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Adobe Experience Manager vs Drupal comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
31
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
37
Ranking in other categories
Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Web Content Management category, the mindshare of Adobe Experience Manager is 8.4%, down from 10.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Drupal is 9.0%, up from 5.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Content Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Adobe Experience Manager8.4%
Drupal9.0%
Other82.6%
Web Content Management
 

Featured Reviews

Hilax Chamberlain - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
it_user982032 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"It is easy to learn. You don't need to be an advanced Java developer."
"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."
"AEM is a CMS and so much more, it requires more of my skills."
"Easy to work with the solution."
"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."
"Adobe Experience Manager has made document management smoother because many people use Adobe, making it simpler for me to modify and resend PDF documents."
"The most valuable are the security features and a wide array of available modules, or extensions, that can be used to add functionality to a Drupal website."
"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."
"We now have more time to focus on crucial features that our client needs, like custom mail notifications, statistics, or other features that can give our clients business value."
"Significantly less time spent on production issues and maintaining existing functionality, translating into significantly more time adding new and enhanced functionality."
"The velocity of its extensibility and prototyping is a valuable feature."
"Use Drupal if expandability is a must or if you are building a large website with various kinds of functionality."
"But it is worth it if you require an enterprise level web platform with great scalability, support, and security."
"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."
 

Cons

"Adobe's technical support is so-so."
"Many people complain about the price as it's one of the most expensive tools."
"The pricing and setup cost for Adobe Experience Manager is a bit higher compared to different content management tools."
"Very very poor."
"Even more out of box components, UI designs."
"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."
"Last but not least, Adobe AEM TCO (total cost of ownership) is very high with return on investment is slow (ROI is not necessarily low), which is why Adobe's focus is mostly large companies with deep pocket"
"The version upgrading process is very painful. Moving to a new Drupal version involves much more than building and configuring the new site."
"I think Drupal has to improve the UX for some administrative pages, such as the modules list page."
"There is need for better organization of the documentation on the drupal.org site."
"It is a little bit simplified."
"For specific use cases, there are bugs with its DB Query UI tables (Drupal Views)."
"Sometimes, you just have to read the code to understand how it works or how to use an API, which is not the best way to learn for everyone."
"The technical support is below average as compared to all the other products."
"Modifying the themes (colors, dimensions, and pictures) could be easier."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's really costly."
"Users have to pay a yearly licensing fee to use the solution, which is highly-priced."
"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."
"I would like to see better pricing."
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Comparison Review

it_user8925 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Construction Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise23
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise11
 

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...
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Also Known As

Adobe Day CQ5, Ektron Social Marketing, Episerver Content Cloud, Adobe CQ5
No data available
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Adobe Experience Manager vs. Drupal and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.