AEM vs Drupal: What are the differences?

Introduction

Here, we will provide the key differences between AEM (Adobe Experience Manager) and Drupal, two popular content management systems.

1. Integration with Adobe Creative Cloud: AEM offers seamless integration with Adobe Creative Cloud, allowing designers to use their preferred tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. This integration enables a smooth workflow between design and content creation, resulting in efficient collaboration and faster content publishing. On the other hand, Drupal does not have built-in integration with Adobe Creative Cloud, which can make the design-to-content process more cumbersome.

2. Built-in Digital Asset Management (DAM): AEM comes with a robust Digital Asset Management system out of the box. It provides advanced features for organizing, searching, and managing digital assets like images, videos, and documents. This functionality allows users to easily find and reuse assets across multiple websites and campaigns. Drupal, on the contrary, does not have native DAM capabilities, requiring additional plugins or custom development to achieve similar asset management functionalities.

3. Scalability and Performance: AEM is designed to handle large-scale enterprise deployments with high traffic volumes. It utilizes a scalable architecture that allows for efficient handling of concurrent user requests, ensuring optimal performance even under heavy load. Drupal, while being suitable for smaller deployments, may face limitations in handling high traffic volumes and may require additional optimizations to achieve comparable performance at scale.

4. Commercial Support and Vendor Lock-in: AEM is a commercial product developed and supported by Adobe. As a result, it offers comprehensive commercial support and maintenance services, including regular patches, updates, and access to dedicated support teams. On the other hand, Drupal is an open-source platform, with support primarily provided by the community. While the Drupal community is vast and active, the lack of official commercial support can be a concern for organizations with critical websites that require immediate assistance.

5. Content Authoring Experience: AEM provides a user-friendly authoring interface that simplifies content creation and management. Its intuitive drag-and-drop functionality, customizable templates, and WYSIWYG editing make it easy for non-technical users to create and publish content. Drupal, while offering similar capabilities, may require additional configuration or custom development to achieve the same level of user-friendly authoring experience.

6. Multilingual and Internationalization Support: AEM includes robust multilingual and internationalization support. It allows for easy translation of content, seamless management of localized websites, and automatic handling of language-specific URLs. Drupal, while having multilingual features, may require additional modules or customization to achieve the same level of internationalization support.

In Summary, AEM offers seamless integration with Adobe Creative Cloud, built-in Digital Asset Management, scalability, commercial support, user-friendly authoring experience, and robust multilingual support. Drupal, on the other hand, may require additional development or plugins to achieve similar functionalities in these areas.