Adobe Experience Manager Reviews

I've worked with all major content management systems. Currently, I work with the leaders such as Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, and Acquia.

Working with big companies, I help them either consider setting up a new content management system or address issues they might have with their existing systems. My role involves evaluating the decision for a new CMS and ensuring successful implementation.

The integration of customer behavior and website setup is impressive. It's similar to a heat map used on the fly.

While there are many aspects that could be improved, discussing them would require more time. The licensing model is opaque, and technical support could be improved, especially for smaller companies.

For the last 25 years as Adobe Experience Manager has evolved through various iterations.

Adobe Experience Manager provides assurance that the system will work within five to ten years, ensuring stability for big companies.

Adobe's technical support is so-so. They are attentive to big companies but tend to be negligent towards mid-sized companies. You rarely have a direct contact with Adobe and often work through suppliers.

Setting up Adobe Experience Manager is easy unless you want to customize anything. The setup process can become problematic if you try to change or customize extensively.

The key is the implementation team, which often involves technical suppliers.

The pricing is opaque and not a key factor when considering the dimensions of the solution. For large enterprises, the cost is often comparable with other major CMSs.

ContentSquare, Sitecore, Storyblok, and Typos3 are alternatives that I am aware of.

For any investment, it's important to understand what you want to do and what your targets are. The system should fit into your IT environment and also align with your business strategy. This makes your implementation smoother and more successful.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

I am a full stack developer, focusing more on the front end. I work with frameworks like React and JavaScript. I would like to give a review about Adobe Experience Manager, which I have used for managing content for large-scale applications.

Since using Adobe Experience Manager, we have been able to manage content without dumping everything into the code. It allows business people to modify values directly without waiting for deployment times. Additionally, the use of Adobe Experience Manager has helped manage traffic more efficiently through effective scaling and balancing loads.

The most valuable features of Adobe Experience Manager include its capability to manage content and create reusable fragments. It is user-friendly for business people who may not have extensive technical knowledge. The Asset Manager is particularly useful as it allows multiple developers to reuse images without bloating local code size.

Adobe Experience Manager could improve by allowing the reuse of components like a progress bar across multiple pages to make the development process more efficient. Currently, changes have to be made on all the pages manually, which is time-consuming.

I have been using Adobe Experience Manager for about one year. Although I am relatively new to it, I find it highly beneficial for content management.

Adobe Experience Manager is fairly stable yet could benefit from enhancements, especially in component reuse.

Adobe Experience Manager is highly scalable but has some difficulties. Despite these, it reduces the number of servers needed by efficiently managing web content.

I have not personally interacted with customer service or raised any tickets. Our Adobe Experience Manager team handles such situations.

Positive

Before using Adobe Experience Manager, I worked with libraries to manage content but did not use another content management system specifically.

Setting up Adobe Experience Manager is complex and requires a good understanding of Java and content management systems. The setup is especially challenging for those unfamiliar with it.

Deployment requires three people: the developer who made the changes, an Adobe Experience Manager assistant, and a business person to monitor the deployment. Maintenance requires at least ten Adobe Experience Manager experts for large applications.

Adobe Experience Manager has provided significant returns on investment, especially in applications with large numbers of users. Its ability to change content without deployments is beneficial.

Adobe Experience Manager is quite expensive and requires careful management of cashing and usage. It is described as high-cost but value-adding.

The platform team chose Adobe Experience Manager due to its trusted reputation and additional advantages over simpler systems like WordPress.

For web applications with frequently changing content where business people need to make modifications without technical knowledge, Adobe Experience Manager offers significant advantages.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

It's a powerful content management system – there's really no competitor in the market right now. The main use case is digital marketing. 

For example, if you have offers you want to publish immediately, and you want extended functionality like Adobe Target and Adobe Analytics on top of those offers, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is perfect. You can publish something in minutes. 

Adobe has other tools like Analytics, Target, Scene7, and now Centra (which is based on artificial intelligence). Integrating these products with your CMS gives you powerful digital marketing and customer journey analytics.

I haven't worked extensively with other content management systems like Sitecore, but from my experience with AEM, managing content is very user-friendly. 

