What is the Best CMS for Enterprise?

There is no agreement on the threshold for what makes a business an “enterprise,” but generally one thinks of it as a company doing business at a large scale, with from several hundred to tens of thousands of employees.

For this space, there is not one clear and undisputed leader in the Content Management System (CMS) space. Each major competitor has features & qualities that have made them attractive to enterprises around the world. Here is a list of several top-tier CMS systems and newer up-and-coming CMS platforms that we will review in a separate blog post.

Top CMS Platforms for Enterprise

• Adobe Experience Manager
• Adobe AEM Edge Delivery Services
• WordPress VIP
• Drupal
• Sitecore
• Contentful

Up and Coming CMS Platforms

• HubSpot
• Yext
• Kentico
• Contentstack
• Optimizely Content Cloud
• Magnolia
• Ingeniux
• Oracle WebCenter Content

Before diving into the capabilities and feature sets of the various competitors, have a look at our podcast on How to Choose a Digital Experience Platform where we go into a number of the factors to consider before even getting into a CMS/DXP shootout.

AEM

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a CMS designed for large business applications. With AEM you can build sites, mobile apps, forms, run eCommerce, and more. AEM is a tool to manage every aspect of your customer’s online interactions with your business. With further suite of Adobe Experience Cloud applications, AEM integrates with platforms like Adobe Analytics, Adobe Commerce, Adobe Real-Time CDP as well as a seemingly-infinte number of other 3rd-party resources.

Adobe Experience Manager allows you to manage documents, images, videos, PDFs, online forms, and more for your website. It is the leader in Enterprise Content Management Systems according to Gartner.

AEM allows for consistent content creation and distribution, and uniform presentation across geographical locations at a massive scale.

AEM Benefits

• Extremely powerful and flexible
• Class-leading personalization features
• Powerful and flexible digital asset management
• Flexible workflows allow integration with any business process
• Easily integrated with other marketing tools from Adobe: Analytics, Target
• Automation of metadata and content tag designation to boost SEO
• Multiple hosting options, including self-hosted on-premise or cloud, or managed SaaS hosting with the AEM as a Cloud Service platform.

AEM Drawbacks

• AEM as a platform can have a steep learning curve, both for authors and end-users, as well as for organizations to learn the eccentricities and rhythm of an AEM development process.
• AEM requires a heavy IT presence throughout the lifespan of the product
• AEM is relatively expensive to procure, as well as to develop-upon and support as it requires specialized personnel.

Some enterprises are large enough that they can staff a full-time team of Adobe Experience Manager architects and developers, but most companies find it more flexible and cost-effective to use an agency with deep Adobe Experience Manager experience like Arbory Digital. Our team has multiple senior architects who have worked with the platform since its inception, and can help navigate the sometimes labyrinthian path forward for many AEM implementation, maintenance and performance challenges.

For a more detailed explanation of Adobe Experience Manager go here.

In our podcast here, we aim to rapidly explain some of Adobe Experience Manager’s key features, benefits, structure and challenges.

WordPress VIP

Arguably the most-recognized CMS, Wordpress is well-known as an open-source, free installation CMS & blogging solution. For more complicated applications, Wordpress VIP is the enterprise arm of Wordpress, and is focused on larger-scale Wordpress implementations. Featuring a highly user-friendly interface & flexible open-source nature, Wordpress provides many out-of-the-box themes and plugins, making it a comfortable starting place for many users. That said, Wordpress also relies on some level of technical knowledge from users to make the best use of the software. WordPress can be used by businesses of any size, and even by individuals looking to host a blog or simple eCommerce site.

Despite its reputation as being mainly for smaller blogs, Wordpress can be optimized to serve considerable traffic as long as content is efficiently cached – which can be a major technical challenge. You’ll also need to keep a close watch on the plugins you use and minimize dependencies on the backend database. If there are too many plugins running inefficiently, the site can become slow for users as traffic scales, or can overwhelm the infrastructure running the site.

The platform’s monolithic nature can eventually become an obstacle to large-scale web delivery, which is where many companies eventually grow out of Wordpress and onto platforms like AEM.

If you were starting with the intention of serving large-scale traffic, it wouldn’t be our first choice. As always, find the right tool for the job.

