Comparative Analysis of AEM with Drupal: Best Pick For Top 500 Fortune Companies

With time, technological advancement and the dynamic need for customized web content delivery have already unlocked the doors for leveraging content management systems at firms. The CMSs help companies keep track of every digital content and asset; catching sight of this, many brands opt for them to experience increased customer engagement, lead generation, and improved profits. 

Right now, you might already be using a content management system for your online business solutions. But, the top two CMSs buzzing worldwide are AEM and Drupal. An increasing number of users are still in doubt about which one to choose. Weighing these two and wondering which one to pick may be a daunting process. While Drupal offers free usage, AEM’s best user experience makes it competitive. This is only one; various parameters can help you make sound decisions regarding choosing the best CMS. 

This post will clear up your confusion. Here, you will know which CMS is best with detailed comparisons, pros and cons, and more. By the end of the article, we assure you that you will make the right decision on the best CMS for your business. 

Let’s get started. 

What is AEM – an Overview?

Just a quick review. 

Business owners usually find it challenging to monitor their numerous digital content and assets while managing them all alone to reach their customers. 

Here arrives Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), which eases digital content management by fusing content management and digital asset management into a single solution for the timely delivery of relevant and personalized experiences. 

A US-based retail company, Walmart, with 2100000 employees, has caught up $611.29 billion in revenue using AEM for digital asset management. 

Simply put, AEM is a software solution divided into CMS and digital asset management systems. It helps companies control digital assets spread across varied channels, applications, and sites in the required format.

What is Drupal – An Overview

A free and open-source content management framework, Drupal can be customized, and it is best for building everything from simple websites to complex web applications, e-commerce stores, online directories, and other sorts of digital content.

Per the reports of 2022, Drupal has been chosen by top companies worldwide, like Charles Schwab, McDonald's Australia, Stanford University, Tesla, etc. 

This CMS platform is also used to publish content on social media sites, like Facebook, Twitter, member and information sites, web apps, and intranets. Besides, whether you want to organize, manage, find, and even reuse content, Drupal is the best solution ever.

The CMS arrives with an easy-to-use and intuitive user interface (UI) that users from non-technical backgrounds can also easily operate. The user role classification and permission system of Drupal help control access to its content and features.

Detailed Comparison Between AEM Vs. Drupal

Acknowledgment of varied parameters is necessary to emerge with a detailed comparison between AEM and Drupal.

Let’s gear up with a few chief elements showcasing these two CMSs’ differences.

What is AEM Used For?

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) stands as a comprehensive content management solution, ideal for businesses aiming to craft, manage, and optimize digital experiences across diverse channels.

This platform excels in the development of mobile apps, websites, and forms, ensuring a seamless digital presence. AEM integrates various time-saving solutions, functioning as a unified platform to streamline digital experience management. This integration facilitates a range of AEM consulting services, each tailored to enhance different aspects of digital strategy and implementation. Let’s explore these services in detail.

1. Experience Manager Sites – Content Management System

One of the best CMSs, Adobe Experience Manager Sites, is mostly chosen by developers and marketers.

Experience Manager Sites offers pre-built templates and off-the-shelf components that you can use to develop a website. To fully leverage this platform and tailor websites to specific needs, businesses often hire an AEM Developer, ensuring professional and efficient customization with minimal coding effort.

With Adobe Experience Manager Sites, marketers and developers publish content seamlessly and concurrently on almost all channels or platforms. Moreover, holding various generative AI tools, this solution helps change the tone of voice, append content variations, and make complete changes to every content.

With AEM Sites, users can create personalized experiences for different customer segments with just a click.

For example, if your business offers services to businesses and individuals, you only need to click a few times to create different landing pages for both audiences.

2. Experience Manager Assets – Digital Asset Management

Experience Manager Assets, a digital asset management system, is a cloud-based system where you can store and systematize your digital files.

It frees you from fetching the files in separate computers and employee accounts. With a DAM, your team can access assets, such as videos, 3D models, and images, in a shared environment.

For example, if you want to store a social media post template on the AEM Assets, you can do that and even share it with your team. You can train your team to use this template, and while using it, if they make any changes, this solution will help you track the modifications. This way, you can always see the adjustments made to the templates in the revision history.

As we have read, AEM Assets is cloud-based, so as it stays on Adobe’s cloud, you are free to store large files locally.

