Magnolia vs. Salesforce Experience Cloud

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Magnolia
Score 8.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Founded in Switzerland in 1997, Magnolia is a CMS used to build composable digital experiences. Magnolia helps create fully integrated customer experiences and speeds up digital delivery of content. Magnolia boasts 480 enterprise customers, thousands of Community Edition deployments, and more than 200 certified Magnolia Partners around the world. They further state that their enterprise customers include Sanofi, Generali, the Atlassian, The New York Times, Harley Davidson, and Union…
$3,500
per month
Salesforce Experience Cloud
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement (formerly Salesforce Experience Cloud or Salesforce Community Cloud) is an online forum powered by Salesforce that enables businesses to connect with their employees, customers, partner organizations, and prospects. Designed to help facilitate communication and information sharing, customers can ask questions and request help, administrators can integrate data from third-party apps, and employees can collaborate across projects and…N/A
Pricing
MagnoliaSalesforce Experience Cloud
Editions & Modules
DX Core
$3500
per month
DX Cloud
$6000
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
MagnoliaSalesforce Experience Cloud
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
MagnoliaSalesforce Experience Cloud
Considered Both Products
Magnolia
Chose Magnolia
Magnolia DXP offers similar or more capability compared to the other platform, while much easier to implement. For example, Adobe Experience Manager tend to be more monolithic in nature, heavier footprint compared to Magnolia. Hence when implementing a DXP, it is much faster to …
Chose Magnolia
The Broadleaf CMS was quite basic and was not a full fledged CMS and hence we had to chose Magnolia to address the business requirement for our B2B platform
Chose Magnolia
I need to specific and say I've had experiences of these platform from previous roles, they were not considered by Good Things Foundation.

My experience is that Magnolia delivers the power of these high end platforms but is generally more accessible to get going and develop …
Chose Magnolia
Magnolia is in a league of it's own vs the other platforms I have previously used. Rather than being a turnkey solution Magnolia puts the power into the hands of your company and developers allowing you to build anything you can imagine. Being a DXP rather than a CMS Magnolia …
Chose Magnolia
Magnolia is not as costly as other enterprise grade platforms and is easier to deploy, more reliable and less resource hungry. It's often also easier to use and certainly easier to use than it's Open Source counterparts. It also manages content in a much more structured manner …
Chose Magnolia
I've used several CMSs like AEM and EpiServer, and comparatively, they all excel at different things. Magnolia is the best to develop for/against. Episerver has the best/most fluid UI in terms of content editing, and the overall admin experience AEM is just all around sucks.
Chose Magnolia
Similar to how one might choose a specific programming language to solve a specific problem, Magnolia has its place among the rest, depending on the use case. While it does not have the most pleasant user experience compared to others, its customization options are streets …
Chose Magnolia
Cost was prohibitive for SiteCore. We liked the support that Magnolia gives us in terms of being an actual Company. We love open-source, but have had problems with Umbraco in the past in terms of upgrade paths etc.
Chose Magnolia
Of all the ones we looked at that met our requirements Magnolia was clearly the best value for money and had a solid background that you could trust and that could take care of you in case of problems.
Chose Magnolia
For us, Magnolia is the best option for our needs. FirstSpirit by eSpirit is missing on the list. We are moving away from FirstSpirit as it feels outdated. Wix has better usability, but is not suitable for enterprise. WordPress I would only recommend for private projects. …
Chose Magnolia
Putting all together: capabilities, support, community and price... Magnolia is the best combination, maybe not the best on each aspect, but for sure in the combination
Chose Magnolia
I choose Magnolia in front of everyone since it is one of the content managers that best adapts to all the modifications that are required by businesses
Chose Magnolia
Magnolia gains in ease of content creation but loses in documentation and practical examples for developers.
Chose Magnolia
One of the most important points that magnolia has over other products is the possibility of extending its functionalities. Being open-source, it is possible to inspect how everything is done and replicate it to change functionalities. In this way, many features that customers …
Chose Magnolia
When developing, I find Magnolia is better in many different ways, mainly in the consistency of how to create new components and page templates.
