Magnolia Reviews

4.7
Overall rating
Reviews

4.7
Overall rating
Reviews
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User Reviews Overview

About Magnolia

Magnolia CMS is the fastest way for mid-market and large organizations to launch world-class digital experiences. Integrating with your existing applications and frameworks is seamless thanks to Magnolia's API-based architecture,...

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Feature ratings

Value for Money
4.7
Features
4.7
Ease of Use
4.7
Customer Support
4.6

Browse Magnolia Reviews

23 of 23 reviews
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Andrew
Andrew
  • Industry: Computer Software
  • Company size: 11–50 Employees
  • Used Weekly for 2+ years
  • Review Source
Value for Money
4
Features
5
Ease of Use
4
Customer Support
5

5
Reviewed on 17/04/2020

Our go-to CMS platform

Our primary goal is unifying data and making it easy for clients to manage their various pieces of data and assets which are often scattered across various systems. Having a centralised interface with one set of logins and where applicable one set of design templates makes it easier to extend applications and keep things tidy. We also don't have to put a lot of effort in to infrastructure as the system performs pretty well without having lots of additional reverse proxies and caches in place. It just works. That's all we and indeed our clients want.

Pros

We implement a number of different CMS platforms and the team have been doing this for over twenty years. Magnolia is a system we keep coming back to because it's reliable, easy to work with and contains the right balance of features to help us give clients the functionality they want without adding extraneous features. For an enterprise grade system, it's also pretty good from a budget point of view. Our clients respond positively to the intuitive interface and that means a lower support overhead for us.

Cons

Up until the last year or two, the company were not particularly customer or indeed integrator friendly. Thankfully this has since changed.

Joaquin
  • Industry: Information Technology & Services
  • Company size: Self Employed
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source
Value for Money
4
Features
5
Ease of Use
4
Customer Support
5

5
Reviewed on 14/06/2020

Clean and high performance open source CMS

I met Magnolia because I was required for a company to evaluate it. I started from the commercial website of Magnolia and it was enough to create the POC and deploy the product in a few time.

Pros

From the point of view of a software engineer what I like more is the architecture and design of the product - it is simple and brilliant - and also the cleanliness of the code and the usage of design principles and recommendations for Java developing.
The above pros allows Magnolia to be robust, reliable and at the same time dynamic and flexible because it is really easy to customize and adapt the product to the requirements of the installation.
As standard java product it is really easy to deploy it in any IT infrastructure: cloud, cluster of dockers, on premise etc.
Another feature I like is headless that allows you to integrate Magnolia with other services to consume and expose contents from/to other services or systems.
As a user, Magnolia is simple to use and easy to learn - it remembers me the "Kiss" principle - and full of features that helps content editors.

Cons

The community of Magnolia is active but It is small, there is a lot of help and docs from official community but non-official or partners are not so involved.

Alternatives Considered

Liferay DXP

Reasons for Choosing Magnolia

The following issues with the current product: low performance, lack of documentation, bugs and poor support. It was a proprietary product and it was not possible to customize or even improve it.

Reasons for Switching to Magnolia

Main reason was that it is Open source and easy to customize. The usage of java as programming language was also important. The modular design of magnolia allowed to integrate Magnolia better inside the infrastructure. Headless skills. Magnolia had better performance than alternative products.
Le Vin
  • Industry: Information Technology & Services
  • Company size: 11–50 Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source
Value for Money
N/A
Features
4
Ease of Use
3
Customer Support
N/A

4
Reviewed on 23/07/2021

Few issues over the years

Pros

As someone who had used other CMS before, Magnolia is very easy to grasp and use. over the past 6 years, there have been almost no occasions where we needed the helpline - we always solved the problems internally.

Cons

Our website is coded such that use beyond standard settings requires a developer to create new templates or adjust settings.

