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Acquia Digital Experience Platform vs. Magnolia

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Acquia Digital Experience Platform

    Score7.9 out of 10
    N/AThe Acquia Digital Experience Platform is an "Open DXP" with its two core pillars being content and data. Built on top of one of the largest open-source content management systems, Drupal, it aims to provide the flexibility and interoperability a modern organization needs. With its customer data platform, it allows organizations to understand who their customers are and deliver personalized experiences. Acquia's DXP offers variety of other tools including digital asset management,…N/A

    Magnolia

    Score8.1 out of 10
    Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
    Founded in Switzerland in 1997, Magnolia is a CMS used to build composable digital experiences. Magnolia helps create fully integrated customer experiences and speeds up digital delivery of content. Magnolia boasts 480 enterprise customers, thousands of Community Edition deployments, and more than 200 certified Magnolia Partners around the world. They further state that their enterprise customers include Sanofi, Generali, the Atlassian, The New York Times, Harley Davidson, and Union…

    $3,500

    per month

    Pricing
    Acquia Digital Experience PlatformMagnolia
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    DX Core
    $3500
    per month
    DX Cloud
    $6000
    per month
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Acquia Digital Experience PlatformMagnolia
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Acquia Digital Experience PlatformMagnolia
    Considered Both Products
    Acquia
    No answer on this topic
    Magnolia
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    97%
    Would buy again
    74 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    58 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    94%
    Delivers good value for the price
    64 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    49 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    73 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    58 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    48 Answers
    98%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    39 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    90%
    Implementation went as expected
    53 Answers
    98%
    Implementation went as expected
    53 Answers
    Features
    Acquia Digital Experience PlatformMagnolia
    Security
    Comparison of Security features of Acquia Digital Experience Platform and Magnolia
    Feature
    Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    8.0
    49 Ratings
    3% below category average
    Magnolia
    8.1
    70 Ratings
    0% above category average
    Role-based user permissions8.049 Ratings8.170 Ratings
    Platform & Infrastructure
    Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Acquia Digital Experience Platform and Magnolia
    Feature
    Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    7.7
    41 Ratings
    8% below category average
    Magnolia
    8.1
    69 Ratings
    7% above category average
    API7.839 Ratings8.562 Ratings
    Internationalization / multi-language7.632 Ratings7.762 Ratings
    Web Content Creation
    Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Acquia Digital Experience Platform and Magnolia
    Feature
    Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    7.9
    43 Ratings
    4% above category average
    Magnolia
    8.0
    75 Ratings
    4% above category average
    WYSIWYG editor7.331 Ratings8.566 Ratings
    Code quality / cleanliness8.134 Ratings8.466 Ratings
    Admin section7.942 Ratings8.071 Ratings
    Page templates8.030 Ratings8.973 Ratings
    Library of website themes8.226 Ratings7.01 Ratings
    Mobile optimization / responsive design7.828 Ratings8.564 Ratings
    Publishing workflow7.934 Ratings7.574 Ratings
    Form generator7.924 Ratings6.959 Ratings
    Web Content Management
    Comparison of Web Content Management features of Acquia Digital Experience Platform and Magnolia
    Feature
    Acquia Digital Experience Platform
    7.0
    35 Ratings
    3% below category average
    Magnolia
    7.5
    70 Ratings
    2% above category average
    Content taxonomy7.728 Ratings7.664 Ratings
    SEO support6.029 Ratings7.264 Ratings
    Bulk management6.931 Ratings7.658 Ratings
    Availability / breadth of extensions7.432 Ratings7.963 Ratings
    Community / comment management7.226 Ratings6.952 Ratings
    User Ratings
    Acquia Digital Experience PlatformMagnolia
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.4
    (93 ratings)
    8.1
    (79 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.9
    (11 ratings)
    8.1
    (9 ratings)
    Usability
    7.7
    (2 ratings)
    8.0
    (69 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.5
    (68 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.0
    (5 ratings)
    9.1
    (3 ratings)
    Online Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.3
    (73 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Acquia Digital Experience PlatformMagnolia
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Acquia
    It made it super easy to upgrade 300+ Drupal sites to the latest major version in 12 weeks, end to end. It is easy to deploy legal changes and updates to components at scale. Turnkey service to deploy new environments and to clone sites. There are no ecosystem lock-in principles for Customer service/success services and professional services for new approaches.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Magnolia
    Magnolia is a very capable DXP, that provides client with lots of flexibility in composing its own stack. While the core of the platform is a content management system, the open architecture of Magnolia DXP allows it to connect to any platform, allowing client to extend the capabilities. One scenario would be a centralized content hub - where through a single platform, content authors can choose which channel to distribute what content. For example, long form content for consumers viewing on a laptop, short form content for those using a mobile browser. This allow the client to personalized the experience based on channels. Another scenarios would be leveraging on GenAI - using Magnolia's built-in connector to ChatGPT. If that is not the service that one desire, you can always connect to another AI service such as Google Gemini. With GenAI, connected, content author can use AI as co-pilot to help them scale up their content production.
    Read full review
    Pros
    Acquia
    • It's fast, no lag time
    • Exceptionally good support. When there's a problem, you reach out to your account manager who either fixes the issue or gets you to the right person. We've had no downtime.
    • Platform is very accessible to those who know how to manage the back end software.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Magnolia
    • Speed of development - time to delivery from zero to MVP was excellent