Chose Magnolia
I use magnolia because my client asked for it in the beginning because he had a long history of using magnolia for years. I think magnolia is middle-hight rated in the stack of similar products. Maybe it's not very well-publicized and it needs better marketing techniques or …
Chose Magnolia
Good documentation and examples Online demos to mess with and test functionalities Easier to install Better knowledge about the product Ability to centralize content of the same type in apps Better performance in some scenarios Better usability: In the newest versions, …
Chose Magnolia
Magnolia is a good competitor in the DXP scenario: Reduced costs License costs are contained, what brings customers the ability to develop their business with a minor impact Open source platform It helps customers to adapt the platform to some special needs DXP …
Chose Magnolia
Magnolia has all flexible capabilities that offer the user the best cloud marketing experience and great functionalities for effective data analytics generation. Reporting through Magnolia tools is also another important aspect since it allows the production of effective …
Chose Magnolia
Pricing was the major concern for us and we found this to be our option.
Chose Magnolia
Proximus was using Magnolia when I started working.
Chose Magnolia
Used CMS: Hybris CQ5/Adobe CMS AEM
Chose Magnolia
Magnolia has an automatic, and speedy social media publication extension, which spread content to all social sites. Also, the insertion of extensions and plugins is more effective when on Magnolia against the opponents. Magnolia admits and adopts diversity, hence, it is a …
Salesforce Experience Cloud
Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
I have used Oracle Fusion and it was super slow if compared to Salesforce. The loading time was longer and information was not organized in a simple way like Salesforce. Even though I haven't participated in the decision process of subscribing to Salesforce, as an employee I …
Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
Salesforce Experience Cloud was selected due to its tight integration with our existing Salesforce CRM platform. Customization of the portal was much, much simpler compared to Sharepoint - especially with role-based security parameters that are ultimately inherited based on …
Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
Salesforce Experience Cloud (formerly Salesforce Community Cloud) is better when you are using Salesforce for applications. Drupal is a solid open-source web content management system for internal and external websites, but if you are using Salesforce for services or case …
Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
We already have Salesforce Sales and Service Cloud and integration with Salesforce Experience Cloud is easier to configure and manage.
Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
We are currently using Vanilla to manage our community (including our knowledge base & ideas), but will be moving to [Salesforce Experience Cloud (formerly Salesforce Community Cloud)] within the quarter. We decided to move forward with Experience Cloud because it integrates so …
Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
Does not have direct access to the Salesforce data, must integrate and maintatin that integration which is costly. Just having a single source login is valuable.
Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
I have used Datatel/Colleague/Recruiter before. There were issues because only one person at the institution was able to have the student's record open at a time. This was problematic when collaboration between departments was necessary especially in the case of admissions, …
Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
After evaluating others on the market, we found that Salesforce Community Cloud comes with many more features than it competitors. Also Salesforce Community Cloud is way more user-friendly than others. And above all, we were looking for faster sales support in which Salesforce …
Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
Before Community Cloud, a common alternative was the development of web sites externally with integration to Sales Cloud being made from external API calls. This is a far costlier and more complex endeavour since it requires a dedicated development team to create and maintain …
Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
Overall, Salesforce is the most effective solution since it is part of an integrated stack to house and activate CRM audiences within an email, but also expand upon it via the DMP. This can allow for cross channel reach and exposure frequency measurement. If we were to partner …
Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
Salesforce has highly customizable lead management and scoring, while HubSpot can get small businesses up and running quickly with lead generation via content marketing. HubSpot is unique in its focus on inbound and content marketing—in fact, that's at the core of what the …
Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
I never found another database solution that works as well as Salesforce.
Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
As our client already used Salesforce CRM, it is a simple integration tasks to link Community to CRM. As such this was a quick deployment with the base data already being present and easily linked to.
Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
I’m sure Salesforce does this as well but we were able to create many macros for Zendesk, that helped our agents interact with customers on a very consistent basis. We haven’t quite got that far in our organization, but I do think it would be useful to our agents.
Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
Overall, Communities provides additional features and better front end experience.
Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
Salesforce Community Cloud was purchased by the company and I was not a decision-maker or involved in the implementation process. Simply a user.
Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
Zendesk was far better at case management.

Atlassian Confluence for knowledge base was not perfect but it was better than Community Cloud for search and appearance for the FAQ.
Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
Other online community forum software vendors include, HiveBrite, ForumBee and Memeni. the main competitor being HiveBrite. Additional tools with chat functionality may also include Slack which i have used. Having th ability to create groups by product / team / region etc.

Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
I have personally not used any other software comparable to Salesforce Community Cloud at this time.
Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
We have only ever used a different internal program that was custom built by our web team. It was not functional with Outlook and all the other systems we use daily. Salesforce is our central hub for everything!
Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
Community Cloud is directly connected to the database (Salesforce), so there is no need for a 3rd party or an API to bring systems together. This means that CRM users can see all Intranet items from Salesforce directly. It's also extremely straight forward in use, but can be …
Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
This is the only product we have used.
Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
I did not select Community Cloud, but since we had the Salesforce platform it was preferred to use this instead of Office 365. I currently use SharePoint at my new organization and there is a much higher level of participation, customization, storage, and synchronicity among …
Features
MagnoliaSalesforce Experience Cloud
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Magnolia
8.0
Ratings
1% below category average
Salesforce Experience Cloud
10.0
Ratings
20% above category average
Role-based user permissions8.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Magnolia
8.1
Ratings
7% above category average
Salesforce Experience Cloud
10.0
Ratings
18% above category average
API8.50 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language7.70 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Magnolia
8.0
Ratings
4% above category average
Salesforce Experience Cloud
9.3
Ratings
20% above category average
WYSIWYG editor8.50 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness8.40 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Admin section8.00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Page templates8.90 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Library of website themes7.00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design8.50 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Publishing workflow7.50 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Form generator6.90 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Magnolia
7.5
Ratings
2% above category average
Salesforce Experience Cloud
8.6
Ratings
18% above category average
Content taxonomy7.60 Ratings9.00 Ratings
SEO support7.20 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Bulk management7.60 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions7.90 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Community / comment management6.90 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Results and Analysis
Comparison of Results and Analysis features of Product A and Product B
Magnolia
-
Ratings
Salesforce Experience Cloud
8.0
Ratings
7% below category average
Conversion tracking00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Test reporting00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Funnel Analysis00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
User Segmentation00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Digital Experience Platform
Comparison of Digital Experience Platform features of Product A and Product B
Magnolia
-
Ratings
Salesforce Experience Cloud
10.0
Ratings
8% above category average
Campaign management00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Cloud enablement00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Content aggregation00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Content classification00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Multi-channel content personalization00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Customer data analytics00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
DXP Third-Party Integrations00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Multi-website management00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Digital asset management00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Editorial workflows and task management00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
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MagnoliaSalesforce Experience Cloud
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Medium-sized Companies
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Score 9.0 out of 10
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User Ratings
MagnoliaSalesforce Experience Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
8.1
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(0 ratings)
9.4
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.5
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(0 ratings)
7.7
(0 ratings)
Online Training
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.4
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
MagnoliaSalesforce Experience Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
If you need a business CMS that brings along a good amount of features and also give you the chance to develop features on your own, Magnolia would be a good choice. Even if you have not the fitting infrastructure around, Magnolia provides you different ways like SAAS oder PAAS. If you have to review your code our have any problems the team behind will helps in a short time. Without using the connectors it is not so easy to connect special functionalities like Marketing tools or optimization tools. The DAM is very slow if you have an huge amount of documents and pictures to store for your website - you have to add an external DAM.
Read full review
[Salesforce Experience Cloud (formerly Salesforce Community Cloud)] seems to be very well suited for what we want to use it for, which is to allow customers to have access to their ongoing and already-resolved cases, which will save our customer success team time and allow for transparency. It also seems well-suited for fine-tuning knowledge libraries, as it allows you to track the knowledge articles that are most impactful (and conversely, those that are less impactful) as you are able to track the path that customers use to self-serve ahead of submitting a ticket. I haven't run into any scenarios yet where we wanted to use Experience Cloud as a solution but discovered that it wasn't a fit.
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Pros
  • Use of YAML to define content models with code.
  • Versatility of defining actions for custom handlers.
  • Reloading classes when code is modified in a local dev environment is nice. While it doesn't seem to work when changes extend beyond the method body (i.e., adding methods), it remediates the pain of long startup times.
Read full review
  • Complete integration with the Salesforce ecosystem. Data displayed in your Community portal reflects records from a Sales Cloud organization
  • Highly customizable. A Community Cloud portal can be totally customized both visually and with different funcionalities with little to no coding skills required
Read full review
Cons
  • As a developer the learning curve is long, you can start developing relatively quickly but getting to know the platform in depth takes time.
  • Having a history of modifications not only at the page level but also at the Content Apps level would be very useful.
Read full review
  • None that come to mind - integrations, experience, and use is great! However, if you're trying to learn it yourself, you may benefit from consulting an expert. Or, if you're wondering if it's good for you, a business analysis will suit you well before you implement to save yourselves, time, money, efforts, and even people.
