From Uniform to Magnolia

We are the Uniform to Magnolia migration experts

Challenges with Uniform

Key pain points

Uniform’s biggest problem is the price of admission. And once you're in, good luck breezing through the learning curve. Teams consistently need workshops, onboarding sessions, and a few existential crises to get comfortable with its orchestration layer.

Because it’s still a relatively young DXP, the ecosystem is thin. You won’t find the deep plugin libraries or community support you get with more established headless tools. Content teams also struggle with their mental model. Especially since the abstraction adds a layer of debugging that feels like fighting a boss battle before publishing a single page, and unless you’re on their higher tiers, expect features and limits that remind you this thing is very much built for enterprises… not anyone trying to stay under budget this decade.

High enterprise pricing barrier

Uniform sits behind an aggressively enterprise paywall, making even basic usage expensive unless you're already swimming in Fortune-500 budgets.

Complex learning curve

Its whole “experience orchestration” model takes time to wrap your head around. Your team won’t be productive on day one, or even week one.

Extensive training requirements

Marketers and developers both need onboarding and workflow retraining, which slows adoption and inflates your implementation cost.

Enterprise-tier feature limitations

A surprising number of essential features only unlock once you upgrade, which is frustrating when the base plan is already pricey.

Preview functionality gaps

Content creators won’t love the limited, indirect preview setup. It’s nowhere near as smooth as modern CMSes with first-class real-time preview.

A light gray gear-like shape with a dark center, surrounded by two concentric circles, on a dark grid background.

Integration complexity overhead

Uniform’s abstraction layer adds mental overhead and troubleshooting work when things break, especially if you're stitching together several backend systems.

Benefits of Magnolia

Key advantages

Magnolia shines if you’re the kind of organisation that genuinely needs the full DXP kitchen sink. It packs personalisation, workflows, multi-site orchestration, multilingual publishing, DAM, marketing automation hooks, and every enterprise acronym you can think of. If your teams run complex global content operations with strict governance, Magnolia’s mature permission system, stability, and long-standing enterprise reputation make it a safe, compliant option.

To be transparent, we don’t actually prefer or build with Magnolia (or any of the DXP-flavoured headless CMSs). They try to do everything, and like most jack-of-all-trades platforms, they don’t excel at the things modern teams actually need that is speed, flexibility, clean workflows, and sane pricing. We’d happily point you toward modern alternatives like Sanity that give you 10× the agility without the enterprise bloat.

A grid with striped blocks forming a square path around a central warning sign, with dashed arrows indicating clockwise movement.

Java-based enterprise integration

Built on Java, Magnolia plugs neatly into large enterprise stacks that already rely on Java systems and legacy infrastructure. If your organisation lives and breathes JVM, Magnolia won’t fight your architecture.

Secure, scalable architecture

Magnolia’s core is engineered for high-security, high-traffic environments, with strong access control, clustering, and enterprise-grade stability. It’s built to survive heavy editorial activity and large content delivery demands.

Grayscale UI wireframe showing a left sidebar with icons and a right content panel with forms and a progress bar.

Real-time page templating

Editors can adjust components and layouts and immediately preview results, making large enterprise content operations faster and less error-prone.

Editable component previews

Magnolia’s component-level previewing gives editors clarity on how complex pages come together, reducing back-and-forth with developers and keeping multi-team workflows sane.

Multi-site management tools

Designed for global brands, Magnolia supports multiple sites, languages, and regional variations under one roof.

Advanced workflow automation

From multi-step approvals to compliance-driven publishing flows, Magnolia handles heavyweight governance. This is the stuff big enterprises actually need when 20 departments want access but only 2 should publish.