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Adobe Experience Manager vs Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 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
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Content Management (3rd), Web Content Management (1st), Enterprise Social Software (4th), Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) (1st)
Microsoft Office SharePoint...
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
4.3
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Content Collaboration Platforms (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Messaging and Collaboration solutions, they serve different purposes. Adobe Experience Manager is designed for Enterprise Content Management and holds a mindshare of 4.0%, up 3.2% compared to last year.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, on the other hand, focuses on Content Collaboration Platforms, holds 3.5% mindshare, down 5.9% since last year.
Enterprise Content Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Adobe Experience Manager4.0%
SharePoint12.0%
OpenText Documentum Content Management6.5%
Other77.5%
Enterprise Content Management
Content Collaboration Platforms Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server3.5%
Office 3658.2%
Dropbox Business - Enterprise7.7%
Other80.6%
Content Collaboration Platforms
 

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.
Daniel Giacomelli - PeerSpot reviewer
Security and Compliance at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Has transformed how I manage documents through metadata and automation while enabling structured collaboration
Microsoft should restore some functionalities from older versions of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2003 and 2010. Specifically, bringing back something similar to SharePoint Designer would be beneficial. SharePoint Designer was both advantageous and challenging - developers found it limiting and preferred Visual Studio, while non-developers struggled to use it effectively. A new tool for configuring webpage design and development for content pages would be valuable. The current system is too basic. While integration of filtered lists and libraries is possible, it requires knowledge of Python or jQuery. A WYSIWYG editor would be preferable to requiring programming knowledge or Visual Studio.

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 has made document management smoother because many people use Adobe, making it simpler for me to modify and resend PDF documents."
"Adobe Experience Manager is a content management system, and we use it to create and manage a website."
"Using Adobe Experience Manager has positively impacted our organization by improving our efficiency significantly."
"The Asset module has received a lot of focus and is currently one of the best solutions for Digital Asset Management out there."
"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 a first-in-class product."
"Over the past two to three years, the organization has grown rapidly with Adobe Experience Manager as a best and supportive tool."
"Adobe Experience Manager is one of the best enterprise-level content management and digital experience platforms available."
"This product is useful because when I go to the client place I can use my credentials, I can log in and I can share whatever I want to share from SharePoint Server."
"The solution is pretty easy to use for the most part."
"It's a very robust product."
"The forms aspect of the solution, for example, the creation of surveys, is its most valuable aspect."
"Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is a scalable solution because our applications are not staying in one place, year on year we are increasing users, so definitely it can scale with what we need."
"Essentially, it is the full suite of Office 365 with the advantage of using the SharePoint database as your list."
"The implementation and configuring of the resolution are very easy in the online version."
"The ability to work through a web browser without requiring installation on devices is particularly beneficial."
 

Cons

"Even more out of box components, UI designs."
"The licenses are very expensive."
"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."
"The programming model could be improved, it's a monolithic solution and that's what we don't like."
"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."
"The solution's pricing and stability could be improved."
"Adobe's technical support is so-so."
"The UI for handling complex logic, especially in forms, could be more intuitive, and debugging issues is not always straightforward and could be simplified."
"It is a bit restrictive to develop in the cloud version."
"The only complaint we have is about the lack of OCR capability."
"The Branding and User Interface Design and CK Editor should be improved, as well as the upgrade process."
"However, when I migrate, a tenant-to-tenant migration presents a challenge to move SharePoint files easily to another tenant because we are using a third-party tool for this migration."
"The solution needs to enable better sharing capabilities between users and external users. Several users also have problems with linking their emails to their Microsoft account."
"The velocity and speed of information retrieval in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server could be improved."
"Probably because I may not have extensively used the advanced search, the search option can sometimes get a little difficult to find out what exactly you're looking for."
"The solution could probably be improved by incorporating some of the power apps for workflow and easy setup."
 

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."
"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 can be expensive for on-premises deployments, especially when you have to support SQL Server as your backend database. That's where the cost comes into play. SQL Server has its own licensing, which Microsoft keeps on changing. Therefore, it can become costly. In the earlier versions of SharePoint, version 2007 or 2010, they had an express version where the SQL Server licensing was free. It wasn't like a full-blown SharePoint. It was only a slimmed-down version. It used to be whatever your hardware costs. You would install the free software and work with it, but you were very limited in what you could do in SharePoint. If you wanted the SharePoint Enterprise Server with all the bells and whistles, then you had to pay more to get the SQL Server license based on the number of users or servers. The subscription model is different for cloud deployments. Licensing is per user and per month. The cost also depends on the storage required. If you have a lot of sites or documents, then you need to expand it based on your needs."
"There are some aggressive discounts offered by Microsoft for organizations that are not for profit, which we are, and it makes it quite attractive to consider."
"One of the reasons why we don't recommend the cloud version of SharePoint is the cost. With the on premise version, you pay for the license once. For the cloud version, there is a recurring fee. It is very expensive. They expect everyone to pay $20 or $30 per user per month."
"Pricing plans may be flexible depending on volume usage and your corporate relationship with Microsoft."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Construction Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise24
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise17
 

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 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server?
I am not aware of the pricing, so I cannot say if the solution is expensive or quite affordable.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server?
My expectation when I start using a Microsoft product is that it would be easy to incorporate diagrams and such from other Microsoft Office products. Incorporating a diagram I've embedded in a slid...
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server?
I produce content about the work I'm doing inside the company, making information about IT architecture, work processes within IT architecture, and security reviews of applications or infrastructur...
 

Also Known As

Adobe Day CQ5, Ektron Social Marketing, Episerver Content Cloud, Adobe CQ5
Office SharePoint Server, MS Office SharePoint Server
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Metra
Del Monte Foods, Unicredit Leasing, Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council, Nokia Czech Republic, Perkins Eastman, JLL, ICA, óxito Software, Dorset Software, PKP Cargo, Arcapita Bank B.S.C., AVE CZ, Chesapeake Energy
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, IBM, Adobe and others in Enterprise Content Management. Updated: August 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.