Adobe Experience Manager vs. Wordpress: Which CMS Is Best for You?

Your content management system plays a major part in how efficiently you can upload, organize, and personalize your content. Adobe Experience Manager and Wordpress sites both offer a comprehensive content management solution, so you need to break down advanced features to find the best for you.

According to a study aggregate from Forbes, 51% of content consumption comes from organic search. Another 74% of companies stated content is crucial for lead generation. Enjoying all of these benefits means choosing a content management system that enables seamless integration between your digital assets and digital strategy.

Simply uploading content isn't enough to help customers find, appreciate, and trust your brand. In this guide, we'll explore the features of Adobe Experience Manager vs Wordpress, their advanced content management capabilities, and which one you should choose.

Key Takeaways:

• Adobe Experience Manager (or AEM) is a content management platform often used by large businesses, while Wordpress is a content management system popular with start-ups, small businesses, and medium sized businesses. Both platforms are efficient at helping brands maintain an organized and optimized content management strategy.

• Adobe Experience Manager offers even more flexibility when it comes to creating and distributing content thanks to its extensive marketing suite. However, Wordpress is generally considered more beginner-friendly due to its plugin library, free themes, and drag-and-drop editor.

• Rightpoint is a digital marketing agency that helps brands with content creation, content management, and digital strategy. No matter which kind of digital asset management platform you use, we'll help you seamlessly integrate the platform into your existing business strategy.

Adobe Experience Manager vs Wordpress: A Basic Overview

Your business's specific digital strategy will determine which platform works best for your content management needs. For example, if you're leaning toward content creation, you may find Adobe Experience Manager's diverse suite of content creation tools a better fit.

However, if you're more interested in a simple online storefront and blog, Wordpress offers plenty of customizable features to get your shop up and running. Let's take a look.

What is Adobe Experience Manager?

Adobe Experience Manager (sometimes shortened to AEM) is Adobe's answer to a growing need for holistic digital marketing tools. This platform is a digital asset management solution that combines content creation, content distribution, and marketing analytics tools in one place.

Released as part of Adobe's Marketing Cloud Suite, businesses are able to create more personalized content at scale across multiple channels. It also provides quick integration with other project management, content, or analytics tools like Adobe Analytics, Salesforce, and Workfront.

What is Wordpress?

If you've ever learned more about a business while flipping through their blog or online storefront, you've likely already become acquainted with Wordpress. This popular content management system has been a business staple for several years due to its versatile, beginner-friendly design.

Businesses don't have to learn a new coding language to quickly put together a Wordpress site thanks to its diverse template library, useful plugins, and customizable themes. Some brands use Wordpress as a blog to share behind-the-scenes peeks, breaking news, or educational posts. Others transform Wordpress into an ecommerce storefront with open-source plugins like WooCommerce.

Adobe Experience Manager vs Wordpress: Primary Features, Pros, and Cons

According to a Statista study, budget contraints and creating high-quality content are some of the biggest challenges facing content marketing leaders. Choosing a compatible content management system frees up your strategy to consistently tend to the growing needs of your audience.

Let's take a look at what each platform has to offer in terms of features, pricing, and add-ons. If you want a quick answer, these are our winners for each general category:

• Content management tools: Adobe Experience Manager

• Ease of use: Wordpress

• Time to market: Wordpress

• Scalability: Tied

• Versatility: Tied

• Security: Adobe Experience Manager

• Maintenance: Adobe Experience Manager

• Pricing: Wordpress

Content Management Tools: Which Platform Makes it Easier to Create Content?

While you can hop between different digital programs and apps to create your content, it's faster to craft everything (or almost everything) in one place. Whether your content focuses more on video or you stick to a classic blogging platform, let's take a look at their basic and advanced features.

Adobe Experience Manager Content Management Tools

Adobe is an industry powerhouse for content creation, ranging from sleek videos to beautiful vector art. Unsurprisingly, Adobe Experience Manager is an incredibly varied and comprehensive content management solution for any business size, industry, or niche.

