Which is the best Enterprise CMS?

I’m am working on a project currently that is leveraging an Enterprise CMS. At the outset, I did an analysis of existing CMS systems to select the one that best fit our clients needs. That turned out to be Magnolia (www.magnolia-cms.com).

However, another one of our clients is using the Alfresco CMS for their business. I reviewed it over the weekend and was impressed by the slick and intuitive user interface. The creators of Alfresco come from Documentum and Interwoven.

Which is better? It’s hard to tell at this point. While I am not terribly impressed with the way Magnolia handles the management of web content and content entry; defining content entry dialogs within the JCR repository, versus making this more code driven seems like a drawback for developers (however there are way to programmatically generate these items via the Magnolia Blossom Module).

Alfresco looks good on the surface, but I haven’t actually tried to build out a system yet with this product. My initial evaluation indicates a good framework to build upon (Java/Spring/JSF) and a very clean user interface.

While I can’t make a recommendation at the moment, I would suggest checking out these options if you are looking to implement an Enterprise CMS solution. MAgnolia is coming out with a 5.0 version soon, so perhaps that will push it over the top.