What is the best CMS for Enterprise?

There is no agreement on the threshold for what makes a business an enterprise, so we think of enterprise business as a company that is doing business at a large scale and has hundreds or thousands of employees. It is helpful in the case of this blog to separate smaller businesses and enterprise businesses because they have different technical abilities and needs with their websites.

By researching this growing market we found a great list of options for large businesses to manage their online marketing and workflows. There is not one clear leader in the Content Management System (CMS) space. Many are better suited for specific types of businesses and use cases. Here is a list of several top CMS systems and newer up-and-coming CMS platforms that we will review in a separate blog post.

Top CMS for Enterprise

• AEM
• WordPress
• Drupal
• Sitecore
• Contentful

Up and Coming CMS Platforms

• HubSpot
• Yext
• Kentico
• Contentstack
• Optimizely Content Cloud
• Magnolia
• Ingeniux
• Oracle WebCenter Content

AEM

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 the Adobe Experience Cloud, AEM integrates with platforms like Adobe Analytics, and Adobe Commerce

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.

Benefits

• Easy to manage marketing content and assets
• Marketers are able to approve and publish content faster
• Easily integrated with other marketing tools from Adobe: Analytics, Target
• Automation of metadata and content tag designation to boost SEO
• Scalability
• Workflows for content management within a large organization
• Security to protect the privacy and vulnerability of data

Drawbacks

• AEM as a platform can be difficult to learn, especially if you are not a tech-savvy person
• AEM requires a heavy IT presence throughout the lifespan of the product
• Lacking structure flexibility
• Expensive Costs associated with license, development, support
• Less than great community/partner support

Arbory Digital focuses our efforts on AEM, but we are constantly looking for new content management systems that could be a better option for our enterprise customers. For a more detailed explanation of Adobe Experience Manager go here.

WordPress

Arguably the most recognized CMS, WordPress is well known as an open-source, free installation software. WordPress features a highly user-friendly interface, while also allowing for a great deal of flexibility because of its 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.

WordPress can be optimized to serve considerable traffic as long as your content is efficiently cached. You will also need to keep a close watch on the plugins you use and minimize dependencies on the database. If there are too many plugins running inefficiently. the site will become slow for users at a large scale, or the infrastructure running the site However, those dependencies eventually become an obstacle to delivery and in my experience, WordPress gets replaced just as the limitations start to significant problems.

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.

Benefits

• There is a great online community developing and helping each other
• Designed for business professionals
• Developers can create a wide variety of original and complex designs
• Free and open source allowing you to customize anything you want to programmatically
• Drupal has solid security settings out of the box
• Built-in, configurable cashing for maintaining site speeds

Drawbacks

• There is a steep learning curve for newcomers operating on the back end and with the front-end UI
• Difficult update and installation process when compared to other open-source CMSs
• Hardwear requirements for Drupal at scale are not inexpensive

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.

Benefit

• Multisite & Multi-lingual Capabilities
• Native personalization and analytics
• Drag and Drop, WYSIWYG interfaces for page and form editing
• Able to deliver consistent content experience across multiple devices, including mobile
• Uses AI to generate a personalized experience for each user by identifying visitor trends (Sitecore AI-enhanced DAM)
• robust partner ecosystem that can provide support throughout the implementation phase and after completion.

Drawback

• Comes at a high cost, although generally cheaper than AEM
• Not a stand-up, out-of-the-box solution, requires multiple development cycles depending on how customers want to leverage the platform

Contentful

Contentful is a cloud-based headless content management system. Headless content management systems make it easier for developers to publish content to a variety of platforms and mediums.

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.

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.

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