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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

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 (68)
    8.9
    89%
  • Role-based user permissions (66)
    8.1
    81%
  • Admin section (66)
    7.9
    79%
  • Publishing workflow (69)
    7.5
    75%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

View all 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
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.magnolia…

Offerings

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

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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

(116)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 69)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
October 16, 2023

Personalisation is key

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
In terms of the UI in magnolia and using it to navigate, build pages, deployment and manage across multiple different set ups. I find magnolia very easy to pick up and understand and takes a lot of the complexity out of it by using a friendly UI, although it could also be due to the initial set up.
Andrew Elia | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We've shown it to a number of users both clients and our own team and despite initial apprehensions, they "get it" very quickly. It's intuitive and friendly and quick to perform daily tasks. We once had a client tell us "Using Magnolia makes me smile" which says it all for us.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The interface is pretty intuitive and simple. Not a lot of bells and whistles, but you can do what you need to pretty easily. Onboarding new users is very manageable because most of the interface simply makes sense. We were able to create our own processes around Magnolia use in order to create a standard method for training new business users.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
At the user level, it is a rewarding and intuitive experience when it comes to creating websites, components, and content within content applications. Although, [in my opinion,] there is [a] slowness when it comes to going through the workflow when publishing. To add permissions at the administrator level (going through a PM role) is not very intuitive and a bit messy to give permissions to [other] roles and users.
December 24, 2022

Meh

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
There are a ton of small things that could make this CMS great Off the top of my head... 1) Better navigation between a component and its corresponding node in the jcr ( devs often have to flip between a page and a spot in the jcr even though there could be a button to take you from a page/component in the pages app to its location in the JCR) 2) Why does a content editor need to open the page to edit the page properties? They could just as easily edit the dialog from the tree view if they have many pages to touch, and it would save them time by not having to render the page.
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It seems that the best way to customize Magnolia is with light-modules, which requires technical skill beyond the scope of what most end users know. It adds a roadblock between content authors and Magnolia, making it feel inaccessible to new or "non-technical" users. When it comes to actually using the interface, it feels clunky and dated. With limited ways to interact with Magnolia like it's seeming lack of click-and-drag to move apps around (as one example) and limited use of right-click for expanded options, it's reminiscent of early OS X as desktop operating systems were just starting to hit their stride. Simple operations like publication are complicated rituals, and complicated operations are completely out of reach as they require code changes or serious digging into the already cryptic configuration app.
Mario de Vicente Fernandez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I see two main pains:
1. A new user need training to be able even to start using the platform, the onboarding is difficult
2. The platform needs a server with a relevant amount of memory to run properly, the dependency on the memory is really high
Manuel Alejandro Lupión Jiménez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The user interface is fully customizable, allowing the different content Apps to be grouped into sections, which can be given different roles for different types of users. Visually it is easy to use and easy to find the different functionalities that cms provide. The approval flow is simple and effective, allowing to validate the content that is going to be published on the web. Pages edition through components is easy to use and customize.
January 12, 2022

Magnolia is cool

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I think that Magnolia has a very positive character and is that it is quite intuitive when used by users. For example, dividing content apps into groups makes it easier to use and the possibility of enabling or disabling actions based on the roles of the users generates a better handling of the application and a lower possibility of errors.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Magnolia makes it easy to use for content editors, everything is focused on making it easy to use for this type of user. However, the learning curve can be steep and the concept of publishing can be complicated at first for certain types of users. As for the administrator or developer user, I see it as more complicated and the documentation could be improved.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
because it's a nice and easy-to-use solution. It's a very useful tool indeed and the workflow it's very intuitive. Java-based it's the best option for safety side use in my opinion and the architecture implemented it's a nice safety side solution to protect content and data storage.
January 10, 2022

Magnolia review

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Clean layout, apps organized in groups for better understanding, ability to edit content in one instance and visualize it in a different one, ability to have custom publishing workflows, ability to connect to Magnolia using the own organization's active directory, possibility of creating variations of pages/components at the click of a button
David Caviedes Márquez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Magnolia, as a DXP platform, has multiple capabilities that make it easy for users to manage the platform, for example, WYSIWYG Editors are very easy to use because you can test it in development time how end-users will see the web pages Mobile capabilities Agnostic front-end development, makes visualization work perfectly across different channels
Jonas Lesy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Their user interface is very nice and user-friendly. Since the release of Magnolia 6.0, their UI is on another level. Everything is easy to find by using their find bar. Even development-wise, by being open-source out-of-the-box, code can easily be adapted to implement the feature you just can't seem to create yourself.
Kelvin Gregory | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
An easy and accessible dashboard for even new users to understand Magnolia's capabilities without much struggling. Magnolia, when deployed on cloud services, is effective on easy data migration and the data analytics that the user can access using Magnolia is productive. The publishing of marketing content is a very easy operation.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Magnolia provides both regular end-users and developers the tools to develop digital content easily. Once a developer builds tools and makes them available in Magnolia, the product specialists or the marketing team can use those tools by simply dragging and dropping them to preview website changes. This gives more control and options for all types of users.
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