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

Up and Coming CMS Platforms

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

AEM Logo

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

AEM Drawbacks

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

Drupal Drawbacks

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

Sitecore Drawbacks

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

Contentful Drawbacks

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.

About The Authors

Hank Thobe
Business Director at Arbory Digital

Technical Project Manager and Business Director leading and supporting AEM experts to provide high-quality services and solutions for various industries and sectors.

Contact Hank on Linkedin

Tad Reeves
Principal Architect at Arbory Digital

AEM Architect & DevOps guy with 14 years experience on AEM/CQ and 25+ years in systems infrastructure. He’s been mountain biking longer than he’s been doing system administration, and though originally from Maine, makes his home in the mountains of Northwest Georgia.

Contact Tad on Linkedin

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Adobe Summit 2023 – New Releases & Conference Recap

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