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Brightspot vs. Adobe Experience Manager
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How to overcome Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) performance issues with a headless CMS

Smiling man working at office workstation for Adobe Experience Manager article

Adobe Experience Manager is one of the largest content management solutions in the world. But with that size comes a reputation for being complex and difficult to learn. While Adobe Experience Manager works well for some organizations, Adobe Experience Manager performance issues, plus the total cost of implementation and time to deployment prove limiting to many.

How to deal with Adobe Experience Manager issues

If you’ve already made the financial commitment to using Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), and feel stuck, we can help. We’ve assisted numerous Adobe Experience Manager customers with optimizing AEM’s functionality by pairing it with the Brightspot CMS, our powerful, extensible, API-first platform.

Top Adobe Experience Manager performance issues & how Brightspot helps

Below we’ve outlined the top challenges and AEM performance issues companies encounter when working with Adobe Experience Manager and how we can help you overcome them.

Adobe Experience Manager licensing costs can be high

The licensing fees for Adobe Experience Manager vary by business needs and which components are implemented, but in general, costs average $250,000 to $1,000,000+ annually. In a review of content management systems, Gartner noted: “Adobe's WCM offering is one of the more expensive in the market, sometimes being twice the price of its nearest competitor.”

Brightspot’s CMS is, on average, half the price of Adobe Experience Manager. What’s more, you can reduce maintenance costs by managing your content yourself. Because Brightspot is designed with end users in mind, editorial teams can start publishing their own content on the same day.

Adobe Experience Manager vs Brightspot: Microsite features

Time to launch can be slow with Adobe Experience Manager

If you’re working with Adobe Experience Manager, you can expect a 9-to-18-month rollout and implementation timeline. Compare this to Brightspot, where teams can go from idea to launch in a matter of weeks and with access to best-in-class publishing features and in-built collaborative tools like notifications and custom workflows. Standing up microsites and landing pages can be done in a matter of hours.

Adobe Experience Manager deliverables often involve hidden costs

One of the most common Adobe Experience Manager performance issues is that many of the essential tasks demoed by Adobe’s sales teams are not achievable solely with Adobe Experience Manager. Companies often find that to meet their business objectives they must also license Adobe Analytics, Adobe Tag Manager, and other Adobe products to supplement their AEM implementation, significantly increasing licensing fees.

With Brightspot's CMS, there are no hidden costs. We deliver on-time and on-budget. Every Brightspot launch involves a true partnership between our team and our customer. Our out-of-box CMS implementation includes in-CMS analytics and a broad portfolio of API integrations. We believe these are essential to your success, not extras you should pay more for later.

Adobe Experience Manager vs Brightspot: Rich-text editor

Heavy IT involvement can be a burden with Adobe AEM

First and foremost, your engineers can expect a complicated installation and setup for Adobe Experience Manager. They will be required to build everything—from text boxes and templates to submit buttons and edit screens for users. Simply put, it is not a product that you can deploy and then hand over to your editorial team.

A huge challenge of the Adobe Experience Manager platform is that it can be hard to grasp for those without advanced HTML skills. Because the system is not designed for editors, additional costs and time required for training should be factored in or the responsibility of creating, developing, and managing the system will fall primarily in the hands of your IT team.

We want to empower your teams to do the things they do best, so Brightspot was designed to fit into your publishing process, freeing publishers to quickly distribute content to every channel without the need for IT. In turn, IT gets to focus their priorities, while content producers get to create.

Integrator dependency is a must for Adobe AEM

Another primary Adobe Experience Manager performance issue is that in order to deploy it, a third-party implementation partner is required. These implementation partners have no direct access to Adobe, and the implementation process and setup will be heavily dependent on the vendor you choose. This increases the maintenance cost of Adobe Experience Manager and makes you reliant on a single, third-party partner, making it difficult to switch if problems arise.

With Brightspot, a third-party implementation is not necessary. Our team will partner with you on every facet of the project to deliver a world-class digital experience. We can deploy quickly and with significantly fewer resources than our competition.

Adobe Experience Manager vs Brightspot: Federated Search screenshot

Adobe Experience Manager’s rigid architecture can be cumbersome

A key reason Brightspot is preferred by editorial teams is our content discoverability. With our clean, folderless infrastructure, powerful federated search and customizable dashboard, editors can move quickly and avoid time wasted in tracking down content. Adobe Experience Manager’s folder structure and basic search functionality can be challenging to navigate and require more clicks and time than they should.

Adobe Experience Manager does not offer federated search out-of-the-box and their basic search functionality is not powerful enough to parse large amounts of data and return relevant results. Unless you know exactly where you saved something, searching for a particular item is time-consuming.

Adobe Experience Manager vs Brightspot: Out-of-the-box analytics

Measurement isn’t included out-of-the-box with Adobe Experience Manager

In today’s growth culture, publishers rely on metrics to remain competitive and make informed decisions. But with Adobe Experience Manager, analytics features aren’t available out-of-the box.

Brightspot features out-of-the-box analytics, which means you won’t need IT or development support in order to get basic analytics on your site. It’s worth noting that Brightspot also has integrations with other analytics providers such as Google Analytics.

We believe in working within whatever ecosystem you’re accustomed to; so, if you have an analytics system in place that you would like to continue using, there’s a good chance we have an out-of-the-box integration for it or can explore an integration with it.

Brightspot vs Adobe Experience Manager

Brightspot was built to delight editors and empower developers. With best-in-class editorial tools and robust admin features, Brightspot allows your editorial team to create and publish timely, relevant content faster and more easily than ever before. Here are some of the highlights of the Brightspot platform that make it a perfect Adobe Experience Manager alternative:

  • An incredibly flexible, lightweight foundation that can be tailored to the way you publish, enabling creators to quickly distribute content to every channel without the need for IT
  • A highly personalized dashboard and streamlined user interface that make it possible to publish with less than 10 minutes of training
  • Robust federated search, core to the Brightspot platform, which increases the discoverability of your content and makes it easy to locate any asset
  • Authoring tools that editorial teams love: In-line editing capabilities, an enhanced rich text editor, leading edge secure preview capabilities and bulk editing, advanced version control, field-level locking and workstreams.
  • An API-first approach to CMS architecture that smoothly integrates with your proprietary data as well as third-party data sources to reduce context switching for your team
  • Customizable drag-and-drop Workflow Engine that can be tailored to the way you work
  • An expert team of Brightspot developers, implementation teams and platform teams to support you from day one
Adobe Experience Manager vs Brightspot: Homepage screenshot

Don’t let AEM performance issues create bottlenecks

AEM can work (well enough) for organizations that can afford both its costs and the significant training time required. But as the digital landscape evolves, budgets shrink, and competition grows tighter, many companies find that difficult.

We’ve replatformed countless clients off of AEM. Request a Brightspot demo today and find out how you can replatform quickly and drastically improve your overall content management experience with the Brightspot CMS.

Start building in a free trial environment, see a demo or talk to an expert—select one of these paths and start however you would like to!

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