Adobe Experience Manager vs Hyland OnBase comparison

Adobe and Hyland are both solutions in the Enterprise Content Management category. Adobe is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.6, while Hyland is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.0. Adobe holds a 4.0% mindshare in ECM, compared to Hyland’s 5.2% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Adobe users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Hyland users who would recommend it.

Adobe Experience Manager

Read 30 Adobe Experience Manager reviews

6,310 Views
2,335 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Hyland OnBase

Read 15 Hyland OnBase reviews

6,334 Views
3,294 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Adobe Experience Manager

Hyland OnBase

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Adobe Experience Manager and Hyland OnBase compete in the digital marketing and content management category. Adobe Experience Manager appears to have the upper hand due to its extensive integration capabilities and advanced digital marketing features.

Features: Adobe Experience Manager offers robust features such as digital asset management, e-commerce capabilities, and seamless integration with Adobe Marketing Cloud Products like Target and Analytics. It also provides campaign management and key integrations with Salesforce and analytics services. Hyland OnBase emphasizes flexibility and integration across business processes, boasting strong security measures, audit trails, and advanced capture workflows.

Room for Improvement: Adobe Experience Manager could benefit from addressing its complex programming model, high cost of ownership, and by enhancing cloud service support and component use efficiency. Hyland OnBase needs improvements in its user interface, pricing model, and search functionalities, particularly by incorporating artificial intelligence for smarter document management.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Adobe Experience Manager supports deployment across the private cloud, on-premises, and public cloud, but technical support can sometimes be slow. However, it benefits from knowledgeable personnel and managed services. Hyland OnBase primarily deploys on-premises and has feedback indicating a need for faster technical support and addressing implementation complexity that might affect user training needs.

Pricing and ROI: Adobe Experience Manager is known for its high cost, linked to the number of users and complexity, yet it offers efficient long-term investment returns in content management and analytics. Hyland OnBase is considered pricy but offers a modular pricing model tailored to vertical solutions, focusing on minimized coding overhead and providing considerable value, particularly in different regional applications.

To learn more, read our detailed Adobe Experience Manager vs. Hyland OnBase Report (Updated: April 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Adobe Experience Manager vs. Hyland OnBase

April 2026

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Helped 893,221 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 Enterprise Content Management

3rd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

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

Hyland OnBase

Ranking in Enterprise Content Management

6th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Business Process Management (BPM) (14th), Low-Code Development Platforms (14th)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Enterprise Content Management category, the mindshare of Adobe Experience Manager is 4.0%, up from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Hyland OnBase is 5.2%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Enterprise Content Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Adobe Experience Manager	4.0%
Hyland OnBase	5.2%
Other	90.8%

Enterprise 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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Abdul_Jabbar

Senior Software Engineer at Infosys

Automated workflows have transformed document handling and support daily approvals and billing

The best features Hyland OnBase offers in my experience include being a robust storage solution that integrates well with the Epic solution, allows Unity Forms to be easy to create and use, and has Distribution Services for sending email notifications as reminders.Out of those features, the workflow engine has made the biggest difference for me because it is excellent for automating approval processes, and we use Hyland OnBase for legal requests, hardware requests, travel requests, corporate credit card requests, and file transfer requests. WorkView is an incredible module for gathering and displaying summary information, and we utilize it highly in our subsidiary to manage our legal contracts, their financial billing process, and their travel. We also use the Document Import Process coupled with Unity API for writing custom code to automate processes to send and receive data from other systems that are not yet API enabled. The impact of Hyland OnBase on our organization is that automating manual processes has had an incredible effect on our return on investment, and the man-hours saved by automating processes pays for the system, ranging from one to five hours. I measured the man-hours saved through the tracking of workflows and automation processes. Additionally, Hyland OnBase has allowed us to move away from moving paper around various departments, providing workflow management to keep approval inside the system and out of the email boxes, eliminating the need for paper storage, and saving storage costs with other vendors.

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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 like the profiling and segmentation."

"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.)."

More Adobe Experience Manager pros

"This solution is easy to implement and easy to use as long as you know what your business requirement are or the specifications are straightforward."

"I like the flexibility and its modular nature that allows us to create solutions that meet our business needs."

