Adobe Experience Manager vs Contentful comparison

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Adobe Experience Manager

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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: November 2026).

Adobe Experience Manager vs. Contentful

November 2026

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Helped 920,574 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 November 2026, in the Web Content Management category, the mindshare of Adobe Experience Manager is 8.5%, down from 10.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Contentful is 1.5%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Web Content Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Adobe Experience Manager	8.5%
Contentful	1.5%
Other	90.0%

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.

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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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The search capability in Adobe Experience Manager is superior, as search capabilities are determined by the metadata, and it also has metadata automation using AI."

"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."

"Using Adobe Experience Manager has positively impacted our organization by improving our efficiency significantly."

"It is a first-in-class product."

"I like the profiling and segmentation."

"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."

"Easy to work with the solution."

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

More Adobe Experience Manager pros

"Website management has become very easy, and content updates to websites are straightforward."

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

"Contentful has impacted my organization positively as I spend less time maintaining our website, the developer spends less time maintaining our website, and our clients spend less time worrying about their site being hacked or crashing."

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

"Contentful is stable."

"Contentful has been affecting us positively."

"Contentful has impacted my organization positively because it has been a game changer since we started using this tool."

"Contentful has helped serve clients better by allowing campaigns to be launched quickly and pages to be developed rapidly, enabling focus on the structure of the page while putting the content on Contentful, which reduces the time to make the page live."

Cons

"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."

"Adobe's technical support is so-so."

"The idea was to make it easy for the marketing teams, but it requires engineers who are hard to find and expensive to employ."

"The licensing plus implementation and maintenance cost is very expensive, making it not suitable for small organizations, and the setup is very complex."

"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."

"This review attempts to sum up the miserable experience of using Ektron from a developer's perspective, a server administrator's perspective, and the actual end content editor's perspective."

"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."

"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

"I think Contentful could be improved if it could include built-in localization, meaning translation of language, and allow for creative editing of visual and imagery."

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

"Customer support for Contentful is very good; whenever I have a query, the customer support team is very responsible, although response times can be delayed sometimes."

"One area where I believe Contentful can be improved is better handling of complex content relationships, as when content is deeply nested with references inside references, the queries can get messy and hard to manage on the front end."

"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."

"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."

"Apart from that, the price is a bit high when we are storing more content in the CMS."

"I think the free tier has always been very generous, but the 25 content model types have at times been limiting, and I have had to find innovative ways to work around it because we are a community radio station that runs on donations and grants."

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 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."

"It's really costly."

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

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Outsourcing Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Construction Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Construction Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Outsourcing Company

11%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	23

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	14
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	18

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 would prefer a model where template changes are stored locally in the browser or somewhere as an incomplete draft. If there is an explicit save or create draft action, that would make it easier w...

What is your primary use case for Contentful?

I have been using Contentful for around two to three years. Initially, we used Contentful as our CMS. From there, we transitioned from using it as a basic CMS to extensively using it for all the fe...

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More Adobe Experience Manager Competitors

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Compared 20% of the time

FirstSpirit Enterprise CMS vs Contentful

Compared 12% of the time

Contentstack vs Contentful

Compared 10% of the time

dotCMS vs Contentful

Compared 8% of the time

Liferay Digital Experience Platform vs Contentful

Compared 7% of the time

Product Reports

Download Adobe Experience Manager product report

Adobe Experience Manager

October 2026

Download Contentful product report

October 2026

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