Adobe Experience Manager vs. Contentful

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
Contentful
Score 6.2 out of 10
N/A
Contentful is a cloud based CMS solution that provides the ability to manage content across multiple platforms.The editing interface allows for managing content interactively and provides developers the ability to deliver the content with the programming language and template framework of their choice.
$300
per month
Pricing
Adobe Experience ManagerContentful
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Lite
$300
per month
Community
Free
Enterprise
Custom
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe Experience ManagerContentful
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Adobe Experience ManagerContentful
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
Contentful
Chose Contentful
Easy to use and much more organized as a single platform versus multi. The layout is clean and easy to read and we don’t have to worry about certain users safe guarding data or content then losing it when they leave the company. It’s a one stop shop for imagery.
Chose Contentful
Contentful was affordable and much simpler than the Java based systems and preferred over a PHP solution
Chose Contentful
In the past we've used WordPress to manage documentation content. Wordpress was more flexible than Contentful but also prone to inconsistencies and we ended having a lot of hacks to accomplish various Wordpress tricks. With Contentful there's less ambiguity so content producers …
Chose Contentful
Contentful offers a great deal of features for a relatively low price. This is what ended up persuading us to purchase it. We also gathered that this was one of the more well-rated products out there, which was encouraging. It definitely stacks up well against its competitors.
Chose Contentful
Very similar to WordPress, but has more organizational properties than square space.
Chose Contentful
For custom solutions, Contentful blows every other CMS I've used out of the water. Unlike WordPress, there's no clutter to wade through, and you can simply build the infrastructure you need. It's more secure by far, and works seamlessly with modern frontend technologies, like …
Chose Contentful
Contentful was the most user-friendly platform that everyone in our company could understand. It doesn't have the integrations that Wordpress does, but it was easier for everyone in our organization to use. We've also seen good ranking and traffic from the pages created in …
Chose Contentful
Contentful is easy and fast and cheap. I went from zero experience to loading data out of my contentful space in about an hour or more. The cost is very reasonable and compared to options like CloudCMS are a fraction of the cost. The benefit is that with a lower cost entry …
Features
Adobe Experience ManagerContentful
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
8.4
Ratings
2% above category average
Contentful
7.3
Ratings
10% below category average
Role-based user permissions8.40 Ratings7.30 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Experience Manager
8.0
Ratings
4% below category average
Contentful
8.0
Ratings
5% above category average
API7.80 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language8.10 Ratings7.70 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
Contentful
7.7
Ratings
0% below category average
WYSIWYG editor7.40 Ratings7.30 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness6.70 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Admin section7.00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Page templates7.60 Ratings7.60 Ratings
Library of website themes7.30 Ratings7.50 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design7.80 Ratings7.70 Ratings
Publishing workflow8.10 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Form generator7.60 Ratings7.00 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
Contentful
8.0
Ratings
8% above category average
Content taxonomy7.70 Ratings8.00 Ratings
SEO support7.10 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Bulk management7.20 Ratings7.70 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions7.50 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Community / comment management7.10 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Adobe Experience ManagerContentful
Small Businesses
Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization
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Score 8.6 out of 10
ManageWP
ManageWP
Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
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User Ratings
Adobe Experience ManagerContentful
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(0 ratings)
8.3
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
8.6
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.7
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe Experience ManagerContentful
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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Coming from WordPress, Contentful feels like content management as it should be. There's no clutter to get rid of, you can simply start building from scratch, and the end product is perfectly tailored to your or your clients needs.
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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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  • Contentful provides organized, flexible data models with support for a variety of data types and content editors (e.g. WYSIWYGs, form fields, raw text areas).
  • Contentful has great built-in versioning features with history and draft states so it's easy to make updates and revert when needed.
  • Contentful has an intuitive user interface and good support for multiple spaces (which can be helpful for companies that need separate projects for dev/staging/production).
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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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  • Preview of changes prior to publishing
  • The ability to use a spell check plug-in when working on content (it doesn't work well with Grammarly)
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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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No answers on this topic
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
Read full review
No answers on this topic
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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No answers on this topic
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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No answers on this topic
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
Contentful was affordable and much simpler than the Java based systems and preferred over a PHP solution
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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  • There was no negative impact as such.
  • Positive impact is increase in sales.
  • More work is delivered due to reusability and other features within a time and less manual effort.
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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.

Contentful Screenshots

Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of