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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
31
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Content Management (3rd), Enterprise Social Software (4th), Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) (1st)
Joomla
Ranking in Web Content Management
12th
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Web Content Management category, the mindshare of Adobe Experience Manager is 8.5%, down from 11.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Joomla is 2.3%, 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 Manager8.5%
Joomla2.3%
Other89.2%
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

"Easy to work with the solution."
"A certain client has definitely seen approximately fifteen to twenty percent improvement in their web engagement and conversions on the personalized pages, especially when those experiences were connected and retargeted with other engagement campaigns in MoEngage."
"Adobe Experience Manager is a content management system, and we use it to create and manage a website."
"Being able to connect everything to one universal system was a game changer for us, giving us an overall better digital experience."
"The Asset module has received a lot of focus and is currently one of the best solutions for Digital Asset Management out there."
"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."
"Over the past two to three years, the organization has grown rapidly with Adobe Experience Manager as a best and supportive tool."
"I believe that the primary feature of the product is the ability and extent to which it allows authors to modify, build and operate their website, page components, etc. that otherwise would require a lot more of developer work."
"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."
"Joomla is one of the most popular CMSs today."
"Do your project in Joomla; you will see that it is a better solution for website development."
"Despite some limitations, Joomla stands out from the crowd and manages to retain its position in the market."
"With a fairly small learning curve for the end user who wants the basics, Joomla is one of the most robust, stable, secure, feature-rich CMSs on the market."
"This CMS lets you create an own website within minutes, no matter if the user has knowledge in coding."
"Simplicity and security are basic elements to build a website quickly and safely, and with JoomShaper it was for me even easier."
"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."
 

Cons

"The licensing model is opaque, and technical support could be improved, especially for smaller companies."
"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."
"Tool-wise, the Adobe Experience Manager support team is not very responsive when the user face issues in AEM as a Cloud Service."
"I assigned a rating of eight because there are certain limitations we must consider, and there are restrictions in Adobe Experience Manager that we cannot resolve."
"One common challenge that I have heard of is that Adobe Experience Manager can feel complex and resource-intensive during implementation, especially for organizations without strong technical or Adobe ecosystem expertise."
"With the default template design, it is difficult to manage the different resolutions of images."
"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"
"Adobe Experience Manager needs more optimization. The frequency of components where we have vitals of a page or an app needs to be optimized because these are heavy Java codes along with some AEM developments."
"With even basic Joomla, it requires a course."
"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."
"Customizing components is not so easy."
"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."
"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."
"Web applications created in Joomla eat up a lot of server resources."
"Joomla itself seems to be secure, but many add-ons are badly written and allow LFI, RFI, SQL injection and XSS attacks."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Users have to pay a yearly licensing fee to use the solution, which is highly-priced."
"It's really costly."
"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 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
11%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Government
8%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise24
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Adobe Experience Manager?
One common challenge that I have heard of is that Adobe Experience Manager can feel complex and resource-intensive during implementation, especially for organizations without strong technical or Ad...
What is your primary use case for Adobe Experience Manager?
I personally have not used Adobe Experience Manager, but I have observed a retail client that uses Adobe Experience Manager to manage their personalized website content, and while they use MoEngage...
What advice do you have for others considering Adobe Experience Manager?
Adobe Experience Manager should be evaluated as a long-term digital experience platform rather than just a CMS. It delivers the most value for organizations that need personalization, multi-channel...
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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: August 2026.
909,563 professionals have used our research since 2012.