Craft CMS vs. Magnolia

Suitable for mid-size to large websites (20 pages+). If you have a massive project with dozens or hundreds of content contributors, complex editorial process/workflow, are tied to a non-Linux platform (Microsoft Server), you may want an enterprise CMS like Episerver. If you need a small, cheap, theme-based, basic website with 5-15 pages, you'll probably go to WordPress.

Incentivized

If you need a business CMS that brings along a good amount of features and also give you the chance to develop features on your own, Magnolia would be a good choice. Even if you have not the fitting infrastructure around, Magnolia provides you different ways like SAAS oder PAAS. If you have to review your code our have any problems the team behind will helps in a short time. Without using the connectors it is not so easy to connect special functionalities like Marketing tools or optimization tools. The DAM is very slow if you have an huge amount of documents and pictures to store for your website - you have to add an external DAM.

Incentivized

• Design-agnostic templating system. No themes. This means you can use whatever HTML, CSS, JS you want, and integrate it with Craft.
• Versatile field types, with 3rd party plugins providing a bunch more. Everything from plain text to address, color picker, date/time, file assets, one-to-many relationships, and more.
• Control panel with clean, responsive UI makes content updates easy for clients.

Incentivized

• Use of YAML to define content models with code.
• Versatility of defining actions for custom handlers.
• Reloading classes when code is modified in a local dev environment is nice. While it doesn't seem to work when changes extend beyond the method body (i.e., adding methods), it remediates the pain of long startup times.

Incentivized

• Could use a more robust implementation of rich text editor.
• Some functionality that requires plugins, for example, advanced field management, should be part of the core install.
• It should be a bit easier to brand the control panel w/logo and color scheme.

Incentivized

• As a developer the learning curve is long, you can start developing relatively quickly but getting to know the platform in depth takes time.
• Having a history of modifications not only at the page level but also at the Content Apps level would be very useful.

Incentivized

Magnolia is an innovative CMS, for example it is possible to use the ipad to manage the contents. Magnolia’s team works hard to improve the product; the community is small but active and the support for the enterprise version is good. Magnolia’s team asks the users what they think and what they need, and the new functionalities planned for Magnolia 5.3 are very exciting for example the content personalization.

There are a ton of small things that could make this CMS great Off the top of my head... 1) Better navigation between a component and its corresponding node in the jcr ( devs often have to flip between a page and a spot in the jcr even though there could be a button to take you from a page/component in the pages app to its location in the JCR) 2) Why does a content editor need to open the page to edit the page properties? They could just as easily edit the dialog from the tree view if they have many pages to touch, and it would save them time by not having to render the page.

Incentivized

It's a lean and performant platform. You don't need to put reverse proxy servers in front of it to speed it up (although that does make it go even quicker) as there are various layers of caching built in to the application. While it's a little cryptic, the internal caching system is actually quite configurable and can be tuned to the right sort of content.

Often what tends to surprise many an IT manager is that you can run it on relatively modest hardware. We've often been met with "are you sure ?" but the reality is that it doesn't need a whole lot of horsepower.

Incentivized

You always get an answer based on your SLA. But you always get a solution. That's the successfactor in this case. To often i was frustrated about people in a company without even a clue what there product is about or how to solve a problem. Magnolia's Support Team does a very good job and try to help you in most of the cases

Craft was originally developed in response to ExpressionEngine's shortcomings. While ExpressionEngine has caught up in some regards, it still looks and feels a bit unpolished by comparison. Additionally, ExpressionEngine's vendor has never gotten UI right - not on their website, nor in their CMS. Craft remains easier to use, more polished and provides a wider feature set in its base install (without needing plugins). As for WordPress - while I recognize its massive popularity, I find its reliance on themes, third-party plugins, along with security shortcomings, make it a poor fit for the larger custom projects we build. On the other hand, if you want to throw up a passable website in a day, you can't beat WordPress.

Incentivized

Magnolia DXP offers similar or more capability compared to the other platform, while much easier to implement. For example, Adobe Experience Manager tend to be more monolithic in nature, heavier footprint compared to Magnolia. Hence when implementing a DXP, it is much faster to build using Magnolia, at a much lower TCO. The other platform like Kontent.ai and Strapi are pure headless platform and offer lesser features. What really make Magnolia different is the APAC team, who are all out to support their client in the implementation, ensuring their client maximize their platform and the project implementation is successful. This is some thing that is not experienced when using other platform(s)

• We don't have hard numbers on Craft's impact on our ROI, but we recognize that its feature set, ease of use, and integrated ECommerce allows offering a superior product to clients.

Incentivized

• We have placed web content management in the hands of the organisation than retained it within the technology team.
• We were able to quickly move to MVP and release and we are now focussed on moving the platform forward at some pace whilst not being burdened with BAU work inside the technology team as so much as self-service to trained organisational users
• The use of the SAAS/PASS has inbuilt business resiliency as specialist work and aspects such as underlying security is done by Magnolia and we are able to focus internal effort on building out the platform.