#1 most frequent
Germany
22.4%442 installations of 1,976
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.
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
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Screenshot of the Magnolia App Launcher, used to switch between workspaces and manage pages
Top Performing Features
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
Areas for Improvement
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
Who Buys & Uses Magnolia
#2 most frequent
United States of America
15.6%308 installations of 1,976
#3 most frequent
Switzerland
9.4%185 installations of 1,976
Magnolia is still our go to platform for our clients and ourselves
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
Meh
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
Once you try it, you don't want to change it
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
Great combination of features for a reasonable price
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
Magnolia is an all in one content management system which is easy to customise.
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
