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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

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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)
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Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
If you need a business CMS that brings along a good amount of features and also give you the chance to develop features on your own, Magnolia would be a good choice. Even if you have not the fitting infrastructure around, Magnolia provides you different ways like SAAS oder PAAS. If you have to review your code our have any problems the team behind will helps in a short time.
Without using the connectors it is not so easy to connect special functionalities like Marketing tools or optimization tools. The DAM is very slow if you have an huge amount of documents and pictures to store for your website - you have to add an external DAM.
March 30, 2024

Magnolia CMS

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Magnolia is well suited for both B2B and B2C enterprise sites covering multiple geographies and languages. The platform has evolved over the period of time and offers extensive customization options. The inbuilt applications e.g. pages app etc are a very good starting points. With so many oob components and options to create or customize existing is a good offering from CMS point of view. Magnolia might not be suitable for smaller sized website where you just need few static/dynamic pages with limited capabilities.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I have little to say on where it is not appropriate - I've used other high end CMS systems and this is by far the best. There seems to be a focus on the CMS market for headless CMS with a front end delivery framework and that is really only appropriate when using significant multi-channel sites. For a small charity as we are, the ability to have an integrated CMS and delivery front end was excellent. I am sure Magnolia would also perform well as headless, so supporting both is crucial.

The weakness I pointed out means that if there are authentication and other integrations needed, more complex development is also needed. I suspect a little bit of alleviation on that would resolve it. Overall its excellent for many use cases for low to high end.

The PAAS/SAAS is not also excellent if not always within the reach of smaller organisations but Magnolia proved proportionate in their pricing model, recognising who we were, which definitely helped.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Magnolia is extremely well suited to our situation, it provides us with everything we require and if there are features that we would like they are always more than happy to work with us to implement them. Magnolia's cockpit is good as a base but we would recommend exporting data to an external solution for more advise detail into logs, etc.
October 16, 2023

Personalisation is key

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use magnolia to be able to provide a different journey to our users depending on authentication status or persona so we can better target and convert users. Magnolia makes this very easy and is a key factor to us using with the business, also being a headless CMS system allows us to deploy in a variety of ways across a range of platforms.
Andrew Elia | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Magnolia is very well suited to scenarios where there are multiple end points for content eg. apps, remote devices, websites etc. and with multiple users. Magnolia is very good at working with different "shapes" of content so it's not necessarily all about HTML content for the web which tends to be the default for a number of other products of this nature. This means that it's more logical for people to work with structured data and easier for the applications to sort and manage that content when they receive it.
This works really well when you have multiple team members (often in multiple locations). We've had clients who've had people in twelve European locations with sixteen languages and they can share skills and resources between them but still manage their own content.

Magnolia is less appropriate for SMEs who have fewer digital assets and content. It's not to say that it can't be done but it's more that the budget would not necessarily fit.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Magnolia is a versatile and robust enterprise grade Content Management. It is not as well suited for regular users or small companies as it requires rather a complex setup. The customer support is providing quick guidance on most of the areas, but you will still need a pretty big team to manage it.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
For omnichannel content distribution, Magnolia does a great job of allowing us to create user-friendly content apps and content models, categorize content, manage taxonomies, etc. We've used it for marketing sites, e-commerce, apps, and more. We also like the built-in checkers and workflows for task management and QA. It can be as powerful or as simplistic as you want, but it's really great for scalable content management for rapidly growing businesses.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Magnolia is great for managing multiple sites within an organization. We are able to managed over 200 business users with access to 50+ sites with business users only having access to their sites. A few of these sites are integrated with Angular and the integration with Magnolia doesn’t always play nice. We’ve had to design some of our own solutions for this.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Magnolia is put to good use [when] creating a basic website with limited content. It is very easy for both the developer and the customer to contribute content. [In my opinion,] the part [that needs improvement] is in the documentation. Content and examples are missing [when trying to] develop certain properties. [In my opinion, the] Magnolia modules should be explained better in the documentation. In the interface, [I find that] it is difficult to move elements and nodes sometimes. [I also believe that] content loading is sometimes very slow when there are more nodes on the account.
December 24, 2022

Meh

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
A colleague here being another business. Magnolia is on its way to being a 'good' product but the 6.2 implementation simply isn't there yet (6.2.26 as of this writing). The admincentral UI could use a complete overhaul to be better streamlined for devs and content editors (the two who actually use it).
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
If you need to get up and running quickly then Magnolia is a great option. For more complicated user requirements, then the stack can be unfriendly in terms of configuration. Documentation could be improved.
Mario de Vicente Fernandez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Magnolia allows you to create your web sites in a really easy and fast way. No coding and enough available tools to create fancy sites. Also in case something additional is needed, customization is easyly supported so you can create new content apps can be greated expanding its capabilities. The main improvement area from my point of view are the reporting features. There is no easy way of obtaining information about how your users are using the platform. Especific ad-hoc reports can be built, but the platform does not support it out of the box.
Manuel Alejandro Lupión Jiménez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I think that magnolia is prepared for the generation of webs were to show static content managed directly by the cms itself. Due to the internal management that JCR does, I think that magnolia's performance should be improved when the data that is retrieved from the Rest api is very heavy, for example, a content app in which more than 500,000 records are stored.
January 12, 2022

Magnolia is cool

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I think that Magnolia is especially well trained to generate and manage multisite web pages and all their content. Regarding the scenario in which magnolia is less appropriate, I think it is directly related to the management of large volumes of content in the same content apps. Especially when sharing these contents via api rest.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Magnolia is well suited for cases where Magnolia is going to be used to make web pages where an editor needs to make changes or edit the content on certain pages. In cases where you have a small volume of content and want to customize the content based on user characteristics. Also if you want to use it as headless. Magnolia does not fit when you want to use the CMS as a back-office or to manage a large amount of content that needs to be referenced as you would in a relational database. It is not suitable for content that is related to other content and has different types of content as children.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Magnolia is well suited to use in huge content sites containers like Amazon, Netflix, or something like that. As well as is a very good solution for e-commerce, research solutions, and companies with huge data volume to use inside their sites. Also, it provides a very high secured solution as it's providing content safety mode with author-public instances.
January 10, 2022

Magnolia review

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Magnolia is perfect for Building simple landing pages Building complex websites Providing a simple way to allow the marketing users to manage the information that will be displayed in the public pages Allowing different users (With different groups and roles) to edit the content at the same time, On the other hand, Magnolia is not so well-suited to, for example, build Intranets, since there are specific products for this case.
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