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Adobe Experience Manager vs Drupal comparison

 

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
30
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 May 2026, in the Web Content Management category, the mindshare of Adobe Experience Manager is 8.9%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Drupal is 9.2%, up from 6.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Content Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Adobe Experience Manager8.9%
Drupal9.2%
Other81.9%
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

"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."
"AEM is a CMS and so much more, it requires more of my skills."
"I think DAM (Digital Asset Management) is most valuable to me; the data is increasing, and in order to manage millions of assets which a large enterprise has, it provides lots of capabilities (searching, reporting, managing, workflows for automation, etc.)."
"Easy to work with the solution."
"It helps us with analytics, application design for specific platforms, and enables us to easily create applications for iOS and Android."
"Using Adobe Experience Manager has positively impacted our organization by improving our efficiency significantly."
"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."
"The integration of customer behavior and website setup is impressive."
"Drupal is the opposite, since it is not closed software and it does not rely on only one company."
"The ability to create a complex website with a few developments is the most valuable feature, that's what got me started."
"Being a community based product, the relationship with the product itself is providing back to the community."
"With over 23,000 contributed modules, there’s a high chance that any feature you want has already been built, and is available for you to use at no cost."
"Drupal could be chosen not only for its adaptability and ability to tackle big website projects, but for its core functionalities, which are unmatched in the free software CMS world."
"Views, terms, panels, and entity conception. It is a very useful and fast solution to build successful web applications."
"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."
"It is a very powerful tool for the developer's hands and also, it's very easy for the content editors to use."
 

Cons

"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."
"Many people complain about the price as it's one of the most expensive tools."
"Tool-wise, the Adobe Experience Manager support team is not very responsive when the user face issues in AEM as a Cloud Service."
"The licenses are very expensive."
"I assigned a rating of eight because there are certain limitations we must consider, and there are restrictions in Adobe Experience Manager that we cannot resolve."
"The licensing model is opaque, and technical support could be improved, especially for smaller companies."
"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."
"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"
"Drupal community and forums are not as easy and straightforward as Wordpress, the number of areas covered by existing plugins should be larger, and it is resource hungry compared to Wordpress."
"I think the support needs to improve, as well as the integration with tracking and analytics systems."
"If you have a high traffic site and speed is important, to optimize Drupal you will probably need an expert."
"Admin Interface: You'll often hear that Drupal has a pretty high learning curve."
"The version upgrading process is very painful. Moving to a new Drupal version involves much more than building and configuring the new site."
"There is need for better organization of the documentation on the drupal.org site."
"Digital experience features like target, segmentation, and campaign management have a long way to go."
"We had stability issues. I have a lot of 'Out of memory' issues."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."
"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
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
12%
Construction Company
9%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise23
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise11
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Adobe Experience Manager?
I find the drag-and-drop form builder in Adobe Experience Manager to be mostly intuitive, especially for basic forms, but it has some quirks when things get complex. You can drag fields, text, drop...
What is your primary use case for Adobe Experience Manager?
I have been using Adobe Experience Manager for over three years, focusing on building scalable content solutions, managing workflow, and implementing AEM Forms for enterprise use cases. My main use...
What advice do you have for others considering Adobe Experience Manager?
In our setup, Adobe Experience Manager integrates with tools such as Adobe Analytics for tracking user behavior, Adobe Target for personalization, and backend APIs for CRM systems for handling form...
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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: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.