Adobe Experience Manager vs Contentful comparison

Read 20 Contentful reviews

1,025 Views
984 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Adobe Experience Manager

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Adobe Experience Manager and Contentful based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Web Content Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Adobe Experience Manager vs. Contentful Report (Updated: June 2026).

Adobe Experience Manager vs. Contentful

Download the complete report

Helped 900,644 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Adobe Experience Manager

Ranking in Web Content Management

1st

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Enterprise Content Management (3rd), Enterprise Social Software (4th), Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) (1st)

Contentful

Ranking in Web Content Management

4th

Average Rating

8.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Web Content Management category, the mindshare of Adobe Experience Manager is 8.6%, down from 11.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Contentful is 1.3%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Content Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Adobe Experience Manager	8.6%
Contentful	1.3%
Other	90.1%

Web Content Management

Featured Reviews

Hilax Chamberlain

Digital Marketing Manager at Ford Motor Company

Centralized content management has unified our digital channels and delivers consistent experiences

Adobe Experience Manager offers enterprise-level digital assets management and very robust customization, brand value consistency, and omnichannel delivery. It saves development and maintenance time. The digital asset management and omnichannel delivery features have benefited my team by managing our digital assets, ensuring brand consistency, and enabling us to deliver customized content easily to our clients. Organizing and obtaining information from results is beneficial. Strengthening our online experience as a brand is valuable. Easy integration with other Adobe services improves productivity and provides a smooth experience. Adobe Experience Manager has positively impacted my organization by enabling component and page reuse, which reduces application size. It saves manual effort for maintaining all applications, improves traffic, and ensures consistency across all our applications. It provides better security, scalability, and makes our applications more robust.

Read full review

Margaret Thatcher

Production Manager at Unilever

Content workflows have become faster and empower non-technical teams to update pages independently

Contentful makes it easier for non-technical teams to update content by providing organized, flexible data models with support for a variety of data types and content editors such as WYSIWYG form fields and raw text areas. It has great built-in versioning features with history and draft states, so it is easy to make updates and revert when needed. Some of the best features that Contentful offers include organized, flexible data models with support for a variety of data types and content editors such as WYSIWYG form fields and raw text. Contentful has great built-in versioning features with history and draft states, making it easy to make updates and revert when needed. Additionally, it has a very intuitive user interface and good support for multiple spaces, which can be helpful for companies that need separate projects for development, staging, and production. It is also very cost-effective and powerful, and it keeps a history of changes made to the content easily. The versioning and multiple spaces features of Contentful have helped my team manage content effectively, as we leverage Contentful's headless CMS capabilities to easily build a static website using modern technology such as GatsbyJS and ReactJS, making it an ideal solution for small businesses and startups seeking a low-maintenance approach. It is a very scalable tool. Contentful has positively impacted my organization as it is very scalable, can be used by any size of organization, and is a very cost-effective tool. It helps us save cost, especially when dealing with a lot of content compared to other alternatives. Its intuitive design facilitates seamless updates of photos and written content while providing the ability to revert changes when necessary. It has been a very good tool because I am able to spend less time maintaining websites, and my clients spend less time worrying about their site crashing or being hacked. This tool has allowed me to be much more flexible with the types of front-end technology I can use. Since it is very easy to use for all types of technical users, there is no time wasted. It enabled rapid project delivery and low-cost projects for my organization. Since adopting Contentful, we have seen an increase in sales and marketing from 45% to 65%. More work is delivered due to reusability and other features within a shorter time and with less manual effort.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"AEM is a CMS and so much more, it requires more of my skills."

"Over the past two to three years, the organization has grown rapidly with Adobe Experience Manager as a best and supportive tool."

"Adobe Experience Manager offers several best features, including user-friendliness and a more secure platform than any other content management systems I have worked with."

"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."

"It's a complete package. You don't need to look elsewhere for digital marketing."

"If you're looking for a .NET based CMS, do yourself a favor and go with an open source CMS."

"A certain client has definitely seen approximately fifteen to twenty percent improvement in their web engagement and conversions on the personalized pages, especially when those experiences were connected and retargeted with other engagement campaigns in MoEngage."

