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Reviews (1-12 of 12)
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March 31, 2021
Canon Canada uses Magnolia as the primary CMS platform for managing and building out the pages for their main consumer website: Canon.ca. It is used by multiple departments within the company with varying levels of web expertise and solves the main problem of simplifying the process of publishing and managing web and product pages for everyone involved.
- Clean and organized user interface
- [The] flexibility of building out templates for users
- Good security and access to [the] visibility of user records
- Give users specification details and or tips for module items and fields (ie. explain what the fields would do to the front end-user)
- Batch upload drag and drop for assets/images
- [The] simpler way to find out the URL of a page without publishing for both EN/FR users
- No way to revert to past versions of a page that hasn't been published live
- A way to copy a specific module on a page with all the fields and settings completed and paste it to a different page
My favorite features [are] the overall simplified UI and the draggable components and modules for page building. I also like the ability to
preview pages in real-time before publishing them with mobile, tablet, and desktop views.
preview pages in real-time before publishing them with mobile, tablet, and desktop views.
March 30, 2021
We use Magnolia as the content management platform for our corporate website. It is used across the company and enables users to take control of the relevant content, without involvement of technical staff.
- Good control of publishing content.
- Easy to use by the end users / publishers.
- Very flexible for adding functionality.
- Excellent support for development efforts.
- Steep learning curve for the admins / developers.
- Some user interface features don't always work, sometimes even crash the system (deleting messages in bulk for example).
My personal favourite feature of Magnolia is that it gives users full control over content that they need to publish - what they need to publish, and when, and they can do this without any involvement of IT staff. IT staff only gets involved when changes in functionality of Magnolia are needed. IT staff can work on these separately from what users are doing, and deliver it as needed. This separation is something that most users of content management systems take for granted, but it is not always present, especially in custom home grown CM systems.
Magnolia is used in Marketing and IT Department to manage user journeys on all digital clients. As a customer of Magnolia you can build up a complete content strategy to fulfill a consistent experience and behaviour on all channels. If you want to use it as an easy to use CMS or as content pool for apps or services is up to you.
- Ease of use / Usability
- Flexible for all kinds of integrations
- Modularity - not a heavy lifted suite
- Technology stack has a steep learning curve
- Could improve mass data management
- Speed of Performance
March 19, 2021
Magnolia is used as an enterprise-wide content management application for a number of public-facing websites in our organization. It helps to create and manage content for our website using a user-friendly interface, rather than needing to work directly with the code. Basically, it makes managing a website much easier for users of all technical levels.
- Its developer friendly
- The customizations that can be done on top of the product is definitely a plus
- The interface is user friendly
- Magnolia comes with a standard set of extensions/third party libraries that can be easily integrated to provide business users the functionality they need.
- The publishing of content is driven by workflows and is highly extensible.
- The product can be used in various forms for different business needs for example it can be used as a runtime engine serving the website to customers or be it used as a headless CMS via rest.
- Magnolia comes with a dedicated product support and technical help.
- Most importantly, its easy to use and comes as a fully functional CMS.
- It could definitely improve in the area of cloud deployment.
- User interface could use some improvement
- Getting used to the platform takes a while for newcomers
Some of the favs of magnolia are personalization, headless capabilities, content creation and publish
With personalization, we are able to segment our customers and target promotions based on customers shopping patterns and preferences.
With personalization, we are able to segment our customers and target promotions based on customers shopping patterns and preferences.
Magnolia is our company's content management system. It is used by multiple departments in the organization. It is used to create and publish content [on] the company's website. It offers us an easy way to deliver a digital experience to our consumer, business, and professional audiences. It allows multiple teams within the organization to communicate with an external audience.
- It's intuitive
- It's customizable
- The version we currently use (Magnolia 5) is [aesthetically] pleasing
- With virtual mapping, it would be useful for there to be a way to organize items in groups and to filter (e.g., alphabetically).
- Still, with virtual mapping, it would be easier if a page didn't become redirected until the virtual URI is published. Currently, the page being redirected becomes inaccessible once a vanity URL is created, even if left unpublished.
- More online references/documentation for front-end users.
- An edit mode that lets you make changes to the actual page (i.e., what the page looks like to a website visitor), which would be a separate edit mode [that] currently exists (editing to the back-end, which looks more like a database).