Top Magnolia Alternatives

Leigh
  • Industry: Internet
  • Company size: 11–50 Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source
Value for Money
4
Features
5
Ease of Use
5
Customer Support
4

5
Reviewed on 08/06/2020

Why Magnolia

Running an Agency Magnolia stands out because of the ease of use, empowerment and speed of development, 3 things which are important in ensuring client deliveries and retaining customers.

Pros

When evaluating CMS's it is important to consider the end user needs, the people that will be using it on a day to day basis. Whilst having all of the Enterprise features Magnolia wins on ease of use, logically laid out the user interface empowers content editors, and authors to get on with telling stories and day to day marketing/merchandising of the website whether Ecommerce or B2B. Add to ease of use features like campaign management and personalisation along with open integration and tools then the platform becomes very powerful.

Cons

Like most Enterprise CMS platforms there is a lot of functionality under the bonnet and it requires expertise to ensure that the approach taken for a particular part of a site development is the right one, but once selected provides a firm foundation to build upon.

Ricardo
  • Industry: Internet
  • Company size: 2–10 Employees
  • Used Daily for 1+ year
  • Review Source
Value for Money
5
Features
5
Ease of Use
5
Customer Support
5

5
Reviewed on 15/01/2021

Magnolia CMS provides a great digital experience

Magnolia CRM was a great complement on our current content management infrstructure. Thanks to its highly modular structure we could implement it with ease.

Pros

Magnolia has an extremely modular structure that enabled it to be integrated to our current business management infrastructure. Magnolia helps us to deliver our central content any end user distribution channel.

Cons

Magnolia is really an extemely huge CRM that requires a considerable amount of time and efford to have an expertise on all features of the platform.

Alternatives Considered

SmartTouch ECM

Reasons for Choosing Magnolia

Magnolia CRM was a better option in terms of ease of integration to our existing business management infrastructure.

Switched From

SmartTouch ECM

Reasons for Switching to Magnolia

Magnolia CRM had more modular structure and this was the key point that effected our decision.
Sebastian
  • Industry: Computer Software
  • Company size: 11–50 Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source
Value for Money
5
Features
5
Ease of Use
5
Customer Support
5

5
Reviewed on 21/05/2020

Magnolia as an ideal Digital Experience integration platform

Solving the content integration and personalization challenges of our clients and Magnolia is providing the tooling to achieve that goal with rapidly customizable features.

Pros

The best features of Magnolia besides it's great content editor experience is the ability to use the product in a traditional CMS approach by rendering web pages and as a headless CMS. It provides great flexibility on both fronts. Enterprise integration capabilities are also superb with available pre-built integration modules to popular applications like Salesforce and Google Analytics as well as Ecommerce. Overall a great platform to build and grow an Enterprise wide Digital Experience.

Cons

The platform is extensive and can be challenging from a development learning curve perspective.

Alternatives Considered

Hippo CMMS

Reasons for Switching to Magnolia

Superior integration capabilities and better editor user experience.
Verified Reviewer
  • Industry: Security & Investigations
  • Company size: 11–50 Employees
  • Used Weekly for 1+ year
  • Review Source
Value for Money
5
Features
5
Ease of Use
5
Customer Support
5

5
Reviewed on 17/03/2020

Distancing itself as an Enterprise solution

Pros

Our team is comprised of Java and Web Developers. We had been using WordPress which was a big task for us as our expertise didn't lie in PHP. Then we stumbled on Magnolia and it wasn't that it was just a Java based product. The ease at which we were able to build the custom modules we needed and plug it into our other solutions like Salesforce. Helped us reduce our time spent in implementing and provide a quicker turnaround for new features to our business team. Which in turn sped up our ROI on Magnolia.

Cons

The only issue we seem to have at this point is there are not a lot of OOB integrations to popular solutions like NetSuite or Salesforce and everything pretty much has to be custom built. I think if Magnolia did that there would be very few competitors for them.

Alternatives Considered

Adobe Experience Manager

Switched From

WordPress
Emilio
  • Industry: Hospitality
  • Company size: 10,000+ Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source
Value for Money
5
Features
5
Ease of Use
5
Customer Support
5

5
Reviewed on 12/05/2020

Why should I recommend Magnolia CMS?