You can integrate DAM with other Adobe software as it is fast and scalable and helps streamline the workflow.

3. Digital Screens

Marketers use a digital signage solution, Digital Screens, to create and manage digital signage for venues and stores. This is the best way to communicate with digital signs showcased in stores, which makes it suitable for omnichannel businesses.

Using only one dashboard, you can easily create and update the signage and coordinate sign messages in varied locations.

For instance, if you have a brick-and-mortar store, Digital Screens can be a useful solution to add smart product recommendations to your in-store displays and customize the product suggestions per individual store visitor.

This way, Digital Screen educates shoppers, boosts the in-store experience, and makes in-store staff free for other jobs.

Here, using this solution, you can match the marketing of your physical store with online efforts.

4. Digital Enrollment and Forms

You can experience smooth digital enrollment and onboarding from the beginning with AEM’s digital enrollment and forms. This way, your work becomes paperless, which paces up your workflows and allows your business to adopt digital transformation easily.

With digital enrollments and forms, you can create digital forms, accumulate e-signatures, and start onboarding with effortless automation. Whether you want for internal or external use, you can use these across multiple platforms.

For instance, if the sales team needs to send numerous emails to and fro, they can use this AEM solution to create onboarding forms for new clients. Once the client is done with onboarding and signs a contract, they will get an automatic message about onboarding from the system. This saves time for the sales team and boosts the client’s experience.

5. Adobe Learning Manager

You can create your training programs using Adobe Learning Manager software to educate customers, provide in-store compliance and sales training, and reskill employees.

Also, you can create personalized training with this solution, which has 86,000 pre-built courses, and enjoy unique features like leaderboards, social learning, and gamification.

For example, if you want to train new members of your organization on leadership practices, you can leverage Learning Manager. It allows you to engage more customers with external-facing training that boosts engagement and sales.

6. Digital Guides

Digital Guides is the software you can use to create your product documentation and supporting content. Also known as a Component Content Management System (CCMS), it is usually confused with a CMS. But, while learning this, you should know digital guides a tool that organizes content into a format you can modify per your need.

For instance, traditionally, when changing a product feature, you were required to ensure that every documentation reflected that change by performing it manually. But, with digital guides, you can do it easily at scale by swapping content components. This lets employees and customers witness a better experience.

Benefits Of AEM

Adobe Experience Manager, being a single platform, offers multiple solutions that ensure profitable investment in Experience Manager.

Let’s explore the benefits you can get by adopting Adobe Experience Manager.

1. Automated Workflows

As we have read, the Experience Manager automated the mundane and repetitive jobs to let the teams focus on other, more valuable tasks. For example, harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, it tags, crops, and allocates assets in record time.

2. Personalized Content

Using this software solution, you can easily craft content variations specific to varied channels to create an extensively personalized experience for all your target audiences.

3. Better Task Management

Content management demands lots of effort; therefore, companies use AEM the most to ease digital asset management. While leveraging this software solution, you can add jobs to every project using your dashboard and keep your workload light.

4. Flexibility & Scalability

You can create discrete content variations for your distinctive personas with only a few clicks, which depicts that AEM is flexible and scalable.

5. Easy-to-Use CMS

You can manage content in Adobe Experience Manager without training or special experience. Even non-techies can use this CMS platform for easy content management.

6. Improved Search for Digital Assets

You no longer have to waste time wondering about the location of your videos and images. AEM pulls all your assets in one spot, easing the users to find and adapt content per the requirement.

7. Target Customers Wherever They Are

Experience Manager holds the caliber to deliver content to the target audience wherever they are despite whatever option they choose to engage.

8. Easy Integration

You will get everything on the same platform, whether third-party analytics or any that eases the integration with other tools.

9. Add-on Functionality

Add-ons are also available to meet your need for specific functionality that you can avail from the marketplace and third parties.

What is Drupal Used For?

With varied outstanding features, Drupal is the best choice for larger and complex websites. Above all, as it’s an open-source CMS, it’s usually picked by government agencies, educational institutes, non-profit organizations, and healthcare firms.

The chief element that makes Drupal stay ahead of its competitor CMSs is its flexibility. While various CMSs are crafted to meet specific use cases, Drupal has emerged to help in varied use cases relevant to digital content.