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Likelihood to Renew
Magnolia is an innovative CMS, for example it is possible to use the ipad to manage the contents. Magnolia’s team works hard to improve the product; the community is small but active and the support for the enterprise version is good. Magnolia’s team asks the users what they think and what they need, and the new functionalities planned for Magnolia 5.3 are very exciting for example the content personalization.
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No answers on this topic
Usability
There are a ton of small things that could make this CMS great Off the top of my head... 1) Better navigation between a component and its corresponding node in the jcr ( devs often have to flip between a page and a spot in the jcr even though there could be a button to take you from a page/component in the pages app to its location in the JCR) 2) Why does a content editor need to open the page to edit the page properties? They could just as easily edit the dialog from the tree view if they have many pages to touch, and it would save them time by not having to render the page.
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Usability is pretty streamlined, especially if you're familiar with other Salesforce products, but even if not, take it from me, as I just entered the technological space about two years ago, that this product is pretty simple to learn. You don't have to jump in with your head underwater. Small wins and learnings along the way are what foster long-term understandings and enable your evolution alongside the product. I definitely recommend Salesforce Trailhead along with it
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Performance
It's a lean and performant platform. You don't need to put reverse proxy servers in front of it to speed it up (although that does make it go even quicker) as there are various layers of caching built in to the application. While it's a little cryptic, the internal caching system is actually quite configurable and can be tuned to the right sort of content.
Often what tends to surprise many an IT manager is that you can run it on relatively modest hardware. We've often been met with "are you sure ?" but the reality is that it doesn't need a whole lot of horsepower.
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Through ease of use and expandability, I think that Community Cloud is a best in class at exposing Salesforce integrations, as well as expandability in working through building custom add-ons for Salesforce for collaborations and self-service. Additionally, the speed to market on these changes are lightning-quick and allow for experimentation.
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Support Rating
You always get an answer based on your SLA. But you always get a solution. That's the successfactor in this case. To often i was frustrated about people in a company without even a clue what there product is about or how to solve a problem. Magnolia's Support Team does a very good job and try to help you in most of the cases
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We have weekly calls with our Salesforce reps. They bring new ideas to the table and help with taxonomy builds. They have also answered many questions and connected us to the right people for us to grow our knowledge and utilization of the platform. They are a good partner overall in comparison.
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Alternatives Considered
Magnolia DXP offers similar or more capability compared to the other platform, while much easier to implement. For example, Adobe Experience Manager tend to be more monolithic in nature, heavier footprint compared to Magnolia. Hence when implementing a DXP, it is much faster to build using Magnolia, at a much lower TCO. The other platform like Kontent.ai and Strapi are pure headless platform and offer lesser features. What really make Magnolia different is the APAC team, who are all out to support their client in the implementation, ensuring their client maximize their platform and the project implementation is successful. This is some thing that is not experienced when using other platform(s)
Read full review
Salesforce Experience Cloud was selected due to its tight integration with our existing Salesforce CRM platform. Customization of the portal was much, much simpler compared to Sharepoint - especially with role-based security parameters that are ultimately inherited based on attributes within the Salesforce CRM platform. Salesforce Experience Cloud was a natural fit for this customer-facing purpose.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • We have placed web content management in the hands of the organisation than retained it within the technology team.
  • We were able to quickly move to MVP and release and we are now focussed on moving the platform forward at some pace whilst not being burdened with BAU work inside the technology team as so much as self-service to trained organisational users
  • The use of the SAAS/PASS has inbuilt business resiliency as specialist work and aspects such as underlying security is done by Magnolia and we are able to focus internal effort on building out the platform.
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  • Its given us much better issue and customer satisfaction tracking, since before Community Cloud much of our communications were extremely siloed within Outlook. We had no visibility because communications happened on an individual basis rather than a holistic level (the company).
  • We've increased user interaction and given our customers a reason to come to the website repeatedly.
  • Our costs have gone up, naturally, as the system proves to be a strong solution. We have pulled in other resources and teams which requires more licenses. I guess that's a sign of success but also a cost.
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ScreenShots

Magnolia Screenshots

Screenshot of the Magnolia App Launcher, used to switch between workspaces and manage pagesScreenshot of the customer experience. This brings together content and audiovisual digital assets to form more compelling digital experiences.Screenshot of global search that brings relevant content, no matter where it resides.Screenshot of customizing the ecommerce experience.Screenshot of Magnolia Orchestratem where users can manage and track campaignsScreenshot of the WYSIWYG page editor