From DevOps perspective Magnolia CMS gives us the ability to clone environments very easily, with low cost in infrastructure. It's amazing how Magnolia CMS can manage high loads without issues using not too large machines. Of course backups are another strong point in Magnolia CMS with easy integration with Cloud solutions.

Pros

Is amazing how easy is to integrate Magnolia CMS in our continuous delivery cycle. We use Magnolia CMS over Tomcat and the behavior is the same than others Tomcat based solutions we already had in the company.

Cons

We would like to control the publication of content between different public instances and not others. For example, I want to publish this content only in this public instances to test something new.

Stanley
  • Industry: Information Technology & Services
  • Company size: 11–50 Employees
  • Used Daily for 1-5 months
  • Review Source
Value for Money
4
Features
4
Ease of Use
4
Customer Support
4

4
Reviewed on 09/06/2020

Magnolia - Our Next Generation Content Management System

Pros

Ability to combine content management, digital marketing and ecommerce onto a single platform was a really good feature. The Visual SPA editor , was really user friendly for non-technical content authors, who had got back their ability to author digital experiences in the new era of web development tools and frameworks.
Evolution of the product to evolve itself into a headless platform that can be hosted both on premise and on cloud made it easy to be placed on the new DXL (Digital Experience Layer) platform that we are building for one of our clients.
Upgrades to latest editions 6.X were also seamless without any major hurdles.

Modular architecture made it easy for us to build a new ecommerce connector at fast pace.

Light module based development was a real boon , when it came to setting up feature teams comprising of FrontEnd and Java based BackEnd developers.

Cons

We would like the product to become for more cloud friendly and looking forward to see support for GraphQL based apis .

Nathan
  • Industry: Marketing & Advertising
  • Company size: 11–50 Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source
Value for Money
5
Features
4
Ease of Use
5
Customer Support
4

4
Reviewed on 09/06/2020

Simple Yet Powerful

It's an exceptional platform to swiftly build out templates that offer a wide range of flexibility to the content managers and endusers alike.

Pros

Wonderful CMS to develop on. Ease of development lets me focus on empowering content managers to deliver amazing end results.

Cons

Admin can feel a bit clunky at times. Especially in version 6 and later.

Dayana
Dayana
  • Industry: Nonprofit Organization Management
  • Company size: 1,001–5,000 Employees
  • Used Weekly for 1-5 months
  • Review Source
Value for Money
5
Features
5
Ease of Use
5
Customer Support
5

5
Reviewed on 05/09/2019

Mangolia is An attractive content management system,Highly recommended

Magnolia CMS is an amazing tool for the development of an innovative websites, intranets, and extra-nets. It enables you to launch your apps or websites without generating new content. It allows you to re-utilize and reorganize your present content into little, recyclable blocks. So, you can provide content to the visitors related to their interests. Magnolia offers easy access to customize the pages and content through its friendly web-based applications.

Pros

Magnolia is an open, extendable and a flexible tool and its standard features can be changed and expanded. It provides a centralized solution for the users with the characteristics for sending an appealing digital experience to all the channels, markets, and brands. Integration of other software’s can be done using Java API, REST, SOAP, CMIS, XML, etc. Magnolia is a high-quality platform for enterprise IT system which is written in Java. It is firm, accessible, and safe and separates the performance from the public settings. Magnolia offers easy access to customize the pages and content through its friendly web-based applications.

Cons

There is a lack of an administrative control panel in Magnolia, displaying all the workflow, most probably in graphical representation. The developer must know how to use Vaadin in order to implement the customization in the administrative UI of Magnolia. The uninstall of the modules is quite unsystematic. There are no chances to go back if an error occurs during the publication of new versions of a self-made module. It is not mobile or tablet friendly.