Drupal strengths varied digital experiences:

1. Interactive Websites

It features multi-step forms, logged-in users, custom JavaScript, and content personalization to create dynamic interfaces, such as decoupled front-ends, maps, and visualization.

2. Corporate and Institutional Websites

It strengthens corporate branding and distributed workflows.

3. Marketing Portals

The CMS builds landing pages that enhance SEO and user experience, taxonomy, metadata management, and integrations with marketing automation tools.

4. Online Directories

It’s best at relevant content listings, advanced search interfaces, and third-party content integrations.

5. Intranets

The CMS is best at creating custom workflows for internal processes, private content, single sign-on, and internal content listing.

Benefits Of Drupal

In the crowd of varied top CMSs, Drupal has managed to stay competitive. Varied benefits of Drupal make it stand ahead of the curve; check out a few:

1. Strong Community Support

The Drupal community is big, active, and, above all, very supportive. Including thousands of developers, users, and designers contributing to the CMS platform, it’s always available with extensive assistance, resources, and knowledge. Also, the community ensures Drupal stays innovative, secure, and up-to-date.

2. Multilingual Capabilities

Evolving with built-in multilingual support, Drupal lets users create and manage content in varied languages. This is one of the reasons the CMS is chosen mostly by businesses and companies aiming at global audiences.

3. Customizable Content Types & Taxonomy

The CMS’s content types and taxonomy system is flexible and allows users to define and manage different content types easily. This simplifies content organization and makes displaying on your site more user-friendly and efficient, especially for websites with heavy content.

4. Responsive Design

Modern websites demand perfect mobile web browsing, for which responsive design is essential. Here, Drupal emerges as a savior that lets users build responsive websites that smoothly adapt to varied devices with different screen sizes, ensuring every visitor gets an optimal user experience.

5. Third-Party Integration

You can effortlessly integrate Drupal with various 3rd-party services and APIs, like marketing automation tools, CRM systems, and social media platforms. That’s why organizations opt for the CMS to meet their requirement for an interconnected and seamless digital experience.

6. Extensibility & Modularity

Drupal allows developers to add functionality via a wide range of available modules. Arriving with numerous modules, users can create custom ones to develop feature-rich and complex websites without extensive custom coding.

7. Improved Security

Holding a strong security target, the dedicated security team at Drupal consistently identifies and locates potential vulnerabilities. Besides, the release of security patches and updates keeps the CMS secure. That’s why Drupal has always been the top choice for enterprise-level websites that need strong security measures.

8. Scalability and Performance

As Drupal can scale with the growing business to meet the needs, it holds the potential to handle loads of traffic. Also, its performance and caching capabilities optimization ensure the site stays responsive and fast even during peak traffic.

9. SEO-Friendly

Keeping track of SEO, Drupal is developed to provide a wide range of modules and features that improve the site’s search engine ranking.

10. Open-Source

As we have read, Drupal is open-source, which makes it free to use, distribute, and modify. This provides greater customization, flexibility, and cost savings.

Usage Statistics and Market Share Of Adobe Experience Manager And Drupal

AEM Facts & Figures

• Per the latest report, about 35,656 live websites are using AEM.
• In the past, about 97,125 sites used AEM.
• In India, currently, 538 websites use AEM.
• AEM CMS holds the #25 position in the market.
• The market share of Adobe Experience Manager CMS is 0.25%.

Drupal Facts & Figures

• The market share of Drupal is 397,929 (1.2).
• Every year, Drupal revenue reaches $5.5 million.
• About 11,21,049 websites are successfully running on Drupal’s database.
• The top websites with a Drupal database are Pinterest.com and Okta.com.

What Makes a Good CMS?

While comparing content management systems, we learned about the usages and benefits of AEM and Drupal. But what exactly is a good CMS? You should be well aware of the features a CMS should hold to choose the best for your business.

Let’s explore the top features of the best CMS.

1. Automatic Content Organization From Start to Finish

Content development is not one man’s job; it includes the participation of many people. Here, your CMS needs to be capable of tracking content details from authoring, editing, approval, and publication to promotion and reporting.

Besides, a CMS with workflow customization and control will let the team work collaboratively and complete the work within the deadline.

Also, features in CMS, such as smart reporting tools and dashboards, will help monitor distinctive content categories.

So, next time, for urgent content updates, you can rely on a CMS holding robust organizational capability, such as link management.

