TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Magnolia

Score9.8 out of 10

119 Reviews and Ratings

What is Magnolia?

Founded in Switzerland in 1997, Magnolia is a CMS used to build composable digital experiences. Magnolia helps create fully integrated customer experiences and speeds up digital delivery of content.

Magnolia boasts 480 enterprise customers, thousands of Community Edition deployments, and more than 200 certified Magnolia Partners around the world. They further state that their enterprise customers include Sanofi, Generali, the Atlassian, The New York Times, Harley Davidson, and Union Investment.

Media

the Magnolia App Launcher, used to switch between workspaces and manage pages
the customer experience. This brings together content and audiovisual digital assets to form more compelling digital experiences.
global search that brings relevant content, no matter where it resides.
customizing the ecommerce experience.
Magnolia Orchestratem where users can manage and track campaigns
the WYSIWYG page editor
Magnolia's AI image editor
Magnolia's accessibility tracking

1 / 8

Top Performing Features

  • Page templates

    The CMS has standard webpage templates or types of web pages (e.g. homepage, article page, interior page, blog page, etc.); users can also build custom templates.

    Category average: 7.9

  • API

    An API (application programming interface) provides a standard programming interface for connecting third-party systems to the software for data creation, access, updating and/or deletion.

    Category average: 8

  • WYSIWYG editor

    What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editing tool allows users to build pages without writing code.

    Category average: 8.1

Areas for Improvement

  • Library of website themes

    A library of website frameworks or themes is available as a starting point for building a website.

    Category average: 7.2

  • Form generator

    Users can build website forms for visitors to fill out.

    Category average: 7

  • Community / comment management

    Users can put post/page comments through an approval process, auto-approve commenters based on their email addresses, block commenters by IP address, delete comments, etc.

    Category average: 7.5

Large amount of possibilities with low learning time

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We build solutions based on Magnolia for our customer's needs. These needs include intranets, web pages, eCommerce, etc. Also, our customers come from a wide range of industries, such as banks, wholesalers, or [travel] companies.

Pros

  • API Rest calls
  • Organising contents
  • Usability by non-technical people

Cons

  • User interface
  • Administration site performance
  • More consistency when indicating if a content is published or not

Return on Investment

  • Positive: organization of complex content structures
  • Positive: developing times
  • Positive: reduced number of systems to manage

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP)

Other Software Used

Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP), Oracle Java SE, Eclipse

Magnolia is still our go to platform for our clients and ourselves

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

<div>We mostly use and recommend Magnolia for enterprise clients who want a lean, easy to use platform for managing their content (not just on the web). However we do also use it internally for our own website as well.</div><div>

</div><div>It's not the only solution our clients use as everyone has different requirements. Why do we use it and recommend it to others when we do see a fit ? Quite simply, it's a well engineered product which has always been ultra reliable whenever we've deployed it to the dozens of clients who we've worked with it on. We don't like implementing solutions that we have to constantly prod and patch to keep working, and for us Magnolia saves us time, money and credibility. Our clients are always happy to use it because it is simple to use and takes minimal training.

</div>

Pros

  • Reliability
  • Ease of use
  • Rapid development and deployment
  • Performance
  • Robust and secure architecture

Cons

  • Improve coverage in North America and the Middle East
  • Arab and Mandarin languages in admin central
  • Less reliance on JCR for back end storage interface

Return on Investment

  • Rapid time to market. We have managed to turn around replatforming projects in a matter of weeks.
  • Integration. The API access is really helpful and we've been able to use this with Python scripts to automate some otherwise laborious batch processing tasks and connect Magnolia with other systems. There's also a Groovy interface which can do some of this for certain types of task. The Groovy console is a little unloved in terms of support but it's really handy if you know what you're doing.
  • We have onboarded and trained staff to use the platform really quickly. It's friendly and accessible to newcomers so while we often get scared looks from new staff when we first tell them about it, they come round to love it very quickly once they see it!

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Sitecore Experience Commerce, dotCMS, Contentful, Umbraco CMS, WordPress and Drupal

Other Software Used

NAKIVO Backup & Replication, Ahsay Cloud Backup Suite, ZEVE- Virtual Environment

Meh

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I train developers how to use, build and customize every nook and cranny of Magnolia.

Pros

  • Allows easy/fast development/configuration via yaml.
  • Allows devs to override out of box functionality.
  • Allows many integration points.

Cons

  • Admincentral UI is clunky and animations make it feel slow.
  • Admincentral UI layout fosters a frustrating experience w/ many misclicks wasting time.
  • Documentation as of late has been inaccurate and hard to follow.

Return on Investment

  • YAML config speeds up and simplifies development where othe CMSs fail.

Usability

Once you try it, you don't want to change it

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Magnolia in our day-to-day business in several different ways

<ul><li>As a content management system for pages in which we display useful information to our customers.</li><li>We also have several headless systems in which we send different information dynamically from banners to regions of the home page to display depending on the type of device that connects (Desktop browser, Mobile browser, Native App).</li><li>ContentApps in which we send literals according to languages selected by the user.</li></ul>

Pros

  • The flexibility it offers us to be able to implement all the needs we have.
  • To be able to perform Front development in the technology that best suits your needs, VueJS, ANGULAR, ReactJS.
  • Constant version upgrades make Magnolia a 100% reliable product.
  • The active community behind it to provide support and help.
  • Flexibility and simplicity of creating ContentApps that can be attacked via APIs

Cons

  • As a developer the learning curve is long, you can start developing relatively quickly but getting to know the platform in depth takes time.
  • Having a history of modifications not only at the page level but also at the Content Apps level would be very useful.

Return on Investment

  • Management and implementation times have been drastically reduced.
  • Marketplace management with the LifeCopy plugin has reduced the time to create new marketplaces in an existing language by more than 90%.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Drupal, WordPress and Adobe Experience Manager

Other Software Used

AngularJS, OpenJDK, Datadog

Great combination of features for a reasonable price

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Magnolia is actually taking care of all the Corporate Sites of Prosegur, covering all the footprint of the company worldwide and all our businesses

Pros

  • Agility to create new contents
  • Customization capabilities
  • Roadmap of the product

Cons

  • Reporting of activities performed by contributors (changes, publications, accesses...)
  • Log information related with the operation of the platform
  • Only five versions for each conten are usually not enough

Return on Investment

  • Accelerated launch times, we are able to generate a complete new web site in a few days
  • The roadmap and strategy are alligned with our needs (SPA, Headless, DXP...)

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress and Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP)

Other Software Used

Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce Essentials