Adobe Experience Manager makes it easy to maintain an efficient content supply chain with the ability to build, edit, and publish web pages. Alongside their document-based authoring and universal editor features, they help you create a consistent, yet personalized brand image across multiple sites with their multisite management feature. This tool lets you easily publish or repurpose content across different sites or regions with just a few clicks.

This platform also integrates with several content creation tools like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe Express. Even if you can't find what you want in Adobe Experience Manager, the ability to integrate other software with a quick download makes the platform extremely adaptable.

Wordpress Content Management Tools

When it comes to Adobe Experience Manager vs Wordpress, it seems like the former is a clear winner. However, Wordpress is rather impressive with its extensive customization options across design, functionality, and sales.

Wordpress offers businesses an intuitive interface that lets them customize the site to suit a variety of needs. You can use the content management system as an active blog, an ecommerce store front, a main website, or a portfolio.

The most common forms of content in Wordpress are blog posts, email newsletters, and shortform video. The site's built-in analytics means you can still study your content's performance or improve its SEO.

Who's the Winner?

Both Wordpress and Adobe Experience Manager offer a lot of flexibilty in content creation, though we'll have to say Adobe is the winner. Its sheer volume of content creation tools and easy integration with state-of-the-art Adobe software means businesses can create impressive content at scale.
Ease of Use: Which Platform is Easiest to Use for Beginners?

If you're newer to the world of content management systems, ease of use is a feature you shouldn't overlook. It takes time and money to overhaul your usual workflow, so a seamless integration will save you valuable downtime getting used to a new content management system.

Adobe Experience Manager Ease of Use

Adobe Experience Manager is an ideal option for more experienced and established businesses due to its complex workflows. This platform is able to handle an extremely large amount of content at scale and attend to the needs of multiple websites, resulting in a steeper learning curve.

A smaller business or newer business may need a period of onboarding to help their team get used to working within the Adobe Experience Manager. Fortunately, the platform comes with project management features to help team members organize, communicate, and execute seamlessly.

Wordpress Ease of Use

Wordpress practically built its reputation on being beginner-friendly and easy to deploy. Anyone can simply sign up for an account, dig around its free themes, and get a blog or storefront running within a few hours.

A business looking to build their digital presence benefits immensely from Wordpress's design simplicity. It also has an extremely active online community that helps people with everything from choosing plugins to SEO.

Who's the Winner?

The intuitive interface and beginner-friendly functionality of Wordpress make it the clear winner in this category. While Adobe Experience Manager becomes easy to use with a little training, expect some downtime while your team adjusts to its complex, branching suite.

Time to Market: How Fast Can You Start Using Your Content Management System?

The longer it takes for you to get your CMS platforms up, the more time and money you lose that could be spent getting more customers. If you've been hesitating to implement a new content management system for fear of lost time, this is one section you won't want to miss.

Adobe Experience Manager Time to Market

Adobe Experience Manager is one of the most versatile and scalable digital asset management solutions on the market. That said, its complexity is a double-edged sword: implementing it can take more time due to how many working parts you have at your disposal.

Establishing websites integrated with Adobe Experience Manager requires the expertise of seasoned development teams and digital marketing managers. Start-ups and small businesses may find this lengthy onboarding and deployment period difficult.

Wordpress Time to Market

By comparison, Wordpress has a lightning fast deployment due to its templatized approach. With its themes, plugins, and (usually) code-free design, businesses can get a Wordpress up and running the same day.

Even a business that wants to customize its Wordpress site further and spend more time researching plugins can still get it up faster than an Adobe Experience Manager site.

Who's the Winner?

Wordpress is extremely quick to launch and start using within hours or a day, so it's the winner by default. While Adobe Experience Manager offers a wider variety of tools and functionalities for digital marketing teams, its complex system requires more technical oversight and onboarding to implement.

Scalability: Which Platform Makes it Easier to Expand Your Business Operations?

