Adobe Experience Manager vs Drupal comparison

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Adobe Experience Manager

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Adobe Experience Manager and Drupal 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. Drupal Report (Updated: June 2026).

Adobe Experience Manager vs. Drupal

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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)

Drupal

Ranking in Web Content Management

5th

Average Rating

8.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) (3rd)

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 Drupal is 9.5%, up from 7.0% 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%
Drupal	9.5%
Other	81.9%

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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it_user982032

Owner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

A good product that helps me to manage complex digital solutions

My advice to others would be that Drupal is not only a CMS, you need to learn the Drupal fundamentals before to start the project. Drupal is a handy tool whenever you work on a digital infrastructure broad project and not only a simple website. So if you have a big project, you can use Drupal. But if you have a small website, like a blog or simple website, my advice would be not to use Drupal, because Drupal is too complex and the cost to maintain the platform can be too high, related to the value of your website, for example. If you have a website with a big product catalog, for example, in many languages and in many countries in the world, then Drupal is good. But if you have a simple website, like a portfolio or five page-website, you can use many other technologies that'd be simple to maintain and implement. On a scale from one to 10, I will rate Drupal an eight. In the next release, I would like to see basic page buttons and better integration with the analytics platform. A drag and drop function to create simple pages will also be handy. For example, if a customer wants to create a landing page, it should be easy for him or her to do so. I would also like to see better translation management.

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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

"Ease of use for content authors and tight integration with Adobe Marketing Cloud Products like Target, Analytics, Campaign; a complete solution for organizational digital marketing needs."

"The Asset module has received a lot of focus and is currently one of the best solutions for Digital Asset Management out there."

"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."

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

"I like the profiling and segmentation."

"It helps us with analytics, application design for specific platforms, and enables us to easily create applications for iOS and Android."

"I'm quite happy with the platform."

"Being able to connect everything to one universal system was a game changer for us, giving us an overall better digital experience."

More Adobe Experience Manager pros

"We use a part of the solution called Acquia, and the personalization portion of this is the most valuable aspect of the solution."

"The open source nature of Drupal, being free to extend or alter it is massively important for us."

"If you need an open-source, scalable and secure CMS, then go for Drupal."

"At Appnovation Technologies we leverage Drupal’s out of the box features and functionality in order to speed up development and delivery time for our clients."

"Drupal always rises above for a large scale contributor base, general security, and lack of vulnerabilities."

"Because of Drupal, we now have the ability to provide our customers with multilingual, multi-regional content to an extent that would not have been possible otherwise."

"Previously, I have used a variety of solutions, including the custom ones, and I switched solutions because Drupal provides all the features that I need."

"Significantly less time spent on production issues and maintaining existing functionality, translating into significantly more time adding new and enhanced functionality."

More Drupal pros

Cons

"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."

"The UI for handling complex logic, especially in forms, could be more intuitive, and debugging issues is not always straightforward and could be simplified."

"AEM, when setup using Mongo, rapidly gains size; hence it consumes a lot of storage space in a very short period of time."

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

"I love DAM, but still think there are improvement areas."

"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."

"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."

More Adobe Experience Manager cons

"Unfortunately, with Drupal, there is a number of learning paradigms that you have to discover, which can make it difficult to understand as a newcomer."

"It is a little bit simplified."

"Modifying the themes (colors, dimensions, and pictures) could be easier."

"There is need for better organization of the documentation on the drupal.org site."

"My advice would be not to use Drupal, because Drupal is too complex and the cost to maintain the platform can be too high, related to the value of your website, for example."

"Admin Interface: You'll often hear that Drupal has a pretty high learning curve."

"The main complaints of the clients or newcomers to Drupal are about the UX of the admin interface."

"However, when you want to add a permission to a user role, something as simple as that checkbox, forces a config push, which annoys me."

More Drupal cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"It's really costly."

"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 would like to see better pricing."

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Comparison Review

it_user8925

Developer with 51-200 employees

Aug 23, 2013

Jive vs Sharepoint vs Drupal Commons

At Mediacurrent we often get requests to compare Drupal to other platforms used for intranet sites and social business platforms (like https://dev.twitter.com/ for example). This is often referred to as “Social Business Software”, which has grown in popularity in recent years. I decided to do a…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Construction Company

Computer Software Company

Construction Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Government

10%

Marketing Services Firm

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	15
Midsize Enterprise	13
Large Enterprise	11

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...

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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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

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Product Reports

Adobe Experience Manager

Download Adobe Experience Manager product report

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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

Drupal is a robust content management framework designed for building complex websites and applications. Known for its flexibility and scalability, Drupal caters to developers and organizations that need customized solutions.

Drupal offers a modular environment allowing users to create highly customized web solutions. It is renowned for its ability to handle large amounts of data and traffic. The open-source nature ensures continuous improvements and a vast library of extensions. Best suited for tech-savvy users, Drupal empowers the creation of diverse web applications with plenty of customization options.

What are Drupal's most important features?

Content Management: Highly customizable content management capabilities.
Security: Robust security features and regular updates for safety.
Multilingual: Built-in support for multiple languages.
SEO-Friendly: Comprehensive SEO capabilities built into the core.
Scalability: Efficiently manages increasing amounts of data and users.
Community Support: Extensive community and resources for assistance.

What are the benefits and ROI when evaluating Drupal?

Cost Efficiency: Open-source nature reduces licensing costs.
Customizability: Tailored solutions for specific business needs.
Community Engagement: Active community support enhances development.
Security Compliance: Inbuilt features for security and regular updates.
Scalability: Suitable for evolving business requirements.

In industries like education and government, Drupal is used to build scalable platforms that require high customization and load management. Its capabilities make it a preferred choice for institutions looking to implement complex portals and interactive digital experiences.

Sample Customers

Metra

BMJ, The Economist, New Republic, SpaceX, Lush, Danone, Tesla Motors, Peugeot, Stanford Law, Harvard, Oxford University, MIT Media Lab, The Beatles, MTV UK, The Weather Channel, NBC, BBC, grammy.com, Mus_e du Louvre, Whitehouse.gov, London.gov.uk, Gouvernment.fr, New Zealand Government, The Prince of Wales, British Council, NYC Metropolitan Transport Authority, Gatwick Obviously

Adobe Experience Manager vs. Drupal