2. Easy Content Creation and Editing

The CMS you select for your organization should be easy to use and can help you create, edit, and publish content. This will free you up to concentrate on other valuable jobs.

3. Security

What if someday a security breach hits the customer relationship you built working hard for a long time? Your business and customer data protection are significant in retaining customer trust in your offerings.

Some CMSs, when integrated with authentication mechanisms, strengthen security and prevent unauthorized access to personal and sensitive information. So, you should ensure your CMS is integrated perfectly with your well-picked third-party authentication systems or service providers.

4. Multilingual Content Delivery

Traditionally, marketers have to devote much effort for far message delivery. With digital marketing, they took a sigh of relief and became capable of expanding their customer base worldwide easily. But, if your message is not reaching your audience in their language, it’s useless.

Here, your CMS will make it up for you. If it supports translation workflows and multilingual editing tools, you can serve national as well as international audiences.

One factor to consider is the law that varies from country to country. So, be sure that your CMS holds information governance controls complying with local regulations of your customers’ place.

5. Role-Based and User Access Rights

You can avoid mistakes with a CMS having control over the content and feature access. It needs to have a customizable user admin feature that can meet the changing needs.

6. Multichannel Scalability

It can be straining to deliver content to varied devices, interfaces, and channels without a headless CMS that can help you attain this efficiently.

For your information, a headless CMS isolates content from its presentation. After the content creation, you can render it on any device or channel.

In fact, some CMSs allow you to create content for once and distribute it anywhere. Others can easily load the existing content onto the newly added channels.

A tip to grasp here is to reach a wide customer base across varied digital channels; you can opt for a CMS with a multichannel scalability feature.

7. Improved Flexibility, Scalability, and Performance

Your CMS holds the power to make or break your business. So, be sure it’s scalable and expands with your business. Some CMSs are best at supporting a wide range of APIs that allow you to work more with your content across varied devices and channels.

You can run your CMS on the cloud or your server. However, a CMS hosted on the cloud will pace up your time to market and offer the flexibility that helps you handle changing market demands and traffic spikes.

8. Content and Commerce Integration

An e-commerce business with appealing content helps boost customer experiences that, in turn, help increase sales.

Here, you need a CMS holding the power of e-commerce and digital. marketing. Besides, it should have a single-pane-of-glass interface for a unified data view, smooth and adaptable inventory management, and easy integration with shipping, payment, tax providers, and more. This will enhance your customers’ shopping experience.

Pros and Cons Of AEM and Drupal

Let’s scan a summarized table of strengths and weaknesses for AEM and Drupal.

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)

Pros

• The CMS is an enterprise-grade solution that meets the complex requirements of large organizations.
• It helps in robust workflow and content delivery.
• Best suitable for large enterprises looking to resolve complex issues.
• When integrated with tools of Adobe’s suit, it helps attain varied, challenging functionalities.
• AEM is scalable, which grows with the business’s needs and performs well.
• It arrives with in-built tools for personalization, analytics, and marketing.

Cons

• Its licensing cost is high.
• The CMS demands special knowledge for seamless usage.
• You can customize well using this CMS.
• It is costly for small projects.
• Community support is less compared to an open-source solution.
• The release cycle for new features is slower.
• Customization can be costly with the CMS.

Drupal

Pros

• It’s an open-source platform that needs no licensing fees.
• The CMS holds a large and active community of developers, designers, admins, and more.
• The platform is known for its multilingual capabilities.
• Users can customize it per their requirements using modules.
• The content-rich and complex sites can reap the benefits of this CMS.
• Robust API support for headless CMS.

Cons

• Some modules may not provide complete support for customization.
• Without optimization, performance may suffer.
• UI is less modern compared to other competitors.
• Beginners may find it tricky to learn.
• Management demands more helping hands.
• Advanced e-commerce may need third-party solutions.

How Will AEM and Drupal CMSs Adopt AI, And What New Features Will They Launch?

The AI integration in CMSs improves their working. It automates tasks, provides personalized experiences, improves search and discovery, and more.

Let’s delve into the specifications where AI is changing CMS’s prospects.

1. Automated Content Creation & Management

AI algorithms and natural language processing create content faster, more efficiently, and more precisely. Ahead, this saves time for marketers and content creators, letting them aim at other important jobs.

