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Adobe Experience Manager vs Drupal 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
Ranking in Web Content Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Content Management (8th), Enterprise Social Software (6th), Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) (1st)
Drupal
Ranking in Web Content Management
5th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
Corporate Portals (Enterprise Information Portals) (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Web Content Management category, the mindshare of Adobe Experience Manager is 13.0%, down from 14.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Drupal is 6.4%, down from 6.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Content Management
 

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…
it_user628050 - PeerSpot reviewer
The best features are its extensibility and plug-ability. It has a very good authentication/authorization system.
The learning curve is the thing that scares most people away from using Drupal. With Drupal Version 8, it has taken a more standardized way by teaming up with the Symfony framework. This, however, is a double-edged sword. It takes you a step further away from the typical front-end developers that had found their gem in Drupal Versions 6 and 7. By its procedural nature, they were able to build semi-complex websites without any real programming and object oriented programming knowledge. Everything below Drupal 8 was aimed at being a procedural application where you can make changes by using hooks they provide in their code (a small amount were Object Oriented, but most people would never touch this). This allows for an easy way to modify existing pages for the non-programmers who know how to write scripts a little. But these hooks are very specific to Drupal itself (hence the steep learning curve) and aren’t very intuitive if you look at PHP frameworks/applications as a whole. The documentation on how to do things as a complete novice is only subpar in both Drupal 7 & 8. By now there are plenty how-to tutorials on how to do things in Drupal 7 luckily. With Drupal 8 they decided to use Symphony2 as the base framework for the system. This allows for best practices in that framework to be used and allow the vast community of symphony2 programmers to make a switch to Drupal since it leans closer to home than the procedural approach from the previous version. Almost everything is now Object Oriented and the amount of hooks (the old procedural approach) has been pushed back to a minimum. This makes it more difficult for the previously mentioned non-programmers. They are now looking at a huge time-investment to learn OO Programming to get started in Drupal 8. I believe this is the reason why Drupal 8 is making such a slow start compared to Drupal 6 & 7. It’s a good product but they made it so much harder for the people who can write basic PHP scripts. The main area of improvement would be better/more documentation and tutorials on how to do things in Drupal 8 at this moment. It’s a leap of faith for the non-programmers out there and some of them just completely thrown off by it. This is what incites projects like https://backdropcms.org/ where they fork Drupal 7 to keep it going after it reaches EOL.

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."
"It is easy to learn. You don't need to be an advanced Java developer."
"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."
"Adobe Experience Manager is quite a powerful product that you can use to design files and export them."
"The most valuable features of Adobe Experience Manager include its capability to manage content and create reusable fragments."
"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 integration of customer behavior and website setup is impressive."
"It's a complete package. You don't need to look elsewhere for digital marketing."
"It is good for big projects."
"You can build websites on it very quickly."
"We use a part of the solution called Acquia. The personalization portion of this is the most valuable aspect fo the solution."
"The feature I find most valuable is that Drupal is a framework and not only a CMS."
 

Cons

"The licensing model is opaque, and technical support could be improved, especially for smaller companies."
"Tool-wise, the Adobe Experience Manager support team is not very responsive when the user face issues in AEM as a Cloud Service."
"The licenses are very expensive."
"Adobe Experience Manager's pricing could be improved."
"The solution's pricing and stability could be improved."
"Programming model could be improved, it's a monolithic solution."
"Adobe's technical support is so-so."
"The latest trend is to render everything in the client-side framework. For example, SPA or single page application. This is a feature that needs improvement. The cloud deployment pipeline needs to be improved as well."
"It is a little bit simplified."
"Digital experience features like target, segmentation, and campaign management have a long way to go."
"The user experience in designing layouts should be much easier or much more helpful."
"I think the support needs to improve, as well as the integration with tracking and analytics systems."
 

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."
"Users have to pay a yearly licensing fee to use the solution, which is highly-priced."
"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."
"I would like to see better pricing."
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Comparison Review

it_user8925 - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 23, 2013
Jive vs Sharepoint vs Drupal Commons
At Mediacurrent we often get requests to compare Drupal to other platforms used for intranet sites and social business platforms (like https://dev.twitter.com/ for example). This is often referred to as “Social Business Software”, which has grown in popularity in recent years. I decided to do a…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
40%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Government
16%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
 

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?
While there are many aspects that could be improved, discussing them would require more time. The licensing model is opaque, and technical support could be improved, especially for smaller companies.
What is your primary use case for Adobe Experience Manager?
I've worked with all major content management systems. Currently, I work with the leaders such as Adobe Experience Manager, Sitecore, and Acquia.
Ask a question
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Also Known As

Adobe Day CQ5, Ektron Social Marketing, Episerver Content Cloud
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Metra
BMJ, The Economist, New Republic, SpaceX, Lush, Danone, Tesla Motors, Peugeot, Stanford Law, Harvard, Oxford University, MIT Media Lab, The Beatles, MTV UK, The Weather Channel, NBC, BBC, grammy.com, Mus_e du Louvre, Whitehouse.gov, London.gov.uk, Gouvernment.fr, New Zealand Government, The Prince of Wales, British Council, NYC Metropolitan Transport Authority, Gatwick Obviously
Find out what your peers are saying about Adobe Experience Manager vs. Drupal and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.