I don't need to be a technical expert to change content, set up Target activities, or use those features in AEM. The whole environment is convenient and easy to use. For example, if you create a page in AEM and want to use it for analytics in Target, you just export it using options within AEM.

Area of improvement for Cloud Service:

For the last four years, I've been working on AEM as a Cloud Service. I feel the tool has all the features needed for production, but the problem is with skills. Depending on the skill level of the developers building the components within Adobe Experience Manager, you can have a very streamlined implementation or a very difficult one.

Tool-wise, the Adobe Experience Manager support team is not very responsive when the user faces issues in AEM as a Cloud Service. If I reach out to Adobe for something, they create a ticket, and then I might wait three to four days for a response. When I have issues, I want an immediate response. 

On AEM as a Cloud Service, this is the one thing I think Adobe needs to improve. They should resolve issues within a day so everything runs smoothly for the user.

Area of improvement for on-premises: 

For on-premises AEM, everything is managed by us, but since Adobe Experience Manager was not a very big market earlier (though it's growing now), there are limited clients. 

The cost of the tool is high, and maintenance is heavy – it's very costly. So, the developers working in AEM development might not always have the proper skills to develop the components. 

For example, in a normal website, we often see carousels which represent your website in a very dynamic way. Now, suppose you have two carousels on the page – one at the top and the next at the bottom. They have different purposes. If I'm a skilled developer, I'll create one component and serve both banners with the same component – a single, dynamic component. This makes it easy for content editors in the production environment to drag, drop, and change the content.

But, if I'm not an experienced developer or I don't have knowledge of AEM, I might create two components – one for the top and one for the bottom. Maintenance becomes heavy, and it's harder for the content team to understand which component to use.  A less experienced developer might create multiple components for the same function, increasing complexity and challenges.

Over the last three to four years, this lack of resources and skilled AM developers has created these kinds of issues.

I have been using it for nine years now. 

It's stable. From my understanding, especially with AEM as a Cloud Service, they've resolved those issues. When we were on AEM on-premises, if there was a bug, they'd do service pack installations to fix them. 

Now, since they're on AEM as a Cloud Service, Adobe just releases a new version, and it automatically upgrades in AEM Cloud.

It is an auto-scalable product. In my company, there are a lot of people. We have three developers, almost a hundred people changing content at runtime, and then admins like managers and product owners. 

The response time is long. Response time, plus the expected output I need should be clear. It shouldn't be like I raise a request, they send questions, I ask more questions, and it goes back and forth.

Neutral

We had something called 'Trader' – not an official product name, but a customized tool the company used. The problem was everything was in one place. 

For example, you might have product information in Salesforce, but in Trader, everything was in one place – product information, contacts, analytics. 

The company wanted a distributed environment: content in a different platform, frontend in a different platform, analytics, Adobe Target, Salesforce for product information, MuleSoft for integrations. They divided it across different products, and that migration is currently ongoing.

For AEM as a Cloud Service, Adobe sets everything up, so it's not time-consuming. You just raise a request with Adobe, and they'll create a program for you. If you have three projects, you'll have three programs. 

Under each program, they'll create multiple environments – dev, stage, production. In Adobe Experience Cloud, everything's connected. They have pipelines, a repository, and the admin console where you manage users. It's very easy. You set up a repository, commit your code, and run the pipeline.

For the last three years, it's been on the cloud. Some clients want to work on-premises, and others work on cloud, but I've been working on cloud for the past three years.

It is an expensive tool. 

Before using it, you should have some hands-on experience. Someone should show you a two-day demo of what a developer actually does, how exactly do we use it? 

If you understand how to use it, then it can be beneficial for development as well. Understanding how to use it allows to explain to clients the use cases where Experience Manager is effective.

It is easy to learn. You don't need to be an advanced Java developer. With basic Java knowledge and about 15 days to a month of AEM training, including a week or two of hands-on experience, you should be good to go.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten, especially considering AEM as a Cloud Service. The best part is the seamless integration with other products. Everything is connected.  

In my current company, we just started using Adobe Target, and the integration with Experience Manager is very smooth. This, combined with how easy it is to manage digital marketing and publish content, is why I give it that rating. Development happens once, but maintenance is ongoing, and AEM makes maintenance simple.

Adobe Experience Manager is used for user experience, product design, and user journeys.