    • Ease of use - the authoring experience is very easy to build and train
    • PAAS/SAAS - the managed service platform removed the traditional overhead of running in-house technologies, meaning we could focus on value add, with less time spent keeping the lights on.
    Read full review
    Cons
    Acquia
    • Support responds pretty quickly to critical tickets, but they can be slow to respond on non-urgent items. Some of what we experienced may have been related to a newer ticketing system recently implemented.
    • Standard support covers business days/hours but only critical support is available outside those times. We typically schedule our website updates for the weekend or "off" hours when only critical support is available.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Magnolia
    • The documentation provides samples that are often out of context, and difficult to know where the provided example code should be implemented. More tutorials providing the full project or step-by-step instructions on how to implement subject material would help greatly. Baeldung is a resource I would consider the gold standard in how this is done in other spaces.
    • The use of JCR and Nodes makes object serialization/deserialization painful. Jackson compatibility or similar would be a welcome enhancement to the developer experience. Maybe leveraging code-gen from light modules to build model classes when possible could help accomplish this.
    • Modifying the home layout from light modules is frustrating. It seems that any configuration overrides made merge with the default rather than overwriting, which makes for a difficult combination of guess-and-check while referencing the documentation to see what should be in each row/column when making changes.
    • Including "mark all as read" or "delete all" in the notifications app would be a great quality of life improvement. It seems that by default, users have to individually select messages and operate them.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Acquia
    We rated our renewal likelihood an 8 because Acquia DXP delivers solid reliability, strong enterprise security, and an infrastructure built specifically for Drupal that takes the burden off our internal hosting management. The developer tooling and cloud stability are exceptional. The only factors keeping it from a 10 are the premium licensing costs and the learning curve for non-technical users, which requires ongoing budget justification during annual renewal discussions.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Magnolia
    We have invested a lot of time and energy into tailoring a solution that works for the company.
    We think the new features in v6.2 will help us get to the next level
    We also don't have the resources to rebuild a website platform from scratch even if we wanted to
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Acquia
    It's a great user interface. It's always being updated and I've never noticed a bad update that increased the complexity or reduced
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Magnolia
    We've shown it to a number of users both clients and our own team and despite initial apprehensions, they "get it" very quickly. It's intuitive and friendly and quick to perform daily tasks. We once had a client tell us "Using Magnolia makes me smile" which says it all for us.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    Acquia
    No answers on this topic
    Magnolia
    I gave [it] 7/10 only because of the loading time of pages. Otherwise, I think it deserves an 8. Normally this is not an issue per [se] but considering the rating matrix and as I have been asked to honestly write about it. Yes, the page loading times could be improved.
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    Support Rating
    Acquia
    Every time we have had an issue, Acquia support has responded promptly and worked with us as a team to solve the problem. The Acquia support team is global and we have literally had interactions with all of their support offices, yet the experience has been the same - top notch
    Incentivized
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    Magnolia
    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
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Acquia
    It was implemented when I got there. I don't know how it was prior.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Magnolia
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    Acquia
    We chose Acquia for a much better UI that gave non-analytical marketers and easy to use tool where they could create their own reports. The campaign side of things also had an easier to use UI as well, that made the targeting of audiences much easier.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Magnolia
    I've used several CMSs like AEM and EpiServer, and comparatively, they all excel at different things. Magnolia is the best to develop for/against. Episerver has the best/most fluid UI in terms of content editing, and the overall admin experience AEM is just all around sucks.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Acquia
    The DXP tools can handle millions of requests and can scale automatically to fit your needs. We have clients that use only part of the DXP tools and have a small usage, but even in these cases they see great value in using tools like personalization and CDP.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Magnolia
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    Acquia
    • Acquia has helped us to stabilize and optimize our website performance, lowering page load times and dramatically decreasing the frequency of issues experienced by end-users.
    • Acquia SOLR search provided a much-improved search experience on our website.
    • Acquia's PCI-compliant hosting has helped us to remain compliant and cyber-secure.
    • We are working to implement Acquia Site Studio and Acquia Personalization now and expect those to improve our operation agility and ability to drive more relevant experiences to our various website visitors.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Magnolia
    • Magnolia has brought about positive impacts. For instance, we need not outsource web design and marketing services because thanks to this software, we can handle most work inhouse
    • The software is affordable with no compromises on capabilities and therefore it is gives us value for money.
    • The templates makes the whole process easy
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Magnolia Screenshots

    Screenshot of the Magnolia App Launcher, used to switch between workspaces and manage pagesScreenshot of the customer experience. This brings together content and audiovisual digital assets to form more compelling digital experiences.Screenshot of global search that brings relevant content, no matter where it resides.Screenshot of customizing the ecommerce experience.Screenshot of Magnolia Orchestratem where users can manage and track campaignsScreenshot of the WYSIWYG page editor