May
  • Industry: Information Technology & Services
  • Company size: 201–500 Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source
Value for Money
5
Features
5
Ease of Use
5
Customer Support
5

5
Reviewed on 16/10/2020

One of the most flexible WCM platforms out there!

Pros

From end users onboarding to platform enablement, Magnolia is proven to be one of the front runner. Our team loves the extensibility of the platform. Definitely one of the most well rounded WCM out there from features to pricing.

Cons

Desired features: More robust translation workflow / connector, A/B/N Testing (in roadmap already)

Tom
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source
Value for Money
5
Features
5
Ease of Use
4
Customer Support
4

5
Reviewed on 18/01/2018

Magnolia is a great CMS platform with a great product and support team

Pros

Magnolia excels in its ability to be adapted to specific enterprise content management needs. Everyone wants roughly the same core features but fine tuned to their business. Magnolia's flexibility makes this possible.

Cons

The underlying JCR technology is solid and stable but has not been updated in a while. Would be good to see more updates in this area and/or future vision.

Jordi
  • Industry: Hospitality
  • Company size: 10,000+ Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source
Value for Money
5
Features
5
Ease of Use
5
Customer Support
5

5
Reviewed on 01/05/2020

A pleasant surprise

Pros

It is a complete solution that has allowed us to migrate from a previous platform easily and quickly. In addition, the learning curve is excellent.

Cons

At the moment I have not found anything outstanding in lack.

Tom
  • Industry: Computer Software
  • Company size: 201–500 Employees
  • Used Weekly for 2+ years
  • Review Source
Value for Money
5
Features
5
Ease of Use
5
Customer Support
5

5
Reviewed on 14/10/2020

Powerful and easy to use DXP

Pros

Very easy to use from an admin perspective. Non-technical resources can easily pick up admin functionality. Built in workflows are very impressive. Perfect enterprise DXP that both marketing and IT will love to use.

Cons

At this point I have no negative issues with Magnolia. Very happy with platform.

Julian
  • Industry: Information Technology & Services
  • Company size: 1,001–5,000 Employees
  • Used Daily for 6-12 months
  • Review Source
Value for Money
5
Features
5
Ease of Use
5
Customer Support
5

5
Reviewed on 08/06/2020

Magnolia - Fast and Easy, yet still industry strength

Being able to reach our customers and give them the best experience.

Pros

The product is easy to configure and use, yet scalable and able to grow as business grow.

Cons

None so far, I've found it easy to use and flexible enough to address our requirements.

Abhay
  • Review Source
Value for Money
5
Features
5
Ease of Use
5
Customer Support
5

5
Reviewed on 24/02/2017

Developr-Friendly Open-Source Enterprise CMS

I work for a digital consultancy that has experience of implementing various CMS products. From a systems integrator point of view, I like Magnolia not just for its strong feature-set, but because I know I can deliver robust and scalable solutions for our clients using this platform. Another bonus is an extensive set of well documented APIs that make it highly extensible and very developer-friendly.

I also like that Magnolia is open-source and offers the free Community Edition as an entry point for smaller organisations.

David
David
  • Industry: Computer Software
  • Company size: 1,001–5,000 Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source
Value for Money
5
Features
4
Ease of Use
5
Customer Support
4

4
Reviewed on 02/06/2020

Intuitivo, buena integrabilidad y abierto

La experiencia en general ha sido muy buena, porque es un producto que desde el principio te sientes cómodo con él y sientes que puedes sacarle el máximo partido gracias a sus funcionalidades de caja, su posibilidad de personalización y el apoyo del fabricante.