Adobe Experience Manager is quite a powerful product that you can use to design files and export them.

Adobe Experience Manager's pricing could be improved.

I have been using Adobe Experience Manager for about a year.

Adobe Experience Manager is quite a stable solution.

Adobe Experience Manager is scalable because I could share it with my colleagues and collaborate on a project.

Our organization has more than 1,000 employees, and Adobe Experience Manager is used extensively in our organization.

Before Adobe Experience Manager, I used other online tools like Pencil or Sketch. I switched to Adobe Experience Manager because it's more extensive and has more features.

Adobe Experience Manager's initial setup is easy.

It doesn't take very long to deploy Adobe Experience Manager. Adobe Experience Manager has a simple installation, and there are some helpful manuals and tutorials to walk through before I start using it.

We have seen a return on investment with Adobe Experience Manager.

I use the solution’s online version licenses. Adobe Experience Manager is deployed on-cloud in our organization.

People could use Adobe Experience Manager if pricing is not a challenge for them.

Before using Adobe Experience Manager, people can start with free tools like Inkscape, Pencil, or Sketch.

Overall, I rate Adobe Experience Manager an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for e-commerce. For the e-commerce part, we have three types of channels: mobile, web, and tools, both B2B and B2C.

It's a complete package. You don't need to look elsewhere for digital marketing. It has all the necessary features and can integrate with various analytics tools, including Google Analytics. Plus, it's easier to use for designing and related tasks.

They also used personalization. The entire customer journey was designed around it.

The licenses are very expensive. Customers don't want to invest so much.

I have been using Adobe Experience Manager for over ten years.

It is 100% stable.

It is suitable for enterprise-level customers. It provides all sorts of products for design and development activities.

I rate the solution’s scalability a nine out of ten.

I have used Liferay.

Maintenance depends on the volume of the work.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I have been using it for CDP, real-time data, CJA, and CJAO (Customer Journey Optimization). My current organization is a product-based company. We have multiple products with a wide user base, both B2B and B2C. 

We have to track their data, including digital and offline data. We have sales and marketing teams who use different sources. We need to club the data through our CDP and give it to the marketing team to utilize for marketing efforts. 

We have a separate team that requires cold calling details, small communications, and push notifications. All these things are required for CJA to optimize our campaigns. 

Before, we were using Eloqua, Salesforce, Adobe, AWS, and many other data sources. It was difficult for stakeholders to make decisions because they had to consult multiple dashboards (marketing, campaign, etc.). They had to create slides and then make decisions. 

Now, with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), we have all the data sources in one place and can visualize them together. We can make quick decisions, and we started using this in 2024.

I like the CDP capabilities and the real-time data set. You can combine offline and online data and use it as a centralized data set. 

Secondly, I like the profiling and segmentation. Profiling gives the uniqueness of the profile and identity, and segmentation allows you to group people for targeted campaigns or performance analysis.

In terms of improvement, it's an industry practice for organizations to move towards Adobe Experience Platform (AEP). One of the major benefits is that all marketing efforts for customer engagement, campaigns, etc., are based on server-side implementations. In AEP, we have a very SDK model through server-side implementations.

That would be the normal benefits where, without third-party cookies, we can use first-party cookies for our marketing efforts. So that would be another benefit of AEP.

There is a little room for improvement in the support. 

I have been using it for the last three years. 

It's perfectly fine. It is a stable product.

It's scalable.

I have worked very closely with the Adobe customer teams and their account managers. So, their support performance is very good. They have the capabilities to help, and it depends on your account and the contract. They will help you a lot.

Positive

The initial setup is easy. A little bit of background knowledge of coding and website structure is required.

It is worth the money. Some products are leaders in the market, and Adobe is one of them. They provide leadership in their analytics.

It's really costly. The pricing is based on the number of users. If your users increase, the prices increase.

It's easy to use, but it requires knowledge of data structure, data modeling, and SQL coding. Familiarity with the relationships of the data set is also helpful.

I would recommend using it. If you have an online, offline, and multi-store business, a multi-city level of business, like a global banking business, Adobe is a good platform. You can utilize it, and once you use AEP, it will be helpful. You can centralize the data from batch data and any digital assets as well.

Overall, I would rate it a ten out of ten. 

