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Adobe Experience Manager vs Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 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
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Content Management (7th), Web Content Management (2nd), Enterprise Social Software (5th), Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) (1st)
Microsoft Office SharePoint...
Average Rating
7.6
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Content Collaboration Platforms (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Messaging and Collaboration solutions, they serve different purposes. Adobe Experience Manager is designed for Enterprise Content Management and holds a mindshare of 3.0%, up 3.0% compared to last year.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, on the other hand, focuses on Content Collaboration Platforms, holds 7.1% mindshare, down 9.8% since last year.
Enterprise Content Management
Content Collaboration Platforms
 

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…
Mehdi Hasankhan - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to use but offers poor integrations with Oracle and has inflexible security configuration
I can't configure the current security I want. There are a lot of bots in it. Sharepoint doesn't integrate well with Oracle, and we use a lot of Oracle products at our company. Therefore, it makes more sense for us to go to Oracle instead of continuing to use Sharepoint.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's a complete package. You don't need to look elsewhere for digital marketing."
"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."
"Adobe Experience Manager is quite a powerful product that you can use to design files and export them."
"Adobe Experience Manager is pretty stable."
"Adobe Experience Manager is a content management system, and we use it to create and manage a website."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the fact that it doesn't require coding. You just need to configure it. You don't need to code before getting something running. It makes it very fast."
"It's a very robust product."
"Document management and records management features are the most valuable."
"It is a decent tool for collaboration, especially if you are already using other Office products."
"The forms aspect of the solution, for example, the creation of surveys, is its most valuable aspect."
"The most valuable feature is the "Alert Me", which provides the ability to set an alert when content is either added or changed and that the alerts can be either real-time or aggregated for the day or the week."
"The collaboration, the ability for multiple users to work on a single document."
"The software is friendly to use for mixing data and analyzing it."
 

Cons

"I haven't seen any areas for improvement in Adobe Experience Manager as it's a full-fledged CMS tool, and Adobe is already working on enhancements for the solution. Adobe is working to make Adobe Experience Manager more valuable and easier to use for any user, even non-technical ones, through multiple components and templates. Day by day, Adobe provides the latest update to Adobe Experience Manager, and if my team needs any particular change, it just needs to be reported to the Adobe team. As Adobe Experience Manager has a broad scope and a lot of use cases and features, it's a solution that requires some time and effort from you in terms of learning, especially if you're implementing it for different clients, which could be an area for improvement."
"The licenses are very expensive."
"The solution's pricing and stability could be improved."
"There is a feature missing where if content is created on the UAT environment and needs to be transferred or synced to the production environment, there is no direct way of doing the sync."
"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."
"A little bit of background knowledge of coding and website structure is required."
"Adobe's technical support is so-so."
"The ability to preview files in different formats should be expanded to include formats such as embedded postscript (EPS), AutoCAD, and Adobe Acrobat PDF."
"This solution is not very stable. It is useful to arrange data but it's not the best for big data. Sometimes we have issues with our reports as a result."
"The product could be improved by accommodating different technologies, particularly integration."
"The areas around security, such as protection, need to be included."
"I would like to see more Agile techniques and seamless integration with other applications."
"It is a bit restrictive to develop in the cloud version. A lot of features are in the cloud now, and you have to develop on the outside. As far as the platform and the programming side of things are concerned, it is moving more towards configuration management rather than programming. When we are doing solutions, we are basically just configuring it to make solutions happen rather than actually using the Visual Studio code and developing from scratch in the cloud. It is almost like creating an app. You have created an app for your phone, but the app doesn't really sit on your phone. It sits somewhere on a server, and the database sits on another server. The app is just pulling and pushing information. The whole development has changed. We used to install things directly on the server and then run the application from the server. Now, it is more of a modular architecture."
"Technical support could be improved. They are not fast enough, especially when we'll go deeper in the product itself. More complex issues make it very tough to find someone that can help you."
"The solution needs to enable better sharing capabilities between users and external users. Several users also have problems with linking their emails to their Microsoft account."
 

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."
"It's really costly."
"Users have to pay a yearly licensing fee to use the solution, which is highly-priced."
"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."
"One of the reasons why we don't recommend the cloud version of SharePoint is the cost. With the on premise version, you pay for the license once. For the cloud version, there is a recurring fee. It is very expensive. They expect everyone to pay $20 or $30 per user per month."
"There are some aggressive discounts offered by Microsoft for organizations that are not for profit, which we are, and it makes it quite attractive to consider."
"It can be expensive for on-premises deployments, especially when you have to support SQL Server as your backend database. That's where the cost comes into play. SQL Server has its own licensing, which Microsoft keeps on changing. Therefore, it can become costly. In the earlier versions of SharePoint, version 2007 or 2010, they had an express version where the SQL Server licensing was free. It wasn't like a full-blown SharePoint. It was only a slimmed-down version. It used to be whatever your hardware costs. You would install the free software and work with it, but you were very limited in what you could do in SharePoint. If you wanted the SharePoint Enterprise Server with all the bells and whistles, then you had to pay more to get the SQL Server license based on the number of users or servers. The subscription model is different for cloud deployments. Licensing is per user and per month. The cost also depends on the storage required. If you have a lot of sites or documents, then you need to expand it based on your needs."
"Pricing plans may be flexible depending on volume usage and your corporate relationship with Microsoft."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
25%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

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?
The content is created as Adobe Experience Manager has an author, publisher, and dispatcher. However, there is a feature missing where if content is created on the UAT environment and needs to be t...
What is your primary use case for Adobe Experience Manager?
We are working on digital experience platforms such as Adobe Experience Manager or Sitefinity. It's for powering their customer-facing website, not the transaction portal, but the brochureware port...
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Also Known As

Adobe Day CQ5, Ektron Social Marketing, Episerver Content Cloud
Office SharePoint Server, MS Office SharePoint Server
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Metra
Del Monte Foods, Unicredit Leasing, Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council, Nokia Czech Republic, Perkins Eastman, JLL, ICA, óxito Software, Dorset Software, PKP Cargo, Arcapita Bank B.S.C., AVE CZ, Chesapeake Energy
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, OpenText, IBM and others in Enterprise Content Management. Updated: June 2025.
856,856 professionals have used our research since 2012.