to use and setup unlike major DXP out in the market
  • Not enough connectors - While there is a great marketplace, there is still a lack of connectors to cater for all other MarTech Platform
  • Lack of a SaaS solution for smaller website that do not need a PaaS or on Premise installation
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Headless
  • Connector Packs
  • Support and Consulting
  • Freedom in development
  • Easier drag and drop functions
  • Form module inflexible
  • find the right structure to overwrite given functions
  • documentation could be more detailed for new user
March 30, 2024

Magnolia CMS

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Content authoring
  • Content publication
  • Workflow
  • OOb components
  • accelerators
  • performance
  • headless offering
  • probably time to go for microservices architecture
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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.
  • Online documentation was out of date in some rare but critical instances
  • There are relatively few people who know the in-depth detail, responsiveness was generally good from support tickets but occasionally it can take a while to get the right answer.
  • The use of Freemarker and time to MVP was resoundingly good, but we were slowed down a little by needing to go to Java to manage what felt like basic requirements to manage the pipeline into web services and this environment seemed to be difficult to setup and manage with dependencies on very specific Java versions ...etc. Room for improvement there.
Andrew Elia | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Reliability
  • Ease of use
  • Rapid development and deployment
  • Performance
  • Robust and secure architecture
  • Improve coverage in North America and the Middle East
  • Arab and Mandarin languages in admin central
  • Less reliance on JCR for back end storage interface
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Easy to onboard new users - using components is fairly intuitive.
  • Once standardized components are built, propping up a new site is pretty easy and quick.
  • Workflows allow my team to stay hands off with editing, but still review changes before they go live.
  • Simple user interface.
  • Can send direct links to edit a page
  • Cannot revert to previous version if it hasn't been published.
  • Individual users cannot delete failed publishes and messages (which makes it look like there are open requests).
  • Publishing larger folders of images is often not possible.
  • We had to design our own preview link solution for sites integrated with Angular
  • Doesn’t always play nice with Angular
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Shows page content
  • Easy development
  • Intuitive
  • Content loading times
  • Documentation in the absence of examples
  • Content that applies [across] different types of nodes (Example: 2 types of nodes within a content app)
December 24, 2022

Meh

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Allows easy/fast development/configuration via yaml.
  • Allows devs to override out of box functionality.
  • Allows many integration points.
  • Admincentral UI is clunky and animations make it feel slow.
  • Admincentral UI layout fosters a frustrating experience w/ many misclicks wasting time.
  • Documentation as of late has been inaccurate and hard to follow.
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Use of YAML to define content models with code.
  • 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.
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Managing content
  • Easy to edit content
  • Easy to build and deploy new functionality
  • Ecommerce within the single platform
  • More personalisation required. - Changing content based on page visited / city user is in.
Ivan De Paz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • The flexibility it offers us to be able to implement all the needs we have.
  • To be able to perform Front development in the technology that best suits your needs, VueJS, ANGULAR, ReactJS.
  • Constant version upgrades make Magnolia a 100% reliable product.
  • The active community behind it to provide support and help.
  • Flexibility and simplicity of creating ContentApps that can be attacked via APIs
  • As a developer the learning curve is long, you can start developing relatively quickly but getting to know the platform in depth takes time.
  • Having a history of modifications not only at the page level but also at the Content Apps level would be very useful.
Chris Chard | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Creating & Managing Web-Content
  • Flexibility for custom requirements
  • Developer friendliness
  • Suitable for enterprise use
  • Usability for editors should be improved
  • Java module developement is only suitable for experienced developers
  • Ease of deployment into third party Cloud infrastructure
Mario de Vicente Fernandez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Agility to create new contents
  • Customization capabilities
  • Roadmap of the product
  • Reporting of activities performed by contributors (changes, publications, accesses...)
  • Log information related with the operation of the platform
  • Only five versions for each conten are usually not enough
January 11, 2022

Magnolia Interview

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Functional development in Magnolia
  • Technical development in Magnolia
  • Maintenance at Magnolia
  • the interface
  • The usability in creating folders and pages
  • Information storage
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Ease of page setup for user editors
  • Personalization of content based on the characteristics of the visiting user
  • Open source makes developers' lives easier
  • Intuitive interface
  • Use of JCR limits the amount of content that can be handled efficiently.
  • The latest version has made it more complicated to customize content apps than in previous versions.
  • It has a steep learning curve for new developers.
January 10, 2022

Magnolia review

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Custom workflows
  • Headless capabilities
  • Different Author / Public instances
  • Traits
  • Multi-site capabilities
  • Publishing mechanism is slow if the number of elements to be published is high
  • Allows only one content type per content app in the newest versions
  • Common problems with Lucene indexes
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