Adobe Experience Manager is a content management system, and we use it to create and manage a website.

The solution's pricing and stability could be improved.

I have been using Adobe Experience Manager for more than a couple of years.

I rate Adobe Experience Manager an eight out of ten for stability.

Adobe Experience Manager is a scalable solution. Around 100 users are using the solution in our organization.

We've seen the benefits of using Adobe Experience Manager regarding ease of use, content, structure, and updating our website.

Users have to pay a yearly licensing fee to use the solution, which is highly-priced.

A team of three or four developers is needed for the solution's deployment and maintenance. Users must set up a team with all the professionals they need to use the product and create their website.

Overall, I rate Adobe Experience Manager an eight out of ten.

If you want to use content in a mobile application and you want the content in some other application, you can simply expose it from the CMS to different clients or different systems. It's easy. On top of that, the technology underlying AEM is open-source and is very powerful like Apache Sling and JCR.

In comparison to other CMS products, Adobe Experience Manager is missing some capabilities such as proper versioning or a better versioning system and backend connectivity.

If something is deleted in AEM, the user cannot recover it. You have to call technical support, and they will need to recover the whole instance. So, it's really difficult. For example, if you delete a page, you cannot recover it. There should be an option to recover it. In AEM, you have to go to the previous state of the instance itself or the virtual machine, and you have to restore everything, which is not good.

It's also a very heavyweight solution. If you want to use it just for one purpose, such as delivering content to your mobile application or marketing website, it's too heavy.

For assets, there is a lightweight version of Adobe Experience Manager, and I would like to see a lightweight version for sites in the next release. 

I would like it to also be a little bit more cost efficient so that it's more approachable to SMBs as well.

It is a stable solution.

The cloud version is somewhat stable, but not all of the features are supported yet.

The challenging part is moving from on-premises to the cloud; it's not straightforward. People are very afraid to jump from one boat to another, so that is a challenge. Once you move to the cloud, however, there are no challenges. From a scaling perspective, you would be scaling the infrastructure horizontally and not vertically.

With my present client, we have more than 200 people working with AEM.

The license comes with a managed services contract. You have dedicated people from Adobe, and they are always there.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate technical support at nine.

Positive

I used OpenText TeamSite from Interwoven before switching to AEM. It's still in use, but a lot of people are migrating from TeamSite to AEM. It's a dying technology. It is also based on Java, but it is complex and hard to learn.

The initial setup is easy, and I would give it a five out of five rating. It's not very difficult because it's just one system.

Initially, you have to have some knowledge of a few technologies, but it's not very challenging. There are lots of open-source materials available, and there are forums as well. So, it's easy to learn. 

It's a costly solution. I would rate the price at two out of five on a scale from one to five, where one is the most expensive and five is the most competitive.

I enjoy using Adobe Experience Manager and recommend it to large and enterprise level organizations.

Overall, I would rate it at eight out of ten.

We use Adobe Experience Manager primarily for content management.

The main benefit of using Adobe Experience Manager in the company is that it lets you easily manage your websites and content. You can also have a static or dynamic website and get any type of content from anywhere. Adobe Experience Manager is also built on Java, so its security is very high.

I've used several CMS tools, but Adobe Experience Manager is feature-rich, especially for web security and content management. It's more efficient to manage content on Adobe Experience Manager, and you can do a lot with it, such as updating content at any time, and on any platform, even from mobile or tablet. Adobe Experience Manager is still getting updated daily, and it's the best CMS tool in the market for me.

I like that you can manage assets in Adobe Experience Manager. I also like that the solution has an analytics dashboard that shows you where the traffic comes from, how many clicks come from a specific location, the number of clicks and impressions, etc. Adobe Experience Manager can be accessed by other teams, for example, the digital media department of my company, so the solution can be used and updated per each team's requirement.

Adobe Experience Manager is more than just a web developer tool, as it also allows visibility tracking and has other uses.

I also like that the GUI for Adobe Experience Manager is straightforward and catchy. It has separate folders and icons, so using Adobe Experience Manager isn't tough. The solution is straightforward to use and handle.

