Adobe Experience Manager vs. HCL Digital Experience

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Adobe Experience Manager
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Adobe Experience Manager is a combined web content management system and digital asset management system. The combined applications of Adobe Experience Manager Sites and Adobe Experience Manager Assets is offered by the vendor as an end-to-end solution for managing and delivering marketing content.N/A
HCL Digital Experience
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
HCL Digital Experience is based on the former IBM Web Content Manager and IBM WebSphere Portal products, acquired by HCL Technologies from IBM in late 2018. The product allows the user to create, manage and deliver engaging omnichannel digital experiences to audiences with responsive content, targeted offers, seamlessly integrated applications and consistent branding across channels (web, mobile, and hybrid mobile/web applications and more).N/A
Pricing
Adobe Experience ManagerHCL Digital Experience
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe Experience ManagerHCL Digital Experience
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Adobe Experience ManagerHCL Digital Experience
Considered Both Products
Adobe Experience Manager
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
End to end capabilities as well as integrations with upstream and downstream systems to make work flows, easier and faster time to market
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Ams support and great customer satisfaction
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
SSO is one fits all, so we don't have to have a separate SSO for each application of Adobe
The integration with Analytics works perfectly and bring directly value really quickly
Target remains more complicated to set up, but can also bring a lot of value once integrated with …
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Drupal and WordPress
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
It has great connectivity with Adobe Experience Manager, you send analytics data, OsGi, components, servlets, workflows, personalization.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
WordPress, Joomla! and Notion
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
support both headless and traditional content mgmt capabilities
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Marketo Engage and HubSpot CRM
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Campaign and Adobe Target
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
AEM feels more enterprise ready
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Experience Manager is what I use most frequently. While the other tools I listed above are important, they are ultimately a secondary tool utilized on a need by need basis where as AEM is what we use daily for content creation, content updates, content optimization, etc.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
AEM is comparable to Sitecore and less agile than Bynder, but Adobe products were already being used across the org and adding AEM allowed us to link it all together.
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
They all do the same thing pretty much, but we are on the Adobe architecture so it made sense to go with AEM
Chose Adobe Experience Manager
RWS Tridion Sites
HCL Digital Experience
Chose HCL Digital Experience
Each of the options had good points and bad points. Building a site with tight integration to HCL Commerce and SAP backend systems was just easier with HCL DX. Security is also a concern and HCL DX provided better fine-grained security across the board. HCL DX also allowed us …
Chose HCL Digital Experience
When compared with CMS products like Adobe Day CQ, Fatwire, Interwoven:
        • IBM Web Content manager is reliable and scalable
        • Better customer service and IBM is keen on helping customers fix any issues with quick turnaround
Chose HCL Digital Experience
IBM Web Content Manager comes with IBM WebSphere Portal. Both [have been] leaders in the portals and content management space for a long time with proven capabilities. Our clients also have other products from the IBM stack and they fit along nicely.
Chose HCL Digital Experience
I used Liferay WCM; the open source system is too customizable such that what you get out of the box is not adequate. However, the portal pages in Liferay blend better with WCM than IBM: This is not always an advantage if you want to build a WCM site separated from portal …
Chose HCL Digital Experience
Adobe Experience Manager,Liferay Portal,Magnolia (V5 and later versions),Adobe CQ
Chose HCL Digital Experience
Magento and Prestashop are E-commerce CMS platforms.
They are used in a different scale of application than WCM.
Features
Adobe Experience ManagerHCL Digital Experience
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
8.4
Ratings
2% above category average
HCL Digital Experience
5.0
Ratings
49% below category average
Role-based user permissions8.40 Ratings5.00 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
8.0
Ratings
4% below category average
HCL Digital Experience
4.1
Ratings
68% below category average
API7.80 Ratings4.10 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language8.10 Ratings4.10 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
7.5
Ratings
2% below category average
HCL Digital Experience
2.9
Ratings
90% below category average
WYSIWYG editor7.40 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness6.70 Ratings3.10 Ratings
Admin section7.00 Ratings3.10 Ratings
Page templates7.60 Ratings1.10 Ratings
Library of website themes7.30 Ratings1.10 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design7.80 Ratings4.00 Ratings
Publishing workflow8.10 Ratings1.10 Ratings
Form generator7.60 Ratings3.00 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
7.3
Ratings
1% above category average
HCL Digital Experience
1.9
Ratings
117% below category average
Content taxonomy7.70 Ratings1.10 Ratings
SEO support7.10 Ratings2.10 Ratings
Bulk management7.20 Ratings2.10 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions7.50 Ratings2.10 Ratings
Community / comment management7.10 Ratings2.10 Ratings
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Adobe Experience ManagerHCL Digital Experience
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Medium-sized Companies
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
RWS Tridion Sites
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Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
RWS Tridion Sites
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Score 9.0 out of 10
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User Ratings
Adobe Experience ManagerHCL Digital Experience
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(0 ratings)
5.7
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
8.6
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.2
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.7
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe Experience ManagerHCL Digital Experience
Likelihood to Recommend
I'll answer the second one because I mean, the first one I don't have an issue with. The second scenario is we oftentimes have the need to spin off very small campaign style sites or sites that generate leads but are unbranded and that sort of thing. So that's hard to do in AEM because you have to then create another organization within AEM to do that. And we're talking about sites that are maybe five to 10 pages in size. So we've been investigating Edge, but then that's a different workflow, so we'd have to train people on that. So it would be nice if there was something within the AEM structure that could allow you to do something very similar to Edge, where you make some small micro sites that are not necessarily branded, that you could still host within the platform and not have to retrain everybody on a completely different platform.
