AEM vs Contentful

Overview

Contentful

Stacks838

Followers955

Votes70

AEM

Stacks108

Followers134

Votes0

AEM vs Contentful: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will discuss the key differences between Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and Contentful, two popular content management systems used for building and managing websites.

Hosting and Deployment Model: AEM is a self-hosted system, which means that it needs to be installed and managed on-premises or on a private cloud. On the other hand, Contentful is a cloud-based system that is hosted and managed by Contentful itself. This means that Contentful takes care of the infrastructure and server management, allowing users to focus solely on managing their content.
Ease of Use and User Interface: AEM has a steeper learning curve compared to Contentful. It offers a wide range of features and functionalities, but this complexity can be overwhelming for non-technical users. Contentful, on the other hand, has a more intuitive and user-friendly interface, making it easier for content creators and marketers to manage and publish content without extensive technical knowledge.
Customizability and Flexibility: AEM is highly customizable and provides extensive capabilities for creating complex web experiences. It offers a wide range of tools and features for developers to build custom components and integrations. Contentful, while not as flexible as AEM, still offers a good degree of customization through its API and webhooks. It allows developers to extend its functionalities using JavaScript and provides a marketplace for pre-built integrations.
Scalability and Performance: AEM is designed to handle large-scale enterprise-level websites with complex content structures. It is built on top of Apache Sling and Apache Jackrabbit, which provide high performance and scalability. Contentful, being a cloud-based system, is also highly scalable and can handle large amounts of traffic. It uses a content delivery network (CDN) to ensure fast and reliable content delivery to users across the globe.
Integration Capabilities: AEM offers seamless integrations with other Adobe products, such as Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, and Adobe Campaign. This allows users to leverage the full suite of Adobe marketing tools for their websites. Contentful, on the other hand, offers integrations with a wide range of third-party tools and services, including digital asset management (DAM) systems, localization services, and e-commerce platforms.
Pricing and Cost: AEM is a more expensive option compared to Contentful. It requires upfront licensing fees and ongoing maintenance costs. Contentful, on the other hand, operates on a subscription-based model, with pricing tiers based on usage and features. This makes Contentful a more cost-effective choice for small to medium-sized businesses or organizations with limited budgets.

In summary, AEM is a powerful and feature-rich content management system that is ideal for large-scale enterprise websites with complex requirements. It offers extensive customizability, seamless integrations with Adobe's marketing tools, and high scalability. On the other hand, Contentful is a cloud-based solution that provides a user-friendly interface, good customizability through its API, and a wide range of third-party integrations. It is a more cost-effective option for smaller businesses or organizations with limited budgets.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Contentful, AEM

Kamil

Product Manager at Wooclap

Jul 17, 2020

Needs adviceon

Google Docs

Gatsby

Hi StackSharers, your help is dearly needed as we're making a move to which we will commit for the next few years.

Problem: As our Marketing team gets growing needs to publish content fast and autonomously, we're trying to add a CMS to our stack.

Specs:

This CMS should have fairly advanced marketing features: either natively built, and/or be open source, so we can either find third parties' plugins suiting our needs or build our own plugins homebrew.
"Advanced marketing features" like these: Non-devs should be able to handle content autonomously, Should have a non-dev friendly interface, should allow creating a library of reusable components/modules, should show the preview before publishing, should have a calendar with all publications, should show the history/tracking, should allow collaborating (Google Docs like), should display characters limit optimized for SEO.

Solution: We're considering an SSG + Headless CMS combination. We're fairly confident for the SSG (Gatsby), but we're still uncertain which CMS we should choose.

122k views122k

Comments

Maxim

Web developer

Apr 14, 2020

Needs adviceon

Sanity

Hi Community, Would like to ask for advice from people familiar with those tools. We are a small self-funded startup and initial cost for us is very important at that stage. That's why we are leaning towards Sanity. The CMS will be used to power our website and flutter cross-platform mobile applications.

