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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

(1-2 of 2)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our clients like Magnolia for its flexibility and extensibility. We’ve been successful with Magnolia’s hybrid headless approach and multi-channel content distribution for both established companies and growing startups. In addition to leveraging the out-of-the-box features, we’ve built detailed components, layouts, and customized functionality to help meet our clients’ needs. They love that our answer is almost always “yes!” when they ask us “can Magnolia do X?” and the easy-to-use author controls make training and handoff a breeze.
  • Hybrid headless
  • Integration
  • Easy to use UI
  • Robust permission controls
  • Extended DAM features
  • Internal site search (currently is handled through optional 3rd party).
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.
Web Content Creation (7)
77.14285714285714%
7.7
WYSIWYG editor
90%
9.0
Code quality / cleanliness
80%
8.0
Admin section
90%
9.0
Page templates
90%
9.0
Mobile optimization / responsive design
90%
9.0
Publishing workflow
100%
10.0
Form generator
N/A
N/A
Web Content Management (5)
76%
7.6
Content taxonomy
90%
9.0
SEO support
90%
9.0
Bulk management
100%
10.0
Availability / breadth of extensions
100%
10.0
Community / comment management
N/A
N/A
Platform & Infrastructure (2)
90%
9.0
API
100%
10.0
Internationalization / multi-language
80%
8.0
Security (1)
100%
10.0
Role-based user permissions
100%
10.0
CMS programming language or framework
N/A
N/A
  • Consolidated tech stack
  • Happy clients
  • Smooth implementation
It's very easy to use and easy to learn. Whenever we bring on new developers they pick it up right away mostly because there's so much flexibility. On the authoring and editing end, we see the same thing—clients pick it up really quickly and can take off with minimal ongoing guidance.
Magnolia's performance is on par with other enterprises CMS/DXPs. The only performance issues we've run into have been on the client's end (content/migrated existing code) and were easily solved. I've been pleased with performance the entire 3+ years I've been using it.
Compared to other WCMS/CMS/DXPs, Magnolia is among the best enterprise products. It's easier or as easy to use as others and has more features and more flexibility than most. The out of the box features are pretty standard, but the integrations and extensibility really set it apart from the rest.
15
Product owners, devs, architects, QA, content authors, publishers, content strategists, and business stakeholders all use Magnolia. On the client-end, can vary client by client, but it's usually a group of 10-20 people. With the right governance in place, managing roles and permissions is really easy and helps us manage all our content and channels effectively.
We usually have a set of developers, a technical architect, a product owner, and some QA resources to support Magnolia on an ongoing basis. This depends on the level of customization the business requires and also how complex the channels and usage are—for a really dynamic, growing business it's a larger team, but for some of our smaller clients it's a much smaller team.
  • Omnichannel content management and distribution
  • Digital asset management
  • Structured content
  • Website content management
  • App content management
  • Omnichannel content management for many digital channels
  • Multi-site blogging
  • Ecommerce
  • We might be able to extend the use of Magnolia for partner sites
  • One of our clients is starting to use it for campaign landing pages
We will definitely be renewing Magnolia because it is flexible, scalable, and does everything our clients need. We've been really happy with Magnolia and its performance and how we've been able to extend it for so many use cases. It's one of the best enterprise DXPs we use and they've been really great partners with us.
We've had great experiences with Magnolia's support team. They have always been super reliable and helpful every time.
We did not purchase premium support.
Yes
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our public website runs on Magnolia. It allows Marketing to design rich content without developer input. It also helps us introduce new products quickly. From a development perspective it allows us to add functionality easily via REST APIs, Filters etc.
  • Intuitive UI
  • Very customisable - easy to extend functionality of the CMS to fit business needs ie filters, REST endpoints
  • Great team support - our account manager always helpful as are the support team
  • Difficult at times to upgrade versions - moving from 5.6 to 5.7 was time consuming, 5.7 to 6.2 also has been challenging but support from Magnolia has been helpful
  • To build and troubleshoot the CMS requires Java dev skills - it is a powerful CMS but one only businesses with experienced Java developers should consider Magnolia
Magnolia is ideal if you want to offer your Marketing team some freedoms to create pages but constrain them in a way so the pages they create conform to certain agreed rules. It is also suited to teams who use Java in-house as extending functionality of the CMS will require Java skills.
Web Content Creation (7)
45.71428571428571%
4.6
WYSIWYG editor
N/A
N/A
Code quality / cleanliness
80%
8.0
Admin section
70%
7.0
Page templates
60%
6.0
Mobile optimization / responsive design
60%
6.0
Publishing workflow
50%
5.0
Form generator
N/A
N/A
Web Content Management (5)
N/A
N/A
Content taxonomy
N/A
N/A
SEO support
N/A
N/A
Bulk management
N/A
N/A
Availability / breadth of extensions
N/A
N/A
Community / comment management
N/A
N/A
Platform & Infrastructure (2)
40%
4.0
API
80%
8.0
Internationalization / multi-language
N/A
N/A
Security (1)
N/A
N/A
Role-based user permissions
N/A
N/A
CMS programming language or framework
N/A
N/A
  • Quick to get new products available on website - in past we needed lots of dev effort - now Marketing and Product teams can do this if a template can be reused
  • Marketing can easily create landing pages for campaigns
Overall it's usable but does require some training to understand how it works
Generally it performs well. We've had occasional issues where CPU spikes and things slow down but that might not be Magnolia-related.

We also considered using Contentful as we were looking at alternatives for having greater control over WYSIWYG content. We decided the best path would be to instead upgrade Magnolia to the latest version to get the benefits with Stories.
15
Sales, Marketing, Product Owners, Software Developers, QA Testers
3
Skills needed at CMS side to support any issues with content creation, publishing etc.
Java skills in development team for support with Java backend issues
IT/DevOps support for assistance with any AWS issues around the hosting and load balancing, CDN etc
  • Website product pages, cart, and checkout
  • REST API as middleware between website and 3rd party API's (ie commercetools)
  • Website marketing content
We have invested a lot of time and energy into tailoring a solution that works for the company.
We think the new features in v6.2 will help us get to the next level
We also don't have the resources to rebuild a website platform from scratch even if we wanted to
We have an account manager, Bradley who goes out of his way to help us. We're probably one of the smallest clients he deals with and yet he treats us as VIPs.
The technical support we get from Magnolia team is always quick and we get lots of help and advice overcoming issues
We have a package that works for us
Yes
Yes, always are
Yes, our account manager Bradley has been great whenever we have blockers, especially during the upgrade from 5.7 to 6.2.
Upgrading Magnolia is challenging but the support team have helped us get to the point we're almost ready to go
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