Item: Adobe Experience Manager
Rating: 2
Author: Sara Chaudhary Powell

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Experience Manager

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Adobe Experience Manager to create & maintain the websites for over 150 individual brands/locations. AEM was supposed to allow us to maintain those websites easily and in a scalable way, and allow us to have great-looking websites without requiring much coding or development work, but that has not necessarily been the case.

Pros and Cons

Pros

shows all sites in one place
allows you to change colors to something else in the palette

Cons

UI is not intuitive at all
can't sort site list alphabetically
SEO optimization opportunities are very limited
difficult to change things outside of specified templates, limited customization
universal components must be manually installed on every site, somewhat defeating the purpose of their existence

Return on Investment

complicated editing process for certain elements, takes time away form other tasks
limited template editability means our sites don't look great, likely a deterrent for customers
limited SEO opportunities mean that we are likely not showing up in search as often as we should

Usability

the userface is not intuitive at all. For example, to change a hero image on our site, if you click on the image and edit there's no way to do it from there. You have to open the assets panel and click and drag onto the image and hope you have exactly the right spot selected or you'll mess up the site, and it doesn't tell you anywhere that clicking and dragging is how you update the image. You also can't easily adjust the heigh of images on your site once they're in place, which can lead to things looking wonky.

You also can't sort the list of sites alphabetically in column view, which is the only view that really lets you see which page/elements of the site you're trying to edit.

Favorite Features

multi-site management - literally the only reason it's worth using at all

Alternatives Considered

WordPress, Squarespace and Wix

In terms of usability for building sites, Adobe Experience Manager is probably the most difficult, least intuitive tool I've used. However, it does allow for easier multi-site management vs other platforms.

Key Insights

Do you think Adobe Experience Manager delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with Adobe Experience Manager's feature set?

Did Adobe Experience Manager live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of Adobe Experience Manager go as expected?

Would you buy Adobe Experience Manager again?

Other Software Used

Adobe Marketo Engage, Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Customer Journey Analytics

Likelihood to Recommend

If you have a lot of sites that you need to be able to toggle between and potentially share assets across, Adobe Experience Manager makes sense in theory. But, by using it you'll be sacrificing a lot of usability and other features such as SEO enhancements that other platforms have much more standard. The ability to use universal components that are the same across all of your sites is a plus, but having to install them on each site manually one-by-one makes it less useful than you'd hope.

Comments

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Alyson Smith
(Vendor Representative) commented 3 months ago
Thank you for taking the time to sharing your review. Were sorry to hear that your experience with Adobe Experience Manager hasnt fully met your expectations. We understand that usability and flexibility are critical when managing a large number of sites and we truly value feedback like yours as it helps us continue improving. Wed love the opportunity to connect directly with you to better understand the challenges youve faced and explore how we can support you further. Our goal is always to provide both powerful functionality and a positive user experience and we are committed to listening to our customers and evolving the platform to meet those needs. Thank you again for sharing your perspective.

Disappointing experience

Modules Used