- The ability to multi-task in the CMS. For example, if approving publishing requests, the ability to edit pages while the CMS processes the approvals.
The ability to customize modules has allowed us to be creative in our page designs while still maintaining a consistent look. I find the interface of Magnolia 5 to be pleasing (not as crazy about Magnolia 6 at the moment). The ability to duplicate components and pages has simplified some of our workflows.
March 31, 2021

We use Magnolia as the CMS for our main corporate website. It was implemented as part of our re-design and re-launch in 2019, a project by the corporate and IT team. Today, there are multiple groups of users, including the communications/web team, the customer support teams, as well as the various product marketing teams, few who have "web design experience." It allows us to create and publish webpages in an easy and efficient way.
- Easy interface to adopt to publish webpages.
- Great standard components/templates used as building blocks to build your pages.
- Customizable to suit specific business needs.
- Site speed has been an issue in the past, but has gotten better.
- Customer service has been a bit hit/miss in the past, but has also gotten better with our latest account exec.
- A few years later, we are seeing errors/mistakes in the way some customizations were done by our agency, something the benefit of customization, also lends itself to.
Magnolia's content authoring interface is great and easy to use, as someone who has used a dozen of different CMS's. It makes it easy for anyone to be able to build a webpage - i.e. if you can create a slide on PowerPoint, you can create a webpage through Magnolia. This was one of our main objectives for finding a CMS for our corporate site, given that it is junior marketing teams, not front-end developers, who would be creating the webpages.
We use Magnolia for our corporate website. Multiple departments with[in] our organization use this product to share product information and marketing content. We moved from a custom-developed tool to Magnolia, as it offered IT the ability to develop and build banners and tools for the users. While giving the users the ability to create, manage and publish their own content with no IT involvement.
- Very good support and training team
- Straightforward publishing/approval process
- Highly customizable with banners and customer content
- Steep learning curve
- Documentation written for development teams and lacking for User Admins
August 20, 2015
Magnolia CMS is a great product to develop enterprise websites, extranets and intranets. At the moment, the community is growing day by day but so far not many extensions are available. Magnolia is an enterprise CMS, the initial learning curve takes time, to learn all its functionalities and how to customize it is necessary to know Java. When one wants to develop just a simple website without complexity which doesn’t need any specific features such as workflow, versioning, environment separation between staging and public, etc. it is preferable to choose another CMS.
- The usability of Magnolia is appreciated, a content editor easily learns how to manage the content in two hours only.
- Magnolia is open, flexible and extendible and it is possible to modify or improve the standards features. Using Java API, REST, SOAP, CMIS, XML, etc. makes it possible to integrate other software or legacy data.
- Magnolia as a modular architecture, a module has its lifecycle, configuration, version handing and dependency: this is a good approach for package content and functionality.
- Magnolia is written in Java, the platform of choice for enterprise IT systems. It is scalable, stable and secure, and Magnolia separates the staging from public environment.
- Magnolia lacks of an administrative dashboard showing all the workflow, possibly in a graphical representation of their status.
- The audit module only logs in a file: having a dashboard for the audit would be a nice improvement.
- When the time comes to configure templates and components in the Standard Templating Kit is quite complicated and boring at times. A widget to help the developer would be a very interesting job. In addition, having the possibility to configure template and component in the Standard Template Kit by code would be nice.
- Implementing a customization in the administrative UI or in the dialogs isn’t simple and the developer must know Vaadin.
- Migrating from the previous major release is complicated and expensive, since Magnolia 5 isn’t compatible with the old major versions (Magnolia 4).
March 08, 2014
We use it to manage the sites of the customer I work with. We use as a front end application, with a custom module we made. We don't use the authentication module to let the users login, but our secure servlets. the product lets us solve the problem of finding a templating system and a CMS application to not let IT employees change the contents of the web pages.
- Easy to use for end users
- You can use both jsp and ftl
- It lets you easily develop a site for both mobile and desktop (V5 only)
- Nice templating mechanism
- Uninstalling modules it too messy
- Almost no documentation
- It uses 2 dbs (one on filesystem) and so it is impossibile to get back in case of errors when publishing new version of self made modules
February 21, 2014
It is the official CMS.
It is used across the whole organization.
Licence costs.
It is used across the whole organization.
Licence costs.
