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Brightspot vs. Adobe Experience Manager
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9 differences between Adobe Experience Manager and Brightspot

Brightspot was designed to fit into your publishing process, freeing content creators to quickly distribute content to every channel without the need for IT. Your development team gets to focus on innovations; creators get to create.

User experience

Brightspot vs. Adobe AEM

Adobe Experience Manager vs. Brightspot: Brightspot company logo
A consistent UI developed from one code base across the platform.
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Acquisitions have led to a disjointed user experience for CMS users.

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.

Publishing approach

Brightspot vs. Adobe AEM

Adobe Experience Manager vs. Brightspot: Brightspot company logo
Flexible. Designed to adapt to your publishing paradigm.
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Rigid. Forces you to work within the Adobe publishing paradigm.

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.

Publishing speed

Brightspot vs. Adobe AEM

Adobe Experience Manager vs. Brightspot: Brightspot company logo
Nontechnical users can easily publish content to various channels.
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Requires considerable effort to publish to emerging channels (e.g., AMP or Echo).

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 has an incredibly fast, sleek front end, and the back end is intuitive, simple and effective. Basically, it helps us publish faster.
Director of Multimedia, National Geographic

Workflows

Brightspot vs. Adobe AEM

Adobe Experience Manager vs. Brightspot: Brightspot company logo
Drag-and-draw workflows empower non-IT admins to create and update workflows.
 adobe experience manager logo
Designed for IT teams to create, develop and manage. Not usable by nontechnical users.

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.

Search capabilities

Brightspot vs. Adobe AEM

Adobe Experience Manager vs. Brightspot: Brightspot company logo
Flat, federated, semantic search delivers any asset to creators.
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Folder structure makes search difficult and time-consuming.

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.

Integrations

Brightspot vs. Adobe AEM

Adobe Experience Manager vs. Brightspot: Brightspot company logo
API-first approach with 50+ out-of-the-box integrations.
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Fewer than a dozen out-of-the box integrations with Adobe AEM.

Brightspot was designed to be API first and includes 50+ out-of-the-box integrations with tools that 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.

June 20, 2022
Brightspot comes ready for business from day one with more than 70 pre-built integrations with the most commonly used third-party software solutions needed by digital publishers.
4 Min Read

Headless and decoupled CMS

Brightspot vs Adobe AEM

Adobe Experience Manager vs. Brightspot: Brightspot company logo
Naturally headless and/or decoupled. Supports live content previews.
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Headless support requires considerable IT effort and does not offer live preview.

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 nee

Time to launch

Brightspot vs. Adobe AEM

Adobe Experience Manager vs. Brightspot: Brightspot company logo
Go from project handshake to launch in 60 days or less.
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9-18 months rollout and implementation timeline

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.

The speed to market and the speed to launch just continues to get better and better with Brightspot, and we in turn, make that a part of our proposition. Where our competition might take months to launch a web presence, our partnership with the Brightspot team and the evolution of the platform allows us bring a new client onboard and launch a new experience in a matter of hours.
Kyle Ragsdale, Chief Marketing Officer, Indigo Golf Partners

Cost

Brightspot vs. Adobe AEM

Adobe Experience Manager vs. Brightspot: Brightspot company logo
Less than half the cost of AEM. Reduce maintenance costs by managing your instance yourself.

Adobe Experience Manager vs Brightspot: Adobe Experience Manager product logo
The most expensive option. License fees, implementation partners and on-staff AEM experts keep costs high.

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.

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