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IBM Web Content Manager is well suited for intranet employee portals, websites which drive extensive marketing content, and e-commerce sites to provide product images and details. It cannot be used a document management system to store large volumes of data as it's purely a web content management system.
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Pros
  • It allows us to scale so that we can make a change on a global footer. And it applies to all of the different property websites. It allows us to set up components and compartmentalize things in a way. The big thing is that it's scalable. And then it also ties into Adobe Analytics and other Adobe products. So we are a complete Adobe shop. Every Adobe product that we can use, we use. I don't think we do it for marketing so much, but for doing target testing and analytics, data scientists are using the same product and so it all speaks.
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  • Well designed web content management system with clearly defined relationships between the various web content objects such as sites, site areas, authoring templates, presentation templates, library resources, components, web content objects, etc.
  • Can create robust content creation and publishing workflows with workflow stages and workflow actions
  • Web Content can be rendered on multiple devices and browsers in a responsive and adaptive manner.
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Cons
  • easier way to make universal changes for multiple websites at a time (ie pushing out a new experience fragment to all as opposed to having to individually add to each site)
  • easier way to get site images to look and be sized exactly as I want directly from the site page editor
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  • Search is not working well. We could not get it work even we worked it with IBM support.
  • Java Applet in Ephox editor is pain. You have to watch that you update your Java version correctly or You cannot edit anything. This might work somehow on enterprise environment with tight workstation configuration. I think that Java Applet editor is the worst part of IBM WCM
  • IBM WCM needs lot of capacity on database and appserver.
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Likelihood to Renew
We had and still have a fantastic experience using Adobe CQ. Lots of flexibility, great integration with other Adobe products we already use and a powerful technology make it a great fit for our corporate environment. Also as the community grows, it makes it easier to network with other developers and users to get new ideas on how to continue to get the best out of the software.
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IBM products always moves forward to adapt to new requirements and technologies. I have used versions 6, 6.1, 7 and 8 of IBM WCM, and I know IBM is ready to revamp the tool based on emerging needs, and still provide the capabilities to migrate your old system to the newer versions.
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Usability
Sure there are a few quirks in the interface, but once you learn them, building and editing pages is fast and efficient. Once you have the content and the planned design decided (how the pages will look and which components you will use), page builds and publishing are quick. I was able to build a 10-page specialized site with cards built using the list component in an afternoon
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New versions has increased user experience facilitating usability.
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Reliability and Availability
Being part of Adobe Suite means you are already notified when the tool has any outages. However, I have never faced unplanned outages. Whenever you face any issue with the site, it is clearly stated if there were any planned outages and how quickly you will be back to normal. So, I will say that even the outages are planned and managed in a great way like their other services.
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No answers on this topic
Performance
With respect to performance, Adobe experience manager is one of the best in the CMS space. We didn't observe frequent slowness on platform, however the systems which are accessing experience manager should be of good specifications without which slowness would be observed. Adobe experience manager works well in integration with other solutions, unless the destination application is designed to trigger frequent calls to AEM.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Adobe Experience Manager, in all its capacity, is a great alternative to any other CMS you are using. It helps in rapid development and makes life easier for maintaining the website for multi-language sites. Technical know-how is eliminated at content authoring. Better documentation in terms of live examples with videos would be appreciated.
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We had some issues related with performing and the support was suitable and sucessful.
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Implementation Rating
Depending on your individual needs, It is really quite simple to create an authoring experience for a website that looks really good. I have been part of many implementations and many teams and have seen many projects that were super successful and others that were not implemented well. AEM has room for a lot of flexibility in the implementation process compared to other CMS like SharePoint
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Implementation was successful due to Websphere application server used.
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Alternatives Considered
SSO is one fits all, so we don't have to have a separate SSO for each application of Adobe The integration with Analytics works perfectly and bring directly value really quickly Target remains more complicated to set up, but can also bring a lot of value once integrated with the rest of the Adobe platform The fact that the solution is Cloud services is also a big advantage for maintenance
Read full review
Each of the options had good points and bad points. Building a site with tight integration to HCL Commerce and SAP backend systems was just easier with HCL DX. Security is also a concern and HCL DX provided better fine-grained security across the board. HCL DX also allowed us to use multiple technologies and maintain a cohesive feel across everything.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • Makes it easy to reuse components across multiple pages and site, which reduces the overhead needed to create all the individual components.
  • Improves business process agility by allowing users to easily create entirely new pages or content by using existing templates
  • Increases conversion rates across our sites by enabling a more consistent experience for users
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  • Unique, easy and user friendly solution that has increased business benefits such as a single repository for all company's products. It provides a better customer service.
  • A huge network of offices managed centrally increasing SEO, marketing, business and clients.
  • Employee efficiency reducing time through a single automated solution.
  • Internal communication within the company has been helped by Web Content Manager as a way of transparency, shared repository and networking with the goal of bringing teams and colleagues together.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Adobe Experience Manager Screenshots

Screenshot of AEM Forms - Creates an adaptive formScreenshot of AEM Forms - themes libraryScreenshot of AEM Forms - where to create a templateScreenshot of AEM Forms - the interactive communications editorScreenshot of Adobe Experience Manager Sites - document-based authoring enables marketers to create and publish content with familiar tools.Screenshot of Adobe Experience Manager Sites - Universal Editor, an advanced visual editor, empowers marketers to edit and publish content.