- Easy to create and move pages
- Easy to do custom development
- Easy to integrate with other frameworks
- The admin interface could be easier to use
- It would be good to have more modules provided by the community
Overall it is a good CMS product, but sometimes it has issues with publishing content. It is open source and pure Java. It is easy to deploy and maintain. Also, it has a good community to ask questions. We can customize on our demand. Java developers learn it very quickly without any knowledge curve.
- Deployment
- Development
- Open Source
- Easy to Maintain
- Publishing
- Content Management
- Subscribe
March 08, 2014

We used Magnolia CMS for a prototype solution for a range of multilingual websites that are managed by their own department in that country. We investigated the product to create a solution for the client, who were looking for a content managed website solution.
- The product allowed the site to be skinned easily.
- The product allowed developers to create dialogs to enable the content editors to enter content for the website.
- The product is a powerful content management tool.
- The set-up of Magnolia CMS seemed to be a little fiddly.
Magnolia Scorecard Summary
Feature Scorecard Summary
What is Magnolia?
Today’s DX productions have become big operations involving many, independent teams collaborating over decoupled technology. So Magnolia's DXP aims to enable users so that they can achieve digital excellence at speed and scale.
With Magnolia, the vendor states users get a robust content hub, feature-complete multi-experience creation tools, and API-first architecture to integrate business applications, any front-end frameworks and deployment infrastructure.
Connector packs natively extend Magnolia's CMS into other core digital systems. Users get blueprints for integration, off-the-shelf connectors, and the ability to change products at any time.
Magnolia Screenshots
Magnolia Videos (5)
Magnolia Downloadables
- Magnolia Feature Catalog: Get a full overview of Magnolia's capabilities and connector packs for a flexible, yet durable digital platform.
- Blueprints for Deep Personalization: Learn the key steps towards building personalized customer experience.
- Head to Headless Report: Visual headless: 1,000 CMS users share their thoughts on the next level of content management and digital experience design.
- Magnolia for the Enterprise: Find out what you can achieve with Magnolia’s enterprise-grade capabilities.
- Magnolia in a Can - Containerization with Magnolia: Learn how to deploy Magnolia as a Docker container based on best practices from our professional services team
Magnolia Integrations
commercetools, SAP Commerce Cloud (formerly SAP Hybris), Salesforce Commerce Cloud, BigCommerce, Bynder Brand Portal, CELUM ContentHub, Cloudinary, Matomo Analytics (formerly Piwik), Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, Marketo, Adyen, Siteimprove, Elasticsearch, Pivotal RabbitMQ, Apache Solr, Oracle WebLogic Application Server, WebSphere Application Server, GraphQL, REST APIs, Magento Commerce, part of Adobe Commerce Cloud, CommerceKit, S3, Movingimage, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Across Translation, Microsoft Translator, Translations.com, Google Translator, Biocryptology, Netlify, Spring Framework, Bootstrap, JBPM, CAS, LDAP, Ehcache, Memcached, SiteMesh, Wildfly
Magnolia Competitors
Magnolia Pricing
- Has featureFree Trial Available?Yes
- Has featureFree or Freemium Version Available?Yes
- Has featurePremium Consulting/Integration Services Available?Yes
- Entry-level set up fee?No
For the latest information on pricing, visit https://www.magnolia-cms.com/library/landing-pages/demo-rp
Magnolia Customer Size Distribution
Consumers | 0% | |
Small Businesses (1-50 employees) | 10% | |
Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees) | 57% | |
Enterprises (> 500 employees) | 33% |
Magnolia Support Options
Free Version | Paid Version | |
---|---|---|
Phone | ||
Forum/Community | ||
FAQ/Knowledgebase | ||
Social Media | ||
Video Tutorials / Webinar | ||
Live Chat | ||
Onsite |
Magnolia Technical Details
Deployment Types: | On-premise, SaaS |
---|---|
Operating Systems: | Windows, Linux, Mac |
Mobile Application: | Mobile Web |
Supported Countries: | Global |
Frequently Asked Questions
What are Magnolia's top competitors?
Adobe Experience Manager, Bloomreach Experience Manager (formerly Hippo), and Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP) are common alternatives for Magnolia.
What is Magnolia's best feature?
Reviewers rate Community / comment management highest, with a score of 8.2.
Who uses Magnolia?
The most common users of Magnolia are Enterprises from the Information Technology & Services industry.