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

More Adobe Experience Manager pros

"Contentful is stable."

"Contentful has impacted my organization positively because it is the best headless CMS, and it is very useful for my organization."

"Contentful has positively impacted my organization by allowing me to both develop and release content really quickly and be responsive to market changes and other factors."

"I advise using Contentful as the first option because it is scalable and stable with all features included."

"Contentful has positively impacted my organization by facilitating faster campaigns for marketing content, reducing the dev workload, and shortening the time to market, with no hard-coding of content, a clean API-based architecture, and reusable components."

"Contentful is a great tool and a powerful solution to support multiple platforms."

"Contentful has positively impacted my organization as it has been a major breakthrough."

"Contentful has positively impacted my work because I have people browsing Google and because I use SEO as well, and my articles are indexed and written by me, people come and read them, and the most valuable part is that some people find them attractive and actually read about topics like the difference between chatbots or agents, what is a chatbot, what is fine-tuning, or remote work, which are quite important looking at the market right now."

Cons

"A little bit of background knowledge of coding and website structure is required."

"Very very poor."

"One common challenge that I have heard of is that Adobe Experience Manager can feel complex and resource-intensive during implementation, especially for organizations without strong technical or Adobe ecosystem expertise."

"There is a feature missing where if content is created on the UAT environment and needs to be transferred or synced to the production environment, there is no direct way of doing the sync."

"The integration of the product with other Adobe Marketing Cloud products could be improved."

"With the default template design, it is difficult to manage the different resolutions of images."

"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."

"Adobe Experience Manager needs more optimization. The frequency of components where we have vitals of a page or an app needs to be optimized because these are heavy Java codes along with some AEM developments."

More Adobe Experience Manager cons

"Sometimes the linking is challenging. If you are using too many links, then it is actually making the application deployment time longer, so Contentful needs to figure out a way to solve that problem."

"Contentful could be improved in the following ways. It would be much easier if I could move data from one environment to another without any CLI tools."

"There was no return on investment. It was very expensive to implement all the needed specialties a company needs for its public publish strategy, to publish the content in different countries, different markets, and different languages."

"Contentful needs to be improved for migration, not only for migration, but from lower to higher environments as well, as the schema diffs and everything are not working as expected."

"However, I find that the licensing can be frustrating, especially for smaller organizations."

"Contentful would be improved if integrations could be made easier."

"I wish Contentful would provide a better feature for publishing all content entries at once."

"Contentful has not helped my organization or our customers achieve any measurable benefits, such as saving time or improving workflows, as we have not measured that."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"It's really costly."

"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."

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

Information not available

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Web Content Management solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Construction Company

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

18%

Construction Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

Media Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	24

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	13
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	17

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Adobe Experience Manager?

One common challenge that I have heard of is that Adobe Experience Manager can feel complex and resource-intensive during implementation, especially for organizations without strong technical or Ad...

What is your primary use case for Adobe Experience Manager?

I personally have not used Adobe Experience Manager, but I have observed a retail client that uses Adobe Experience Manager to manage their personalized website content, and while they use MoEngage...

What advice do you have for others considering Adobe Experience Manager?

Adobe Experience Manager should be evaluated as a long-term digital experience platform rather than just a CMS. It delivers the most value for organizations that need personalization, multi-channel...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Contentful?

Setup cost and pricing are handled by our organization's admin team. Currently, I do not have much information on this.

What needs improvement with Contentful?

I wish Contentful would provide a better feature for publishing all content entries at once. Additionally, if any validation errors occur, handling them in a better way would be beneficial. Changin...

What is your primary use case for Contentful?

I am Niketan Naidu, working at LTIM, and I am using Contentful for our content management system and website. I have been using Contentful for three years, and it has been excellent work. We use Co...

SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management vs Adobe Experience Manager

Comparisons

Compared 6% of the time

Oracle Content Management vs Adobe Experience Manager

Compared 5% of the time

Drupal vs Adobe Experience Manager

Compared 5% of the time

SharePoint vs Adobe Experience Manager

Compared 4% of the time

Oracle WebCenter vs Adobe Experience Manager

Compared 3% of the time

More Adobe Experience Manager Competitors

CoreMedia vs Contentful

Compared 30% of the time

FirstSpirit Enterprise CMS vs Contentful

Compared 23% of the time

Contentstack vs Contentful

Compared 11% of the time

Product Reports

Adobe Experience Manager

Download Adobe Experience Manager product report

Download Contentful product report

Also Known As

Adobe Day CQ5, Ektron Social Marketing, Episerver Content Cloud, Adobe CQ5

No data available

Overview

Adobe Experience Manager offers powerful content and digital asset management capabilities, allowing users to streamline content replication and integrate with tools like Adobe Target and Analytics.

Adobe Experience Manager is a comprehensive platform used for content management, website development, and digital asset management. It allows marketers to efficiently manage and publish content without needing extensive coding knowledge, enhancing operational efficiency through integration with Adobe Target and Analytics. The platform supports omnichannel distribution and multi-site management, leveraging experience fragments to replicate content seamlessly across platforms. Users appreciate the platform for its scalability and robust personalization features, improving collaboration and reducing overall costs.

What are Adobe Experience Manager's Key Features?

Content Management: Offers intuitive tools for creating, managing, and publishing content across digital channels.
Digital Asset Management: Centralizes asset management to streamline content reuse and improve consistency.
Experience Fragments: Enables content replication across multiple channels for seamless user experiences.
Integration: Enhances efficiency by integrating with marketing tools like Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target.
Omnichannel Support: Provides consistent messaging and branding across different platforms and devices.

Which Benefits and ROI Should Users Consider?

Improved Collaboration: Facilitates teamwork through component reuse and workflow automation.
Cost Reduction: Reduces expenses through efficient multi-site management and content repurposing.
Scalability: Supports growing business needs with scalable content solutions.
Personalization: Delivers personalized user experiences enhancing customer engagement.
Analytics Integration: Offers valuable insights into customer interactions, improving strategic decisions.

Organizations within industries like retail, healthcare, and finance utilize Adobe Experience Manager to develop tailored digital experiences, efficiently managing websites and assets for better customer engagement. Retailers use it to deliver personalized promotions, while healthcare providers enhance patient information access. In finance, it ensures compliance and manages customer communications effectively.

Adobe

Contentful is a modern content management platform known for its reusable components, easy integration, and flexible content modeling. It enables content management across multiple platforms quickly and efficiently.

Contentful’s API-first architecture and Rich Text editor offer seamless content management for different platforms, enhancing productivity by minimizing coding efforts and allowing non-technical individuals to update content effortlessly. It supports diverse needs like content preview, localization, and scalability, which accelerates deployment and reduces costs. The intuitive interface facilitates rapid project delivery with minimal overhead.

What are Contentful's most important features?

Reusable Components: Facilitate consistency and efficiency in content creation.
API-First Architecture: Allows seamless integration across platforms.
Rich Text Editor: Simplifies content management with advanced editing capabilities.
Content Preview: Enhances content accuracy and workflow efficiency.
Localization Support: Facilitates content localization across regions.
Scalable Architecture: Supports growing business needs and rapid deployment.

What benefits and ROI can users expect from Contentful?

Improved Workflow: Streamlines operations, saving time and reducing bottlenecks.
Cost Efficiency: Reduces development expenses with faster deployment.
Enhanced Flexibility: Allows adaptable content types for dynamic content creation.
Ease of Use: Non-technical teams can manage content with minimal learning curve.
Rapid Project Delivery: Supports agile methodologies, minimizing project timelines.

Contentful is extensively used for storing, managing, and retrieving content for web and mobile applications. Businesses utilize APIs and GraphQL to decouple content from presentation layers, driving dynamic websites and applications. It integrates effortlessly with other platforms, offering seamless access to non-technical teams, and supports diverse applications like documentation, marketing, and internal data management. Contentful’s adaptability with content types allows quick page creation and content updates across different projects and clients.

Sample Customers

Metra

Information Not Available

Adobe Experience Manager vs. Contentful