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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 3.9%, up 3.2% compared to last year.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, on the other hand, focuses on Content Collaboration Platforms, holds 3.3% mindshare, down 7.1% since last year.
Enterprise Content Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Adobe Experience Manager3.9%
SharePoint11.7%
Alfresco6.7%
Other77.7%
Enterprise Content Management
Content Collaboration Platforms Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server3.3%
Office 3658.5%
Google Workspace7.9%
Other80.3%
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

"The integration of customer behavior and website setup is impressive."
"The best feature is the experience fragment; if you want to replicate content across multiple websites with 1,000 or 20,000 pages, this feature helps accomplish it in a fraction of seconds."
"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."
"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."
"The Asset module has received a lot of focus and is currently one of the best solutions for Digital Asset Management out there."
"I believe that the primary feature of the product is the ability and extent to which it allows authors to modify, build and operate their website, page components, etc. that otherwise would require a lot more of developer work."
"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."
"I've used several CMS tools, but Adobe Experience Manager is feature-rich, especially for web security and content management."
"This product has improved the way our organization functions in the following manner: We are provided with policies and procedures for administration, we can store all the documentation related to all IT projects, and we have developed some workflows for automating licensing requests and other types of requests."
"The ability to work through a web browser without requiring installation on devices is particularly beneficial."
"Using these features together, we converted our paper work to electronic digital data."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the fact that it doesn't require coding. You just need to configure it. You don't need to code before getting something running. It makes it very fast."
"The integration with security tools in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is one of the significant pluses since it alerts the IT team if anyone tries to redirect an email, which is illegal for us."
"It's a very robust product."
"I believe the control and the restrictions, accesses that we can have once we decide to share any document through Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, are the most beneficial aspects for me."
"I think SharePoint is a good tool, especially if you are in the Microsoft ecosystem — as in being an Office 365 user — then SharePoint is definitely something you should look at as a solution for collaboration and file sharing."
 

Cons

"Adobe Experience Manager needs more optimization. The frequency of components where we have vitals of a page or an app needs to be optimized because these are heavy Java codes along with some AEM developments."
"The licensing model is opaque, and technical support could be improved, especially for smaller companies."
"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."
"Adobe Experience Manager is not so simple to use, so others should have some experience with similar programs."
"With the default template design, it is difficult to manage the different resolutions of images."
"The licensing plus implementation and maintenance cost is very expensive, making it not suitable for small organizations, and the setup is very complex."
"AEM, when setup using Mongo, rapidly gains size; hence it consumes a lot of storage space in a very short period of time."
"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 search feature needs improvement. I can never find the information I need when I use it."
"It is a bit restrictive to develop in the cloud version. A lot of features are in the cloud now, and you have to develop on the outside. As far as the platform and the programming side of things are concerned, it is moving more towards configuration management rather than programming. When we are doing solutions, we are basically just configuring it to make solutions happen rather than actually using the Visual Studio code and developing from scratch in the cloud. It is almost like creating an app. You have created an app for your phone, but the app doesn't really sit on your phone. It sits somewhere on a server, and the database sits on another server. The app is just pulling and pushing information. The whole development has changed. We used to install things directly on the server and then run the application from the server. Now, it is more of a modular architecture."
"I think that it can be improved in terms of security, to manage roles and better performance."
"The solution could probably be improved by incorporating some of the power apps for workflow and easy setup."
"The solution needs to have more flexibility. The classic version had more flexibility, however, the modern version has many more limitations."
"The solution requires a lot of hardware capacity for high availability and performance."
"Workflows could be simplified."
"The areas around security, such as protection, need to be included."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Users have to pay a yearly licensing fee to use the solution, which is highly-priced."
"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
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
Construction Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

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: May 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.