Considering content management, AI is best at managing the entire content lifecycle, from creation to delivery to archiving, which diminishes human error and frees up time and resources.

Also, by automating mundane and repetitive tasks, AI eases content management, whether it’s article writing, product description generation, or any piece of content.

2. Personalization and Customized User Experiences

With personalization, you can provide a better user experience to your customers, and for that, AI plays an important role. CMS systems with the power of AI algorithms and machine learning customize the content and experiences for every individual user. AI analyzes users’ behavior, search history, and preferences and showcases related and personalized content, boosting the overall user experience.

The personalization ahead leads to increased engagement, conversion rates, and enhanced customer satisfaction.

3. Collaborative AI-powered Content Creation

With AI, teams can collaboratively create content in real-time from wherever they are. AI holds the caliber to automate content lifecycle jobs, like editing and proofreading, making content creators free to aim at other demanding tasks. In addition, it offers improvement suggestions, like content quality improvement, alternate word choices, etc.

With AI, teams can create high-quality content faster, effectively, and efficiently.

4. Real-Time Analytics and Optimization

If you want to know how your users are interacting with your content, real-time analytics and optimization will surely help.

Here arrives AI-powered analytics that offers real-time and valuable user insights about their preferences and behavior, using which it optimizes content, boosts user experience, and increases conversions.

5. Improved Search and Discovery

AI-powered search helps to find the right content faster and easier. By understanding the search query intent, the AI algorithm returns relevant results. This helps improve overall user experience, whether you are a website owner, content creator, or marketer.

What People Say For CMSs – AEM & Drupal (Testimonial)

Most people recommend Adobe Experience Manager CMS, while some say it needs improvements.

What People Liked About AEM?

• Easy and dynamic interpretation and presentation of work and Excel files.
• Any latest frontend framework can be used.
• No knowledge is needed to use the editor.
• Faster platform if set up is done properly.
• Helpful in creating and managing personalized customer experience across varied channels.
• Effortless content creation and management.
• Boost digital marketing and commerce.
• High customization eases report creation according to needs.
• Best for all-sized organizations to extend their functionalities.
• Provides an integrated platform for content management and digital assets management across multiple channels.
• Allow the creation of a unified customer experience.

What People Disliked About AEM?

• Challenging development.
• Lots of bugs and limitations.
• It is heavy and expensive to adopt AEM only for content management.
• Formatting sometimes doesn’t work properly, or programs slow down, which wastes time.
• Maintenance needs to be automated.

What People Liked About Drupal?

• The platform can develop and manage content and integrate with other apps.
• It includes numerous built-in modules that can help assemble a site.
• It fits every potential requirement and is picked the most for development purposes.
• It is secured and can’t easily be affected by bugs or malware.
• Best security features.
• Huge community and support for developers.
• Arrives with varied free modules.
• High scalability and support for multilingual features.

What People Disliked About Drupal?

• Beginners may find it challenging and overwhelming to work with Drupal.
• Installation takes more than normal and, therefore, becomes cumbersome.
• Cache needs time to get cleared as it’s not done immediately.
• Coding skills are required to operate the software.

What Makes Emizentech The Best Pick For a CMS Development Company?

We understand how concerned you are about handling your corporate content. Here, content management system development will meet your need to build customizable, scalable, intuitive, and SEO-centric solutions.

We provide services using AEM and Drupal content management systems to fulfill your content-relevant requirements aiming at your business needs.

Besides being a leading AEM Consulting company, we can help your brand ensure cost-effective web content management and lead to website lead generation.

Key Features of CMS We Deliver

• Content creation and storage
• Content publishing and promotion
• CMS administration
• Security and Compliance

Key Highlights of Emizentech

• 10+ years of experience
• Expertise in varied industries
• Agile approach
• Clutch Awarded

Wrapping Lines

As you want to expand your web presence, you should consider the increasing expectations of online visitors from commercial sites. You can go with easier-to-maintain and cheaper CMS platforms, like Drupal. But, while choosing one for your business, remember the hidden costs and security risks that come with the open source.

By diving deeper, you will notice that Adobe Experience Manager offers the best of both worlds, incorporating a tech stack developed in open source and a codebase that the digital market leaders manage.

Still not sure?

Connect with a CMS consultant who can guide you in choosing the best CMS for your business.

Frequently Asked Questions