Adobe Experience Manager review - a comprehensive but often complex solution
April 10, 2019

Adobe Experience Manager review - a comprehensive but often complex solution

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Experience Manager

We use Adobe Experience Manager primarily in our HQ digital department, but we also have helped implement it to staff and departments in many other countries around the world. We use it to host our main corporate website, as well as our staff intranet site and several other smaller sites. Adobe Experience Manager addresses our organizational need for a powerful, enterprise-level CMS that can handle translations and live copy, experience fragments and dynamic content, integrations with analytics and targeting tools, and many of the cutting-edge Adobe technologies that are included out of the box.
  • Adobe Experience Manager is great for maintaining large websites with lots of content. It has a comprehensive repository and folder structure which makes it easy to organize and break down your website into sections.
  • Although we have not personally used it much yet, Adobe Experience Manager has integrations with the other Adobe Experience Cloud products such as Campaign, Target, and Analytics. The newest version(s) also have integrations with Creative Cloud products like Photoshop, which allows creatives to upload assets directly into the DAM.
  • Adobe Experience Manager has powerful live copy/translation tools that allow you to clone and translate webpages into other languages for alternate language versions of your site.
  • The new Touch UI interface could use a lot of improvement. Many of it is smaller detail items/features, but when using the system extensively it can become cumbersome.
  • There is a bit of a learning curve because of the depth of what Adobe Experience Manager can do. Even basic editing and page creation, while relatively simple at the most basic level, is not as intuitive and easy to use as other systems like WordPress.
  • Development can be complicated. Although I've not personally done much in terms of dev work, my experience and what I've heard from my colleagues indicates that there are some complexities that make it not as easy to develop in as other systems.
  • The source edit option within the rich text editor does not include syntax coloring for the code, or even a different serif/monospaced font. It is the same sans serif font as the regular rich text, which makes it hard to read.
  • Adobe Experience Manager has allowed us to create translated versions of our website to serve to other divisions of our company around the world.
  • Adobe Experience Manager has allowed us to achieve one of our primary objectives of knowing who are users are by tracking their movement across our website and content, via our tagging taxonomy that classifies our content.
  • Adobe Experience Manager allows us to create reusable and scalable content via the Experience Fragment methodology, which injects dynamic page content within the page template that can be plug and played into other pages.
  • One negative aspect is that by consolidating so many websites under one roof in Adobe Experience Manager, it takes away the freedom of other smaller sects of our organization from creating their own websites and templates, as they are required in some cases to adhere to the rigidity of the templates set in Adobe.
Adobe Experience Manager has more robust features than WordPress or Oracle. It also has powerful integrations with other Adobe products in the Experience Cloud and Creative Cloud, which make it a very comprehensive marketing tool solution. Its ability to handle communities of websites, live copy/translations, an in-depth taxonomy system, and reusable/scalable content, made it the choice for our organization. It also is kept up to date with annual releases and regular service packs, and is supported by a large and reputable company (Adobe).
Adobe Experience Manager is well suited for large organizations that need a powerful, comprehensive and robust CMS to manage multiple websites/translations of websites. It is also well suited for those who need a CMS that is well integrated with other systems such as analytics, targeting and email marketing, or those who want some fancy add ons like Adobe smart tags or AI-enhanced capabilities.
It is also an expensive product with a steep learning curve, so it is less appropriate for smaller companies/individuals or those that don't need an overly robust system that is integrated with other digital marketing tools. If you're looking for a more affordable solution that is easy to pick up and play, go with a more basic WordPress or Joomla type option.

Adobe Experience Manager Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG editor
4
Code quality / cleanliness
6
Admin section
7
Page templates
6
Library of website themes
Not Rated
Mobile optimization / responsive design
8
Publishing workflow
5
Form generator
Not Rated
Content taxonomy
9
SEO support
5
Bulk management
6
Availability / breadth of extensions
4
Community / comment management
5
API
Not Rated
Internationalization / multi-language
9
Role-based user permissions
9