Magnolia

Score8.1 out of 10

119 Reviews and Ratings

What is Magnolia?

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 Investment.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Screenshot of the Magnolia App Launcher, used to switch between workspaces and manage pages

Screenshot 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 campaigns

Screenshot of Magnolia's AI image editor

Screenshot of Magnolia's accessibility tracking

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Screenshot of the Magnolia App Launcher, used to switch between workspaces and manage pages

Page templates
The CMS has standard webpage templates or types of web pages (e.g. homepage, article page, interior page, blog page, etc.); users can also build custom templates.
Category average: 7.9
API
An API (application programming interface) provides a standard programming interface for connecting third-party systems to the software for data creation, access, updating and/or deletion.
Category average: 8
WYSIWYG editor
What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editing tool allows users to build pages without writing code.
Category average: 7.9

Library of website themes
A library of website frameworks or themes is available as a starting point for building a website.
Category average: 6.7
Form generator
Users can build website forms for visitors to fill out.
Category average: 7.1
Community / comment management
Users can put post/page comments through an approval process, auto-approve commenters based on their email addresses, block commenters by IP address, delete comments, etc.
Category average: 7.4

#1 most frequent

Manufacturing

8.7%

172 installations of 1,985

#2 most frequent

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

8.3%

164 installations of 1,985

#3 most frequent

Finance and Insurance

7.4%

146 installations of 1,985

Andrew Elia View profile

CEO (Chief Executive Officer) in Professional Services at Arishi (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We mostly use and recommend Magnolia for enterprise clients who want a lean, easy to use platform for managing their content (not just on the web). However we do also use it internally for our own website as well.

It's not the only solution our clients use as everyone has different requirements. Why do we use it and recommend it to others when we do see a fit ? Quite simply, it's a well engineered product which has always been ultra reliable whenever we've deployed it to the dozens of clients who we've worked with it on. We don't like implementing solutions that we have to constantly prod and patch to keep working, and for us Magnolia saves us time, money and credibility. Our clients are always happy to use it because it is simple to use and takes minimal training.

Pros

Reliability
Ease of use
Rapid development and deployment
Performance
Robust and secure architecture

Cons

Improve coverage in North America and the Middle East
Arab and Mandarin languages in admin central
Less reliance on JCR for back end storage interface

Return on Investment

Rapid time to market. We have managed to turn around replatforming projects in a matter of weeks.
Integration. The API access is really helpful and we've been able to use this with Python scripts to automate some otherwise laborious batch processing tasks and connect Magnolia with other systems. There's also a Groovy interface which can do some of this for certain types of task. The Groovy console is a little unloved in terms of support but it's really handy if you know what you're doing.
We have onboarded and trained staff to use the platform really quickly. It's friendly and accessible to newcomers so while we often get scared looks from new staff when we first tell them about it, they come round to love it very quickly once they see it!

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Sitecore Experience Commerce, dotCMS, Contentful, Umbraco CMS, WordPress and Drupal

Other Software Used

NAKIVO Backup & Replication, Ahsay Cloud Backup Suite, ZEVE- Virtual Environment

alex plouff

Web Developer in Information Technology at Crescendo Collective (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I train developers how to use, build and customize every nook and cranny of Magnolia.

Pros

Allows easy/fast development/configuration via yaml.
Allows devs to override out of box functionality.
Allows many integration points.

Cons

Admincentral UI is clunky and animations make it feel slow.
Admincentral UI layout fosters a frustrating experience w/ many misclicks wasting time.
Documentation as of late has been inaccurate and hard to follow.

Return on Investment

YAML config speeds up and simplifies development where othe CMSs fail.

Usability

Ivan De Paz View profile

Website Porject Manager in Information Technology at Air Europa (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Magnolia in our day-to-day business in several different ways

As a content management system for pages in which we display useful information to our customers.
We also have several headless systems in which we send different information dynamically from banners to regions of the home page to display depending on the type of device that connects (Desktop browser, Mobile browser, Native App).
ContentApps in which we send literals according to languages selected by the user.

Pros

The flexibility it offers us to be able to implement all the needs we have.
To be able to perform Front development in the technology that best suits your needs, VueJS, ANGULAR, ReactJS.
Constant version upgrades make Magnolia a 100% reliable product.
The active community behind it to provide support and help.
Flexibility and simplicity of creating ContentApps that can be attacked via APIs

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.

Return on Investment

Management and implementation times have been drastically reduced.
Marketplace management with the LifeCopy plugin has reduced the time to create new marketplaces in an existing language by more than 90%.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Drupal, WordPress and Adobe Experience Manager

Other Software Used

AngularJS, OpenJDK, Datadog

Mario de Vicente Fernandez View profile

IT DIrector for Marketing in Information Technology at Prosegur (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Magnolia is actually taking care of all the Corporate Sites of Prosegur, covering all the footprint of the company worldwide and all our businesses

Pros

Agility to create new contents
Customization capabilities
Roadmap of the product

Cons

Reporting of activities performed by contributors (changes, publications, accesses...)
Log information related with the operation of the platform
Only five versions for each conten are usually not enough

Return on Investment

Accelerated launch times, we are able to generate a complete new web site in a few days
The roadmap and strategy are alligned with our needs (SPA, Headless, DXP...)

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress and Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP)

Other Software Used

Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce Essentials

Daniel Morley

Business Analyst in Marketing at Rentokil Initial (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Magnolia is used in our Business to build our brochure websites. Currently we have 25+ websites live in Magnolia, however are undergoing a migration from our old content management system over to Magnolia where all of our 180+ websites in 80+ countries will be managed. My role within Magnolia is to document the requirments for new features and enhancements and ensure we maintain Magnolia to the latest updates. Long term Magnolia will be used in the business for other functions such as our logged in portals and other applications.

Pros

Managing content
Easy to edit content
Easy to build and deploy new functionality

Cons

Ecommerce within the single platform
More personalisation required. - Changing content based on page visited / city user is in.

Return on Investment

Speed of development
Speed of content entry
Single source of assets

Magnolia

What is Magnolia?

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Magnolia Key Features

Top Performing Features

Page templates

API

WYSIWYG editor

Areas for Improvement

Library of website themes

Form generator

Community / comment management

Most Frequent Users

Manufacturing

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

Finance and Insurance

Magnolia Reviews

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Other Software Used

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Magnolia Alternatives