Since implementing a new content management system takes precious time and money away from your daily business operations, it's understandable to hope it can help you scale in the future. Constantly downloading and onboarding new systems is tedious and can hamper your growth, so let's take a look.

Adobe Experience Manager Scalability

Adobe Experience Manager provides immediate reprieve from ongoing maintenance by having a fundamentally scalable foundation. This platform supports large scale digital experiences with its cloud-based design, massive amounts of content, and easy integrations with other Adobe platforms.

If your business starts experiencing spikes in web traffic or needs to add another website in a different region, Adobe Experience Manager is already ready to go.

Wordpress Scalability

Wordpress may be elegantly simple in its user-friendly design and fast deployment, but it's quite scalable, to boot. It provides a host of features like advanced caching and a selection of content delivery networks to keep your site running smoothly even as online demand grows.

With a few adjustments, Wordpress can be a viable option for a small business or a large business expanding to multiple markets around the world.

Who's the Winner?

Business websites have a lot to love with both platform's easy scalability features. As a result, we're going to have to call this section tied for Adobe Experience Manager and Wordpress.

Versatility: Which Platform Offers You the Most Options for Your Business Operations?

Do you want the ability to quickly change your content management system to address new markets, content types, or niches? The digital commerce experience is dynamic at the best of times, so a flexible base saves you time having to install new systems to keep pace.

Adobe Experience Manager Versatility

Large businesses that regularly dabble in different types of content enjoy the platform's focus on a multichannel experience. From video to text to graphics, the Adobe Experience Manager is great at enabling users to create and deploy content with ease.

Its particular strength lies in making even more personalized content at scale, a tricky task when you have to keep track of a hundred customer variables at any given time. The Adobe Experience Cloud provides content targeting that segments users on features such as age, activity, and area to deliver the most relevant content quickly.

When over 80% of respondents to a global customer survey expect personalized experiences, this feature is non-negotiable for your digital asset management strategy.

Wordpress Versatility

Wordpress does an impressive job at offering versatility with minimal technical expertise or even business expertise. With the help of a plugin or a relevant theme, you can easily transform your site into a blog, portfolio, or ecommerce store.

The extensive plugin ecosystem is the fundamental brilliance of Wordpress. The site acts as a simple clay, easy to sculpt into a more specific function or unique design with just a download or two. No matter your industry or business size, Wordpress can easily meet you and your customers halfway.

Who's the Winner?

This section is another difficult one to call due to how versatile both platforms are in terms of content creation, deployment, and site functionality. We're going to call this one a tie, too.

Security: Which Site Will Keep Your Business Assets and Sensitive Information Safest?

Digital content is one of your most powerful tools for educating customers and earning their trust, but they're also easy to steal if you're not careful. Your content management platform should come with a suite of security features to manage in-house activity and keep theft at bay.

Adobe Experience Manager Security

Since Adobe Experience Manager operates straight from the Adobe Cloud Infrastructure, it has automatic access to the cutting-edge security features Adobe is known for. Just a few of the features that will give you peace-of-mind include (but aren't limited to):

• Protection against cross-scripting to prevent hackers from injecting malicious code into web pages

• Role-based access control to restrict access to content to specific users in a team

• SSL encryption to protect all data transmitted from a user and the server

• Ongoing security patches to keep pace with new security threats

Wordpress Security

Wordpress is a scalable, versatile, and beginner-friendly site, but its security features still leave a little to be desired. Since the platform is open-source and requires ongoing contribution from a large user base for its plugins and themes, a lot of the security falls on the shoulders of the user.

For example, a business owner could install a plugin or theme with malicious code that steals personal information. They could lose hours, days, or even weeks of valuable time correcting the issue and getting their site up and running again. In the meantime, sensitive information like credit card numbers or personal addresses could wind up in the wrong hands.

Although Wordpress has a dedicated community of skilled programmers, business owners, and developers that contribute to security with updates or patches, the hypervigilance might be too much.

An additional point of security you can consider with your Wordpress is their WP Engine to provide daily backups. This useful feature drastically reduces the downtime of a data breach or glitchy plugin by restoring your site to its previous functionality.