I haven't seen any areas for improvement in Adobe Experience Manager as it's a full-fledged CMS tool, and Adobe is already working on enhancements for the solution. Adobe is working to make Adobe Experience Manager more valuable and easier to use for any user, even non-technical ones, through multiple components and templates. Day by day, Adobe provides the latest update to Adobe Experience Manager, and if my team needs any particular change, it just needs to be reported to the Adobe team.

As Adobe Experience Manager has a broad scope and a lot of use cases and features, it's a solution that requires some time and effort from you in terms of learning, especially if you're implementing it for different clients, which could be an area for improvement.

I've been using Adobe Experience Manager for more than five years.

Adobe Experience Manager is a stable solution. It's high-performing and it's better than other CMS tools in the market. Adobe Experience Manager has a quick response time, so within seconds, the server is able to respond to the web browser. In terms of security, the solution is also very secure.

Adobe Experience Manager is very scalable, and it's also customizable. You can customize the template or component based on your requirements.

I'm able to resolve issues myself, so I haven't contacted the technical support team for Adobe Experience Manager.

When comparing Tietoevry and Adobe Experience Manager, I'd say that the two solutions are different because, in Tietoevry, the website is only available in English, while Adobe Experience Manager has a multilingual option.

You must create a workspace in Tietoevry before the content gets published automatically.

Adobe Experience Manager is simpler to use, which is why my company prefers using it.

The initial setup for Adobe Experience Manager was straightforward. Not more than four to five people were involved in the deployment of the solution.

How long it takes to deploy Adobe Experience Manager depends on the requirements, but it didn't take much time for my company. You also have the option to schedule the deployment.

We implemented Adobe Experience Manager ourselves, and we didn't need any help because we had keynotes on how to do any test or update any template. We were able to identify what steps to take to deploy the solution. There's also complete documentation on how to do it, and you have the option of getting help. You click, and you'll find relevant Adobe Experience Manager topics, or you can Google or search on YouTube, as content about the solution is available anywhere.

There's a free trial for one month for Adobe Experience Manager, which you can use for learning purposes, then, after the trial period, you'll need to purchase the license. Adobe offers a few plans for Adobe Experience Manager, but I'm unaware of how much my company is paying.

I've evaluated the IBM tool, apart from Adobe Experience Manager, and it's a fine tool, but Adobe Experience Manager has more features.

Adobe Experience Manager requires maintenance, but the client side takes care of it. Even during the deployment, the client joined the call, and any needed improvements will be made from the client side, for example, migrating from one server to another. Hence, the maintenance of Adobe Experience Manager is the client's responsibility.

My company has one project on Adobe Experience Manager, with a team of forty people working on different parts.

My advice to anyone planning to implement Adobe Experience Manager is that it has a broad scope in terms of usage, so I recommend that you learn about the solution before implementing it, especially if you have a lot of clients for it.

My company has a partnership with Adobe.

I'd rate Adobe Experience Manager as ten out of ten.

Adobe Experience Manager is a CMS or content management system. It's primary use for web development involves hosting a website. That is, anything that we develop, such as a new feature, a new website, or upgrades, is hosted in Adobe Experience Manager.

I like the native applications such as Adobe Target, Adobe Analytics, and Adobe Experience Platform. Because of these, it's very easy to connect and obtain reports on how my website is doing, how many have visited it, how frequently, etc.

The multiple publisher concept is one of the best parts of this solution.

The latest trend is to render everything in the client-side framework. For example, SPA or single page application. This is a feature that needs improvement.

The cloud deployment pipeline needs to be improved as well.

I started using this solution in 2013, so I've been working with it for nine years now.

So far, the stability has been good. Since Adobe Experience Manager has the multiple publisher concept, if any one of the servers goes down because of the traffic load, you can easily spin up a new server.

If the solution is deployed in the cloud, it will automatically spin up when needed. If it's not on the cloud, then you can easily spin up a new server as you scale up and the traffic load increases.

We have about 200 people from marketing, target analytics, and web engineering teams who use Adobe Experience Manager.

The move to the cloud has been challenging, and I've had to contact technical support. I would rate them at seven on a scale from one to ten.

Neutral

The initial setup is very straightforward and user-friendly. It takes about 10 to 15 minutes.

Because of the improvement needed with the client-side framework and because page loading takes time, I rate Adobe Experience Manager at seven out of ten.