Pros

Magnolia es un producto que destaca por varias de sus virtudes. Por una parte es muy fácil e intuitivo de usar para usuarios no técnicos. Además tiene un time-to-market muy acotado que permite realizar su implantación en muy poco tiempo. Destaca también su filosofía de código abierto que permite adecuar el producto a las necesidades específicas de cada cliente. Es un producto con potentes herramientas de marketing como la personalización de los contenidos (targeting) o las herramientas SEO p.ej. Destaca también la buena integrabilidad gracias a sus connector packs y su API REST de serie. Su arquitectura es escalable, lo que permite adaptar y optimizar el dimensionamiento a las necesidades de cada momento. El soporte del fabricante es bueno y siempre brindan el apoyo necesario tanto a partners como a clientes. Es un producto en constante evolución por lo que las mejoras de seguridad, rendimiento, funcionalidad, etc las obtiene directamente el cliente sin coste adicional por ellas. Permite desacoplar la capa frontal, por lo que se pueden hacer desarrollos basado en tecnologías actuales como Angular, ReactJS, VueJS, etc, dotando de dinamismo a las páginas.

Cons

Quizá se eche de menos un sistema más automático de desinstalación de módulos. Por otra parte, a pesar de contar con herramientas de backups donde las copias de seguridad son muy fáciles de programar, la restauración ha de hacerse de una forma un poco manual. Respecto a las integraciones de caja con otras herramientas o fabricantes, se echan de menos algunas aunque están evolucionando bien en ese sentido

Antonio José
Antonio José
  • Industry: Internet
  • Company size: 10,000+ Employees
  • Used Weekly for 2+ years
  • Review Source
Value for Money
3
Features
3
Ease of Use
4
Customer Support
3

3
Reviewed on 01/06/2020

Buen producto para los proyectos adecuados

Mi experiencia en general es buena, es un producto muy valido para realizar proyectos web que tengan una serie de caracteristicas bastante claras.

Es un jugador de nicho que intenta expandir el terreno de juego.

Pros

Su interfaz es intuitiva y sencilla.
Su arquitectura admite una profunda personalización ajustandose a las necesidades de cada cliente.
Su API para gestionar contenidos es de las mejores en productos de este tipo.
El renderizado de las páginas es bastante sencillo y ajustado; no tener que lidiar con trozos de HTML inyectados por el CMS es una ventaja a la hora de integrar todas las partes.
Su rendimiento es bastante bueno para ser un CMS basado en Java.
Su apuesta por el desarrollo Front como alternativa viable para casi todo es un acierto mayusculo que permite ahorrar tiempo de implementación.

Cons

SI bien en las opciones en las que es bueno es mejor que la mayoria de competidores tecnológicamente equivalente, no es buena opción para proyectos que no estén dentro de su rango natural de actuación.
La curva de dificultad a la hora de realizar implementaciones crece exponencialmente en cuanto te sales de lo que ofrece el producto.
No tiene una comunidad amplia que te ayude o de soporte.
No tiene un marketplace amplio que te permita reutilizar desarrollos.
No tienen demasiados conectores para integrarse con otros softwares.

Alternatives Considered

, and

Reasons for Choosing Magnolia

En los proyectos en los cuales MagnoliaCMS es bueno es mejor que Liferay DXP

Reasons for Switching to Magnolia

Combina mejor seguridad y soporte que las alternativas PHP y mas sencillez de implementación que las alternativas Java en aquellos proyectos que están dentro de su rango de actuación.
Claudia
Claudia
  • Industry: Program Development
  • Company size: 501–1,000 Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source
Value for Money
5
Features
5
Ease of Use
5
Customer Support
5

5
Reviewed on 01/06/2020

Magnolia, el gestor de contenidos adaptable

Llevo trabajando con Magnolia algo más de 7 años, es una plataforma muy completa con la cual hasta ahora hemos podido cubrir todas las funcionalidades que nos han solicitado. Además debido a que está en constante evolución he podido estar al día en cuanto a las tendencias en desarrollo front e integrar frameworks como bootstrap, REACT, etc gracias a su arquitectura headless, así como en el back, donde ahora podemos trabajar con estructuras más complejas gracias a la Inteligencia Artificial en la que han ido trabajando para su backend.

