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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
7.0
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Content Management (7th), Web Content Management (3rd), Enterprise Social Software (5th), Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) (1st)
Microsoft Office SharePoint...
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
4.2
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
Content Collaboration Platforms (3rd)
 

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 3.3%, up 3.0% compared to last year.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, on the other hand, focuses on Content Collaboration Platforms, holds 5.9% mindshare, down 10.4% since last year.
Enterprise Content Management
Content Collaboration Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

Thomas Becker - PeerSpot reviewer
Impressive integration of customer behavior with an easy setup and okay support
I've worked with all major content management systems. Currently, I work with the leaders such as Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, and Acquia Working with big companies, I help them either consider setting up a new content management system or address issues they might have with their existing…
Jaufre Rouanet - PeerSpot reviewer
Integration enhances workflow while user support requires improvement
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server should add some 'tip of the days' and small videos to help users grow within their experience with SharePoint. More integration with Copilot and with the AI platform would be great. Additionally, having the ability in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server to summarize when bringing in SharePoint folders would be beneficial, providing extracts, analysis, proposals, and summaries of those documents.

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."
"Adobe Experience Manager is quite a powerful product that you can use to design files and export them."
"I've used several CMS tools, but Adobe Experience Manager is feature-rich, especially for web security and content management. It's more efficient to manage content on Adobe Experience Manager, and you can do a lot with it, such as updating content at any time, and on any platform, even from mobile or tablet. Adobe Experience Manager is still getting updated daily, and it's the best CMS tool in the market for me. I like that you can manage assets in Adobe Experience Manager. I also like that the solution has an analytics dashboard that shows you where the traffic comes from, how many clicks come from a specific location, the number of clicks and impressions, etc. Adobe Experience Manager can be accessed by other teams, for example, the digital media department of my company, so the solution can be used and updated per each team's requirement. Adobe Experience Manager is more than just a web developer tool, as it also allows visibility tracking and has other uses. I also like that the GUI for Adobe Experience Manager is straightforward and catchy. It has separate folders and icons, so using Adobe Experience Manager isn't tough. The solution is straightforward to use and handle."
"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."
"The most valuable features of Adobe Experience Manager include its capability to manage content and create reusable fragments."
"Adobe Experience Manager is a content management system, and we use it to create and manage a website."
"It's a complete package. You don't need to look elsewhere for digital marketing."
"Easy to work with the solution."
"It's a very robust product."
"It is a decent tool for collaboration, especially if you are already using other Office products."
"The most valuable features for us are their document management list and hybrid forms. and We also use third party ad-dons to achieve workflows and other recent apps."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the Communication Site."
"The implementation and configuring of the resolution are very easy in the online version."
"The software is friendly to use for mixing data and analyzing it."
"The solution is pretty easy to use for the most part."
"The solution's most valuable features is its document management. It allows sharing with external users and integrates well with Office apps and Microsoft Flow."
 

Cons

"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."
"A little bit of background knowledge of coding and website structure is required."
"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."
"The licenses are very expensive."
"Tool-wise, the Adobe Experience Manager support team is not very responsive when the user face issues in AEM as a Cloud Service."
"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."
"Programming model could be improved, it's a monolithic solution."
"The licensing model is opaque, and technical support could be improved, especially for smaller companies."
"The product is behind in development and lacks some features."
"The search feature needs improvement. I can never find the information I need when I use it."
"Workflows could be simplified."
"I think these tools do a pretty good job. There is only one area of improvement. Maybe Microsoft can invest a little bit more into the ease at which integration can be done with other third party applications."
"The solution needs to be more collaborative. I believe they are just coming up with the themes for this right now."
"I would like to see the integration with Teams reinforced."
"The user interface needs improvement because there is a lot of stuff in there. I use five to eight navigation buttons. It should be more user-friendly. Frequently used menu items should be arranged in a proper way. That would be helpful."
"The GUI is outdated."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Users have to pay a yearly licensing fee to use the solution, which is highly-priced."
"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."
"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."
"Pricing plans may be flexible depending on volume usage and your corporate relationship with Microsoft."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Retailer
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Adobe Experience Manager?
It is easy to learn. You don't need to be an advanced Java developer.
What needs improvement with Adobe Experience Manager?
The content is created as Adobe Experience Manager has an author, publisher, and dispatcher. However, there is a feature missing where if content is created on the UAT environment and needs to be t...
What is your primary use case for Adobe Experience Manager?
We are working on digital experience platforms such as Adobe Experience Manager or Sitefinity. It's for powering their customer-facing website, not the transaction portal, but the brochureware port...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server?
The pricing for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is very reasonable, and the cost is not a significant concern.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server?
While I don't have significant issues with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, there is one area that could potentially be improved. In previous years, there were some challenges when integrating w...
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server?
The solution is primarily used for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server collaboration and document sharing, with edits across teams.
 

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, OpenText, IBM and others in Enterprise Content Management. Updated: August 2025.
865,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.