Magnolia vs. Movable Type

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Magnolia
Score 8.1 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
Movable Type
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Movable Type is a Perl-based content management system from Six Apart, featuring the capability to host multiple weblogs and standalone content pages, manage files and user roles, templates, tags, categories, and trackback links.N/A
Pricing
MagnoliaMovable Type
Editions & Modules
DX Core
$3500
per month
DX Cloud
$6000
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
MagnoliaMovable Type
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
MagnoliaMovable Type
Features
MagnoliaMovable Type
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Magnolia
8.0
Ratings
1% below category average
Movable Type
5.0
Ratings
47% below category average
Role-based user permissions8.00 Ratings5.00 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Magnolia
8.1
Ratings
7% above category average
Movable Type
6.0
Ratings
23% below category average
API8.50 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language7.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Magnolia
8.0
Ratings
4% above category average
Movable Type
6.4
Ratings
19% below category average
WYSIWYG editor8.50 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness8.40 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Admin section8.00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Page templates8.90 Ratings5.00 Ratings
Library of website themes7.00 Ratings3.00 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design8.50 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Publishing workflow7.50 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Form generator6.90 Ratings3.00 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Magnolia
7.5
Ratings
2% above category average
Movable Type
5.6
Ratings
27% below category average
Content taxonomy7.60 Ratings9.00 Ratings
SEO support7.20 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Bulk management7.60 Ratings3.00 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions7.90 Ratings3.00 Ratings
Community / comment management6.90 Ratings7.00 Ratings
User Ratings
MagnoliaMovable Type
Likelihood to Recommend
8.1
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.1
(0 ratings)
5.4
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.5
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
8.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
MagnoliaMovable Type
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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For the purpose of simple, day-to-day blogging, Movable Type will get the job done. As I mentioned before, it has an intuitive UI so that most beginners can pick it up and build a simple blog post. But if you're looking for a CMS that will host multimedia content, interactive content, or any "fancy" production that goes beyond paragraphs and bullet points, then I would recommend something different - maybe even a custom CMS for the maximum control over your website's back-end coding. Keep in mind that the CMS does have some quirks and can be finicky, but the support staff is extremely helpful and available.
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Pros
  • 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.
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  • Once you understood how the MT language and framework worked, customization wasn't too difficult.
  • Allowed for levels of user access.
  • Ease of creating RSS feeds.
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Cons
  • 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.
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  • While it's beneficial to be able to assign administrative rights to a user so they can only post to certain places of a website, I can recall that Movable Type did not inform general users of the types of privileges they had. So, for example, when I knew I needed to make a posting to a certain area, and was unable to do so, I was not informed that I did not have access to make that posting. It would have been helpful for Movable Type to post a message on the screen, saying that I needed more permissions. This was very frustrating, especially when I was on deadline for a newspaper story.
  • Unfortunately, (or fortunately), I do not recall other negative experiences. I thought it was a pretty clean, friendly interface.
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Likelihood to Renew
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.
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I think there are still improvements to be made. I haven't tapped in to the full functionality of the CMS yet but the rating I give it now is only based on what I've been able to use it for
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Usability
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.
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No answers on this topic
Performance
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.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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)
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Movable Type is better than Wordpress because it generates static sites that cannot be broken by losing your database connection. The custom fields in MT are superior to Wordpress because of the way the fields are presented in the new content form. You need to get paid plugins in order to get that kind of functionality in Wordpress. Most of the templates in MT can be customized with greater control because you're provided with more templates.
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Return on Investment
  • 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.
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  • Movable Type definitely increased employee efficiency. Having everyone on the same platform to edit multiple websites from system is crucial.
  • Expanding our website presence was a super simple process with Movable Type. All we needed to do was add another site, destination folder, and we're ready to go.
  • Having all of our web designers on the same platform helped immensely with communicating information and structuring education for new employees.
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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