Who's the Winner?

While Wordpress has several options to improve your site's security, it requires a level of vigilance and double-checking that may be too much work for some businesses. Adobe is the winner in this front with its comprehensive, airtight security features and automatic security updates.

Maintenance: Which Content Management System is Easiest to Maintain Long-Term?

Even the most elegantly designed website needs check-ups and updates from time-to-time. It's still worth considering which content management system will need the least amount of work so you can focus on your business.

Adobe Experience Manager Maintenance

Adobe is keen on maintaining a trustworthy and adaptable digital presence, having pivoted to a cloud-based model with ongoing updates several years ago. Adobe Experience Manager is no exception to this approach, providing users with manual updates and security patches without any work on their part.

However, if you want to improve your website's functionality with new types of content or improve its general performance, that's where your development team comes in. This content management system is a delicate interplay between automation and personalization, making it well-suited to more experienced teams that can maintain that tightrope balance.

Wordpress Maintenance

Wordpress requires a more active touch from its user base, such as running security scans or implementing WP Engine for daily backups. You also need to go out of your way to research plugins and themes before using them on your site.

Fortunately, you don't have to do all of this alone. Wordpress's active community forums, contributing developers, and 24/7 support from Wordpress developers give you several means of maintaining your site.

Who's the Winner?

Although both sites do a good job of providing several maintenance options, Adobe Experience Manager maintains a better balance. It provides multiple automated security updates while still freeing you up to optimize and tweak your websites personally.

Pricing: Which Platform is Most Cost-Effective for Your Business Budget?

These complex digital ecosystems both come with a price point, but more is not necessarily more. You may find you don't need enterprise grade security features or deep technical knowledge to get the most value from your site.

Adobe Experience Platform Pricing

Narrowing down this platform's pricing is trickier since it operates on a personalized and proprietary model. There are dozens of ways to modify your content management system to suit your business needs, so they give you a quote instead of a one-time price or tier list.

Its startup costs usually range between $30,000 to $60,000, depending on how many sites you plan on implementing and the features you choose. If you want a more specific quote, you'll need to reach out to their customer support and get an estimate.

Wordpress Pricing

Wordpress pricing is more straightforward since it operates on a templatized and beginner-friendly model. You can get a free version to start with to get comfortable with the platform, then upgrade to a series of monthly or annual plans depending on the features you want.

That said, you still need to take into account additional costs like hosting, purchasing premium themes and plugins, and hiring additional help for web design or content creation.

Who's the Winner?

Wordpress is the most affordable and flexible when it comes to pricing, though your mileage may still vary depending on the scale and size of your business. Adobe Experience Manager may still be a worthwhile investment for enterprise systems that need more refined security and massive content at scale.

Which Content Management System Should You Use for Your Digital Commerce Experience?

Now that we've broken down the functions and features of both platforms, it's time to narrow down the best one for your business. Adobe Experience Manager is well-suited to established, large scale enterprises that need advanced security features and the ability to produce large amounts of content.

This platform not only integrates smoothly with other Adobe content creation software, it's also ideal for crafting some of the most personalized, yet automated content marketing strategies.

Wordpress is well-suited to small, medium, and large businesses that want a flexible platform for running a blog, maintaining a portfolio, or starting an ecommerce store. Its low price point and versatile customization options make it easy to design, adapt, and deploy.

Rightpoint Will Help You Implement and Deploy Your Content Management System

We know how daunting it can be to pivot to a new content management system when you already have a workflow that's delivering personalized experiences. Rightpoint remains one of today's most reliable digital marketing agencies because we easily slot into your business operations with implementation and content creation strategies that work.

Our expertise spans the length of analyzing, implementing, deploying, and running a new content management system for businesses of various industries. From retail to healthcare, we've helped dozens of clients pivot to a more personalized and scalable digital asset management model.

When you need to shift to a new content management platform, we're in your corner. Contact us today to learn how you can craft personalized content faster, easier, and more securely.