9 differences between Adobe Experience Manager and Brightspot

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.

The Brightspot CMS’s extensible architecture means you can publish how you want—headless or decoupled—all from the same environment.

A library of proven tools and experiences enable any custom content application to start at least 50% complete. Flexible, fast and without compromise. Brightspot truly becomes your platform. You can extend it with your business logic and workflow because Brightspot is designed to grow with your content business.

Hybrid CMS

What to look for in a flexible CMS framework

Discover why an extensible CMS, publisher-proven tools and strong integrations are crucial for a custom CMS framework that can evolve with your business.

With Brightspot, speed extends to how efficiently the platform works for editors and contributors to develop content—from idea to publish—incredibly quickly to how nimble the system operates on the back end to support an organization’s publishing needs. Our use of the GraphQL query language means queries to the database are designed to retrieve only the results you need, unlike other data-heavy progragmming approaches. Likewise, GraphQL’s self-describing type system enables automation in the case of changes to the underlying content data model—freeing you consider updates, apply them, and move your content business forward with speed.

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. Build and customize workflows to suit your business and team needs, plus easily create and manage user roles, content templates and more.

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.

Brightspot was designed to be API first and connects to over 7,000 of the most common business applications, which help content-focused teams get started immediately with little to no dev support, from translation tools to authentication to analytics. Out-of-the-box solutions for Adobe products include an Adobe Stock integration to leverage the power of images, videos and more directly from the CMS.

A major challenge of Adobe Experience Manager is how complicated it is to set-up and adopt. Developers will need to build everything—from templates to buttons and anything in between. It also has a reputation for being difficult to adopt by anyone who isn’t familiar with HTML. Brightspot is the opposite. It fits seamlessly into virtually any publishing process, enabling rapid content creation across multiple channels without the need for IT. Built with a modern, flexible architecture that enables companies to publish decoupled, headless, or hybrid all from the same environment, Brightspot provides solutions that customers need from digital experience platforms. This flexibility extends to serving as the second CMS for customers dependent on Adobe AEM but needing a solution to future-proof their digital needs.

Unlike Adobe Experience Manager—whose highly intertwined foundation almost always requires heavy IT involvement and sometimes year long (or more) implementation cycles—Brightspot is designed to be up and running in 60 days or less, so your team can start creating content as soon as possible at half the cost.

Brightspot’s CMS is, on average, half the price of Adobe Experience Manager. What’s more, you can reduce maintenance costs by managing your back- and front-end implementations with our Brightspot GO option. And because Brightspot is designed with end users in mind, editorial teams can start publishing their own content on the same day—delivering savings and cost efficiencies from day one.