108k views108k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Contentful	AEM
With Contentful, you can bring your content anywhere using our APIs, completely customize your content structure all while using your preferred programming languages and frameworks.	It is a web-based client-server system for building, managing and deploying commercial websites and related services. It combines a number of infrastructure-level and application-level functions into a single integrated package.
Platform agnostic headless CMS; GraphQL and REST APIs; Fast delivery with global CDNs; Images API; Language and framework agnostic; Extensible web interface; CI/CD-ready; Flexible data; App Marketplace integrations; App Framework for building your own; Scheduled publishing, teams, tasks & comments; Localization with fallbacks	-
Statistics
Stacks 838	Stacks 108
Followers 955	Followers 134
Votes 70	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 30 API-based cms 17 Much better than WordPress 11 Simple and customizable 5 Images API 3 Free for small projects Cons 5 No spell check 5 No repeater Field 4 No free plan 3 Slow dashboard 2 Pricey	No community feedback yet
Integrations
Algolia imgix Bitbucket Saleor Twilio Mailgun Cloudinary GraphQL Playground commercetools Google Cloud Platform	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Contentful, AEM?

WordPress

The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home” — we’d love you to join the family.

Drupal

Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world.

Strapi

Strapi is100% JavaScript, extensible, and fully customizable. It enables developers to build projects faster by providing a customizable API out of the box and giving them the freedom to use the their favorite tools.

Ghost

Ghost is a platform dedicated to one thing: Publishing. It's beautifully designed, completely customisable and completely Open Source. Ghost allows you to write and publish your own blog, giving you the tools to make it easy and even fun to do.

Wagtail

Wagtail is a Django content management system built originally for the Royal College of Art and focused on flexibility and user experience.

OctoberCMS

It is a Laravel-based CMS engineered for simplicity. It has a simple and intuitive interface. It provides a consistent structure with an emphasis on reusability so you can focus on building something unique while we handle the boring bits.

Twill

Twill is an open source CMS toolkit for Laravel that helps developers rapidly create a custom admin console that is intuitive, powerful and flexible.

Sanity

Sanity is a headless, real-time CMS where the editor is an open source React-based construction kit and the backend is a graph-oriented cloud datastore with a globally distributed CDN.

ProcessWire

ProcessWire is an open source content management system (CMS) and web application framework aimed at the needs of designers, developers and their clients. ProcessWire gives you more control over your fields, templates and markup than other platforms, and provides a powerful template system that works the way you do

Typo3

It is a free and open-source Web content management system written in PHP. It can run on several web servers, such as Apache or IIS, on top of many operating systems, among them Linux, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, macOS and OS/2.

Related Comparisons

AEM vs Contentful: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will discuss the key differences between Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and Contentful, two popular content management systems used for building and managing websites.

Hosting and Deployment Model: AEM is a self-hosted system, which means that it needs to be installed and managed on-premises or on a private cloud. On the other hand, Contentful is a cloud-based system that is hosted and managed by Contentful itself. This means that Contentful takes care of the infrastructure and server management, allowing users to focus solely on managing their content.
Ease of Use and User Interface: AEM has a steeper learning curve compared to Contentful. It offers a wide range of features and functionalities, but this complexity can be overwhelming for non-technical users. Contentful, on the other hand, has a more intuitive and user-friendly interface, making it easier for content creators and marketers to manage and publish content without extensive technical knowledge.
Customizability and Flexibility: AEM is highly customizable and provides extensive capabilities for creating complex web experiences. It offers a wide range of tools and features for developers to build custom components and integrations. Contentful, while not as flexible as AEM, still offers a good degree of customization through its API and webhooks. It allows developers to extend its functionalities using JavaScript and provides a marketplace for pre-built integrations.
Scalability and Performance: AEM is designed to handle large-scale enterprise-level websites with complex content structures. It is built on top of Apache Sling and Apache Jackrabbit, which provide high performance and scalability. Contentful, being a cloud-based system, is also highly scalable and can handle large amounts of traffic. It uses a content delivery network (CDN) to ensure fast and reliable content delivery to users across the globe.
Integration Capabilities: AEM offers seamless integrations with other Adobe products, such as Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, and Adobe Campaign. This allows users to leverage the full suite of Adobe marketing tools for their websites. Contentful, on the other hand, offers integrations with a wide range of third-party tools and services, including digital asset management (DAM) systems, localization services, and e-commerce platforms.
Pricing and Cost: AEM is a more expensive option compared to Contentful. It requires upfront licensing fees and ongoing maintenance costs. Contentful, on the other hand, operates on a subscription-based model, with pricing tiers based on usage and features. This makes Contentful a more cost-effective choice for small to medium-sized businesses or organizations with limited budgets.

AEM vs Contentful

Overview