"OnBase is a remarkable tool. It is a well-done product. Hyland has a lot of experience in building it and looking for new things for clients in terms of functionalities. It has amazing stability, and it can grow horizontally and vertically. It is built for growth. Their technical support is also quite good and available throughout the year."

"A single platform with multiple capabilities to orchestrate processes, complex business rules and all types of business content."

"The most valuable features are that it's very secure and provides audit trails for our documents."

"I like the cloud and its integrability."

"Its most valuable aspect is its flexibility"

"OnBase provides high-value solutions for organizations with much less cost in comparison to other ECM solutions."

More Hyland OnBase pros

Cons

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The licensing model is opaque, and technical support could be improved, especially for smaller companies."

"The tech support from Adobe is slow to respond and takes a lot of time to fix product related bugs."

More Adobe Experience Manager cons

"The solution’s initial setup is a little difficult."

"As an ECM solution, there are a lot of improvements needed. For example, the web client should address the next generation of web technologies such as HTML5 and stylish layout."

"We need to troubleshoot why our reports didn't get downloaded in a day. There is a workflow feature which powerful but also complicated."

"An area for improvement would be the training - getting our people up to speed on how to use it required more training than we expected due to the complexity of the solution."

"Software malfunctioning usually occurs when we receive documents from external sources."

"The look and feel could be better. The integration with the user could be better. It could also be more user-friendly."

"The migration is a bit difficult in the tool."

"We found the size of images to be a restriction, though this may have been due to the API used rather than the Hyland application."

More Hyland OnBase cons

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."

"The solution costs around $6,000 per month."

"There are a number of different types of licenses. There are concurrent licenses, individual licenses and imaging licenses."

"They can do better in terms of the pricing model. It is a really expensive tool in Latin America. They should have different prices for different regions."

"OnBase is reasonably priced."

"The tool's price is high."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Retailer

Government

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	23

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	13

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Hyland OnBase?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is very cost-effective and affordable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Hyland OnBase?

Hyland OnBase could be improved in terms of service support response time. More timely updates to solution software support documentation also should be improved.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Hyland OnBase?

Hyland OnBase is used across the entirety of the organization in a variety of different ways, and its primary use is as a document storage solution that is used in conjunction with other systems su...

See all answers

Comparisons

SAP Extended Enterprise Content Management vs Adobe Experience Manager

Compared 6% of the time

Oracle Content Management vs Adobe Experience Manager

Compared 6% of the time

SharePoint vs Adobe Experience Manager

Compared 5% of the time

Drupal vs Adobe Experience Manager

Compared 4% of the time

FirstSpirit Enterprise CMS vs Adobe Experience Manager

Compared 2% of the time

More Adobe Experience Manager Competitors

OpenText Content Management vs Hyland OnBase

Compared 7% of the time

IBM FileNet vs Hyland OnBase

Compared 6% of the time

SharePoint vs Hyland OnBase

Compared 6% of the time

Alfresco vs Hyland OnBase

Compared 6% of the time

OpenText Documentum Content Management vs Hyland OnBase

Compared 4% of the time

More Hyland OnBase Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Adobe Experience Manager

May 2026

Download Adobe Experience Manager product report

Buyer's Guide

Hyland OnBase

May 2026

Download Hyland OnBase product report

Also Known As

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

OnBase

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

Hyland OnBase is acclaimed for its robust document management, automating workflows, and improving organizational efficiency across various industries. Praised for its ability to manage records compliantly, especially in regulated sectors like healthcare and finance, the tool also integrates smoothly with other enterprise systems. Users benefit significantly from streamlined processes, reduced manual tasks, and enhanced data accuracy, boosting productivity and customer satisfaction.

Hyland

Sample Customers

Metra

Honda France Industries, Hill County Texas, Hylant Group, ING Lease France, State of South Carolina, Syracuse University, Swindon College, Rhode Island Department of Human Services, Rochester Institute of Technology, Moen, Odense University Hospital

Buyer's Guide

Adobe Experience Manager vs. Hyland OnBase

April 2026

Free Report: Adobe Experience Manager vs. Hyland OnBase

Find out what your peers are saying about Adobe Experience Manager vs. Hyland OnBase and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.

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