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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
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Content Management (3rd), Web Content Management (1st), Enterprise Social Software (4th), Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) (1st)
Microsoft Office SharePoint...
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
4.3
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Content Collaboration Platforms (5th)
 

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 4.0%, up 3.2% compared to last year.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, on the other hand, focuses on Content Collaboration Platforms, holds 3.5% mindshare, down 5.9% since last year.
Enterprise Content Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Adobe Experience Manager4.0%
SharePoint12.0%
OpenText Documentum Content Management6.5%
Other77.5%
Enterprise Content Management
Content Collaboration Platforms Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server3.5%
Office 3658.2%
Dropbox Business - Enterprise7.7%
Other80.6%
Content Collaboration Platforms
 

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.
Daniel Giacomelli - PeerSpot reviewer
Security and Compliance at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Has transformed how I manage documents through metadata and automation while enabling structured collaboration
Microsoft should restore some functionalities from older versions of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2003 and 2010. Specifically, bringing back something similar to SharePoint Designer would be beneficial. SharePoint Designer was both advantageous and challenging - developers found it limiting and preferred Visual Studio, while non-developers struggled to use it effectively. A new tool for configuring webpage design and development for content pages would be valuable. The current system is too basic. While integration of filtered lists and libraries is possible, it requires knowledge of Python or jQuery. A WYSIWYG editor would be preferable to requiring programming knowledge or Visual Studio.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like the profiling and segmentation."
"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.)."
"The integration of customer behavior and website setup is impressive."
"Adobe Experience Manager is a content management system, and we use it to create and manage a website."
"Over the past two to three years, the organization has grown rapidly with Adobe Experience Manager as a best and supportive tool."
"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 search capability in Adobe Experience Manager is superior, as search capabilities are determined by the metadata, and it also has metadata automation using AI."
"Adobe Experience Manager has made document management smoother because many people use Adobe, making it simpler for me to modify and resend PDF documents."
"The software is friendly to use for mixing data and analyzing it."
"Enhanced user access management features fully integrated with Active Directory allowed us to gain the trust of the users and they use SharePoint to store and share all company digital content created by them."
"I like the collaboration, the ability for multiple users to work on a single document and be able to firstly collaborate and share notes about the document, as well as being able to work on the document without losing the information."
"It's a very robust product."
"What I appreciate most about Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is how it centralizes information and collaboration in one place."
"There is a lot more flexibility in the cloud, especially for mobile development."
"The best features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server are the integration between SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, and email."
"This solution has provided us with a collaborative workspace to allow everyone to work together and be on the same page."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution's pricing and stability could be improved."
"Adobe Experience Manager is not so simple to use, so others should have some experience with similar programs."
"The idea was to make it easy for the marketing teams, but it requires engineers who are hard to find and expensive to employ."
"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's pricing could be improved."
"Many of our customers would like to see an OCR feature, so it would be very good to have this in a future release."
"Making it more intuitive could help teams adopt it faster and use it more effectively by being more user-friendly."
"The permission management features need improvement."
"I would like to see the integration with Teams reinforced."
"The search functionality on the on-premises version is not very good."
"One of the reasons why we don't recommend the cloud version of SharePoint is the cost."
"However, with time, they raise the price until it becomes somewhat expensive for us."
"The UIs are really clunky and Microsoft needs to fix that."
 

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."
"Pricing plans may be flexible depending on volume usage and your corporate relationship with Microsoft."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Construction Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

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 Business13
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise17
 

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server?
I am not aware of the pricing, so I cannot say if the solution is expensive or quite affordable.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server?
My expectation when I start using a Microsoft product is that it would be easy to incorporate diagrams and such from other Microsoft Office products. Incorporating a diagram I've embedded in a slid...
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server?
I produce content about the work I'm doing inside the company, making information about IT architecture, work processes within IT architecture, and security reviews of applications or infrastructur...
 

Also Known As

Adobe Day CQ5, Ektron Social Marketing, Episerver Content Cloud, Adobe CQ5
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, IBM, Adobe and others in Enterprise Content Management. Updated: August 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.