Pros

Este gestor de contenidos posee una arquitectura modular que ofrece la posibilidad de poder integrar cualquier servicio y realizar desarrollos basados en microservicios que pueden ser reutilizados, incluso,k por cualquier otra plataforma gracias a la API que nos proporciona.
De esta manera he podido cubrir cualquier necesidad que al cliente se le plantee, obteniendo no solo un portal web si no pudiendo integrar cualquier funcionalidad, permitiendo cubrir las necesidades del mismo en un tiempo récord.

Cons

Estaría bien contar ya con módulos orientados a trabajar con foros o blog, dónde se de la iniciativa de tener un lugar donde colaborar con los usuarios públicos.
No obstante, con el sistema de plantillado y la posibilidad de trabajar con workspaces en cluster es posible desarrollarlos fácilmente.

Julien
Julien
  • Industry: Computer Software
  • Company size: 51–200 Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source
Value for Money
5
Features
5
Ease of Use
5
Customer Support
5

5
Reviewed on 01/04/2021

Fluide, facile et efficace - parfait pour un Website Content Manager

Pros

Le logiciel offre de nombreuses fonctionnalités et est très intuitif.
Pour créer de nouvelles pages, de nouveaux components et les éditer ensuite, tout est très facile (aussi facile qu'avec des programmes de type Elementor) et user-friendly, tout en apportant plus de possibilités qu'avec les programmes plus "basiques".
Il est possible d'intégrer des programmes externes très facilement pour faire communiquer le CMS avec les autres softwares que l'on utilise déjà (CRM, eShop, etc.)
J'ai été sur Magnolia 2 ans, quasi quotidiennement en tant qu'utilisateur.

Cons

Seule la version Enterprise offre l'ensemble des features, donc pas fait pour les plus petites PMEs avec un budget Digital limité, cependant une version Community est disponible.

Gonzalo
  • Industry: Information Technology & Services
  • Company size: 1,001–5,000 Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source
Value for Money
5
Features
5
Ease of Use
5
Customer Support
5

5
Reviewed on 08/06/2020

Un gestor ágil y flexible

Trabajo a diario desarrollando portales sobre Magnolia y la verdad es que de los CMS con los que he trabajado este es el mejor, es sencillo de implementar lo que hace que la curva de aprendizaje sea muy suave. Es súper flexible, lo que nos permite adaptarnos fácilmente a las necesidades del cliente. Y permite la integración casi con cualquier aplicación.

Pros

Lo que más destacaría del gestor es su facilidad de uso, y su flexibilidad. Desde el minuto uno los usuarios son independientes de IT para poder crear páginas o contenidos. Y desde el punto de vista técnico nos permite integrarnos con multitud de aplicativos.

Cons

Echo de menos algún tipo de acelerador con un catálogo de componente base de los que partir, le restaría un poco de flexibilidad pero permitiría acelerar los desarrollos.

Matteo
  • Industry: Apparel & Fashion
  • Company size: 5,001–10,000 Employees
  • Used Daily for 1-5 months
  • Review Source
Value for Money
4
Features
5
Ease of Use
5
Customer Support
3

4
Reviewed on 07/07/2023

Tool di CMS affidabile.

Esperienza positiva sicuramente, ma con qualche ma, soprattutto nella riorganizzazione dei contenuti.

Pros

Mi piace molto l'interfaccia, che all'inizio può sembrare dispersiva e difficile da capire, ma che poi diventa facilmente fruibile. E' facile poter caricare le immagini e contenuti multimediali nella sezione "Media" ed è facilissimo poter cambiare il merchandising del proprio ecommerce nella sezione "Pages".Inoltre, si integra bene con altri strumenti come Hybris, il che lo rende un software affidabile e conosciuto.

Cons

Non ho apprezzato il fatto che durante l'aggiornamento del catalogo del proprio sito, per trascinare un contenuto dal basso verso le prime righe, ci si impiega troppo tempo. Allo stesso modo si può trascinare solo un contenuto alla volta e se si hanno tanti prodotti da aggiornare, il tutto può diventare macchinoso e lento.

23 reviews