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Adobe Experience Manager vs Joomla 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
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Content Management (3rd), Enterprise Social Software (4th), Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) (1st)
Joomla
Ranking in Web Content Management
15th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Web Content Management category, the mindshare of Adobe Experience Manager is 8.9%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Joomla is 2.2%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Web Content Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Adobe Experience Manager8.9%
Joomla2.2%
Other88.9%
Web Content Management
 

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.
JS
Techvangelist & CEO at IT Guru Solutions, Inc.
One of the most robust, stable, secure, feature-rich CMSs on the market
I would like to see more back-end admin power pulled into the front-end, therefore the admins will not have to use the back-end as much, especially for the menu manager, user manager, etc. versus using third-party extensions to achieve this. As it is today, it often ends up introducing some potentially serious security concerns. When I turn over a Joomla site, editing content is easy for most folks (i.e., changing the Contact Us or About Us pages). However, when it comes time for them to edit menus and navigation to add a new page or article into the menu somewhere, it starts to get a little complex for many users to build these menu items, especially when there are multiple menus being used in different positions. I also would like to see the same sorting and attributes available through the web browser on the JED (sorting by free or commercial license, sort by rating, popularity, etc.) within the back-end Joomla Web Installer when browsing extensions. I would also like to see the Joomla security bulletins pulled into the admin back-end with better publishing of known extension issues, especially for ones we have installed. Therefore, if we do not have them installed, we never see those bulletins. If we do, then pertinent messages showing up like "there are X number of extension updates available" can pushed upfront and center like updates and security notice usually are.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Being able to connect everything to one universal system was a game changer for us, giving us an overall better digital experience."
"Adobe Experience Manager is one of the best enterprise-level content management and digital experience platforms available."
"It is easy to learn. You don't need to be an advanced Java developer."
"Easy to work with the solution."
"Brand management, Digital Transformation of organization and Most dynamic site."
"I think DAM (Digital Asset Management) is most valuable to me; the data is increasing, and in order to manage millions of assets which a large enterprise has, it provides lots of capabilities (searching, reporting, managing, workflows for automation, etc.)."
"I'm quite happy with the platform."
"The search capability in Adobe Experience Manager is superior, as search capabilities are determined by the metadata, and it also has metadata automation using AI."
"The speed in which you can take a CMS and make it a full-blown shopping cart with analytics tracking, SEO, user accounts, security, and ease of use through a robust framework of modules and plugins to enhance and promote-related content is about as turnkey as it gets with Joomla."
"Despite some limitations, Joomla stands out from the crowd and manages to retain its position in the market."
"One of the most robust, stable, secure, feature-rich CMSs on the market."
"Simplicity and security are basic elements to build a website quickly and safely, and with JoomShaper it was for me even easier."
"Do your project in Joomla; you will see that it is a better solution for website development."
"No useful review content was provided."
"This CMS lets you create an own website within minutes, no matter if the user has knowledge in coding."
"Joomla is a complete and easy-to-use content manager system; it's possible to create a website, manage its structure and contents, and add features using hundreds of extensions, and the most valuable thing for us is the easy way you update content, add articles, modify structure, and apply SEO tags and info."
 

Cons

"A little bit of background knowledge of coding and website structure is required."
"In comparison to other CMS products, Adobe Experience Manager is missing some capabilities such as proper versioning or a better versioning system and backend connectivity. 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. So, it's really difficult. For example, if you delete a page, you cannot recover it. There should be an option to recover it. In AEM, you have to go to the previous state of the instance itself or the virtual machine, and you have to restore everything, which is not good."
"AEM, when setup using Mongo, rapidly gains size; hence it consumes a lot of storage space in a very short period of time."
"Adobe Experience Manager could improve by allowing the reuse of components like a progress bar across multiple pages to make the development process more efficient."
"The programming model could be improved, it's a monolithic solution and that's what we don't like."
"The UI for handling complex logic, especially in forms, could be more intuitive, and debugging issues is not always straightforward and could be simplified."
"Last but not least, Adobe AEM TCO (total cost of ownership) is very high with return on investment is slow (ROI is not necessarily low), which is why Adobe's focus is mostly large companies with deep pocket"
"Bug troubleshooting is challenging and requires developer expertise."
"With even basic Joomla, it requires a course."
"Web applications created in Joomla eat up a lot of server resources."
"Customizing components is not so easy."
"I would like to see more back-end admin power pulled into the front-end, therefore the admins will not have to use the back-end as much, especially for the menu manager, user manager, etc. versus using third-party extensions to achieve this."
"When it comes time for them to edit menus and navigation to add a new page or article into the menu somewhere, it starts to get a little complex for many users to build these menu items, especially when there are multiple menus being used in different positions."
"Joomla itself seems to be secure, but many add-ons are badly written and allow LFI, RFI, SQL injection and XSS attacks."
"I would like to see the same sorting and attributes available through the web browser on the JED (sorting by free or commercial license, sort by rating, popularity, etc.) within the back-end Joomla Web Installer when browsing extensions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Users have to pay a yearly licensing fee to use the solution, which is highly-priced."
"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."
"Joomla is open source, therefore free. Only hosting, the time to build it along with the training time is your startup cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise24
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Adobe Experience Manager?
I find the drag-and-drop form builder in Adobe Experience Manager to be mostly intuitive, especially for basic forms, but it has some quirks when things get complex. You can drag fields, text, drop...
What is your primary use case for Adobe Experience Manager?
I have been using Adobe Experience Manager for over three years, focusing on building scalable content solutions, managing workflow, and implementing AEM Forms for enterprise use cases. My main use...
What advice do you have for others considering Adobe Experience Manager?
In our setup, Adobe Experience Manager integrates with tools such as Adobe Analytics for tracking user behavior, Adobe Target for personalization, and backend APIs for CRM systems for handling form...
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Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Metra
Artisan Web and Print, HLVC Design, Media A-Team Inc, Holdingbay - Tristan Bailey, Molehill Web Works, Sysgen Media, Pappy Productions, Inc., Turn To The ProsPB Web Development, LC Publishing - LambCottage Foundation
Find out what your peers are saying about Adobe Experience Manager vs. Joomla and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
894,738 professionals have used our research since 2012.