Item: Magnolia
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

To begin with, Magnolia is not used in whole of our company or other departments. I am a software/web application developer. Given that I had the decision making power over what tool we should use for CMS and SEO management for a website, I went with Magnolia for our use case.

Pros and Cons

SEO management is quite automated and powerful. I lacked knowledge of SEO as a backend developer but the tool made my life much easier.
The headless CMS is awesome. It allowed me to use Magnolia as a central data warehouse for my web app.
Analytics and traffic monitoring offers great way to research which components are gaining traction a and what needs to be improved.
It also has payment systems built in. I did not use it but it shows how complete of a software suite it is.

Feature deprecation: There have been cases where some of the features I used were gone or changed in newer releases. This made updating website code mandatory and hence increasing the cost.
Difficult for beginners. Especially not from technical background.

Return on Investment

Saving time on common web development activities such as SEO, content delivery and marketing (newsletters).
Negative: Initial training might be required in some cases.

Usability

I would categorize usability into three aspects : Features, Learning Curve and Community Support.

Features: As mentioned before, it is a complete suite for lightening fast web development and post development management and marketing.
Learning Curve: Again, it is a bit difficult to learn but not for all of course. As a developer, it was actually easier for me.
Community Support: It seems to have fairly decent community support and documentation.

Performance

I think the performance was fairly good with the Magnolia software suite. Again, I used Reactjs for front-end so the performance in the front-end didn't really depend too much on Magnolia itself. However, I also used react-magnolia - npm (npmjs.com) library which helps in integration of Magnolia components in React. Again, I did not face any performance hiccups.

In terms of integration with Reactjs, the specific library I mentioned before made stuff much easier than expected for me.

Alternatives Considered

WordPress

Key Insights

Do you think Magnolia delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Magnolia's feature set?

Yes

Did Magnolia live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Magnolia go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Magnolia again?

Yes

Other Software Used

WordPress

Likelihood to Recommend

For someone who wants to build websites quickly, targeting ecommerce, newsletters, CRM, SEO then Magnolia can be one of the best options. For developers alike, the tool is really well suited since it has API to integrate Magnolia functionalities in web apps. For example, integrating data coming from CMS into something like a Reactjs application is totally possible.

Developing Web Apps with Magnolia

Overall Satisfaction with Magnolia