At the end of January, Gartner — a leading research and consulting firm — released its 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) analyst report, which evaluates vendors against comprehensive business and product inclusion criteria. Pimcore, a platform HDMZ has been using since 2019, was newly included in this year’s report, marking a significant milestone for the organization.
Pimcore is a DXP with open-source roots, which provides the tools to manage the many kinds of data that go along with a website — including products, digital assets, and customer information. As long-time users of Pimcore, HDMZ was gratified to see its recognition. Here, we’ll explore the significance of the Gartner Magic Quadrant, the meaning of Pimcore’s placement on it, and how HDMZ uses Pimcore in our own web development work.
Exploring the Magic Quadrant
The Gartner Magic Quadrant is a well-regarded industry bellwether for software. Gartner publishes annual Magic Quadrants in multiple categories, including the one at hand: DXPs, which are the next evolution of content management systems, and offer features that go past management alone. Placement on this list puts a DXP in a group of companies that has high esteem in the industry.
There are a number of requirements for the services and capabilities a platform must provide to be considered for this industry list. A large portion of these come down to the infrastructure a company provides, in comparison to, for instance, a purely open-source project. For example, there are specific mandatory features for cloud capabilities, integration between applications, and support for multiexperience delivery of digital experiences, among other requirements. Because of the rigorous standards of the Gartner Magic Quadrant, it has become a standard of its own: Many IT departments will only consider solutions that are included on the list.
The meaning of Pimcore’s placement
In recent years, Pimcore has been expanding its capabilities, including those that contribute to consideration for the Gartner Magic Quadrant, such as enterprise offerings, hosting, and internal support teams. Additionally, it has had a positive reception among users, and even received a Customers’ Choice recognition in the 2024 Gartner Voice of the Customer for Digital Experience Platforms report. This growth and user response have culminated in Pimcore’s addition to this year’s Magic Quadrant.
Pimcore was placed in the “Niche Players” quadrant, acknowledging that it’s a smaller player with focused intent. This separates it from the larger players in the space, such as Acquia, which has broad, but generalized, offerings. However, Pimcore has a more directed purpose. In fact, the “Pim” in Pimcore comes from “product information manager,” pointing to its original intent to provide the means of governing product information so that it can be used for ecommerce.
How HDMZ uses Pimcore
At HDMZ, we’ve found Pimcore to be an extremely useful platform. Naturally, having started out as a product information manager, it’s a great solution for ecommerce for any company with a robust product lineup. We’ve used it with websites for clients that have hundreds of products to manage, as well as for clients that need to define products and include support documents with them.
Another huge piece of its utility is its extraordinary capability for digital asset management (DAM). Even if the clients choose not to use Pimcore’s DAM as a discrete function, our team employs it when building sites to manage the videos, images, and documents that go into a website. When some clients have thousands of pdfs on their sites, strong document management is a necessity.
We also frequently use Pimcore’s master data management (MDM), which offers a unique approach to data that provides flexibility to work with any kind of data as if it’s a native object. Few modern websites are wholly independent of the outside world, and the multiplicity of connections they utilize are well serviced by Pimcore’s MDM capabilities.
A continued partnership
Gartner’s notable recognition of Pimcore reaffirms the excellent work of our digital solutions team over the last several years. After two years as a Pimcore partner, and even longer as regular users of the platform, the majority of our web developers have been certified in its use — in some cases with multiple different certifications. Additionally, our partnership has given us access to message boards, resources, and dedicated support that further enhances our ability to make the best use of this platform. We’re excited to see the future growth and success of Pimcore, and the new opportunities it presents.