Drupal

Another open-source CMS, Drupal expands beyond WordPress in allowing for feature-rich website development and multi-channel delivery with more simplicity. Drupal is cloud-based, allowing for many features, along with multilingual tools, automation in marketing and analytics, and similarly easy content editing and publishing. Once again, being open-source requires a moderate level of technical knowledge to be able to fully modify and utilize the platform.

Drupal Benefits

• There is a great online community developing and helping each other
• Designed for business professionals
• Developers can create a wide variety of original and complex designs
• Free and open source allowing you to customize anything you want to programmatically
• Drupal has solid security settings out of the box
• Built-in, configurable cashing for maintaining site speeds

Drupal Drawbacks

• There is a steep learning curve for newcomers operating on the back end and with the front-end UI
• Difficult update and installation process when compared to other open-source CMSs
• Hardware requirements for Drupal at scale are not inexpensive, and monolithic nature can make it difficult to run at high volume.

We have a more detailed breakdown of Drupal here. In this blog, we offer a direct comparison of Drupal and Adobe Experience Manager.

Sitecore

Established in 2001, Sitecore is one of the leading enterprise-level content management systems built on ASP.NET. Sitecore was one of the earliest content management software products available and remains the legacy CMS for a number of large, enterprise organizations today. Out of the top 10,000 websites by traffic, Sitecore accounts for less than 2%. Which is likely related to the overall cost associated with using Sitecore, as well as the resources needed to optimize it. However, this is a fairly stable trend among leading enterprise-level CMS solutions. There is indeed a hefty cost when selecting a CMS of this price, but for larger enterprise-leading businesses, to have a consistent and easily managed portfolio of assets the price for return on value is worth the investment.

Sitecore is a proprietary CMS that, enables web content editors and marketers to have full control over all aspects of their websites. Enterprise favorite used by leading global organizations such as Experian, Toshiba, Canon, and Nestle. Offers developers, editors, and marketers a variety of tools used to produce rich digital projects that can show visitors personalized content. It also gives you the flexibility to promote brand consistency and positive user experience across multiple channels with headless content creation.

Sitecore Benefits

• Multisite & Multi-lingual Capabilities
• Native personalization and analytics
• Drag and Drop, WYSIWYG interfaces for page and form editing
• Able to deliver consistent content experience across multiple devices, including mobile
• Uses AI to generate a personalized experience for each user by identifying visitor trends (Sitecore AI-enhanced DAM)
• Robust partner ecosystem that can provide support throughout the implementation phase and after completion.

Sitecore Drawbacks

• Comes at a high cost, although generally cheaper than AEM
• Not a stand-up, out-of-the-box solution, requires multiple development cycles depending on how customers want to leverage the platform

Contentful

Contentful is a cloud-based headless-only content management system. Headless content management systems make it easier for developers to publish to a variety of channels and front-ends (web, mobile, app, digital panels & signage, etc) while having the CMS entirely separated from the equipment and software that is rendering the front end of the site. This allows the deployment pattern to be highly flexible with each channel having a fully-separated lifecycle, at the cost of additional deployment complexity and a variability on the results of the finished system. See our podcast on monoliths vs composable systems for a discussion about the benefits and drawbacks of such a setup.

Contentful allows developers to choose the frameworks and code languages they prefer to build a custom frontend. The backend and APIs are handled and managed by Contentful and customized according to the customer’s needs. A headless content management system is the back end of any project, separated from the front end or the presentation layer that is managed by the user. The front end will be where content is organized, created, and published.

Developers use Contentful API calls to get data in and out of the platform. Handling APIs and JSON is vital to developing on Contentful. Contentful offers well-documented APIs and CLI migration tools for teams or developers that are new to the platform.

Contentful Benefits

• Lightweight and easy to stand up
• Low acquisition cost (as well as a free tier for developers) makes it easy for organizations to start experimenting with
• Cloud-native and scales easily for large amounts of traffic

Contentful Drawbacks

• Contentful is a headless-only CMS, meaning it does not have the ability (on its own) to render a fully-formed website. It still requires that you come to the table with a web or mobile front end technology and stack.
• Contentful has a rudimentary image management system, but lacks a full digital asset management solution.

Conclusion

There are many factors that go into choosing the best content management system for your business. If you are a global business or are looking to grow into one AEM is still the gold standard in our opinion. We do recognize our bias as this is the primary product we work with. If you disagree or need help with your CMS please feel free to contact us.

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