For more than a decade, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) has been the default choice for enterprise organisations looking to manage content at scale.
It offered control, integration, and the reassurance of a single, powerful platform sitting at the heart of the digital experience stack. But the environment for which it was built no longer exists.
Today’s digital teams are under pressure to move faster, do more with less, and deliver seamless experiences across an increasingly complex set of channels. Technology is expected to enable that speed, not restrict it. This is where many organisations are starting to question AEM. While it still delivers power, it often does so at a cost; a financial, operational, and strategic cost that is becoming harder to justify.
The cost of control
One of the most consistent themes across user reviews on software marketplace platforms like G2 and Software Advice is the total cost of ownership associated with AEM. And crucially, this goes far beyond licensing. AEM sits at the premium end of the CMS and DXP market, but the licence fee is only the entry point. The real cost emerges over time, through implementation, infrastructure, and the ongoing resources required to keep the platform running effectively.
Organisations quickly find themselves reliant on specialist partners to implement and extend the platform, alongside dedicated AEM developers to manage even relatively small changes. Infrastructure costs, particularly for those running legacy or hybrid environments, add another layer of expense.
User feedback reinforces this picture. Reviewers frequently cite:
- The platform’s high costs relative to alternatives
- The need for ongoing specialist support to manage and extend it
- That while AEM is powerful, the investment required to realise that value is significant, particularly for organisations without large, dedicated teams.
This is why many leaders begin to question whether they’re still investing in a CMS or simply sustaining an ageing ecosystem.
When complexity becomes a constraint
AEM was designed for enterprise-scale control. It allowed organisations to standardise content, workflows, and experiences at scale. The downside is that strength often translates into complexity that affects both technical and non-technical teams.
For developers, the platform demands deep specialisation. For content teams, it introduces friction into what should be simple workflows. What should be quick (launching a page, updating content, or testing a campaign) often becomes a multi-step process involving multiple teams. Over time, customisations made to meet immediate needs begin to introduce technical debt, making the platform harder to manage and evolve.
This experience is echoed by users who frequently cite a steep learning curve and a complex implementation process, and the view that even experienced teams require time to become fully effective on the platform.
This is where the experience has shifted, as what once felt powerful now feels restrictive.
The real impact: slower time-to-market
Cost and complexity are challenges in their own right, but their impact is also felt in speed.
Modern marketing teams need to operate in short cycles, launching, testing, and refining campaigns continuously. With AEM, even relatively small changes often require input from developers.
Marketing teams become dependent on engineering backlogs. Content updates are delayed. Opportunities to experiment are missed. Put simply, your marketing team shouldn’t need engineering tickets to move fast, yet for many organisations running AEM, that’s the reality.
The knock-on effect can be significant. Stretched timelines, slower response to market, and reduced ability to act on performance data in real time. What should be a continuous optimisation loop becomes a stop-start process governed by technical constraints. The net result is that all these things affect outcomes. Slower execution means businesses have fewer opportunities to test and learn, experience reduced campaign effectiveness, and ultimately, lose competitive advantage.
In a landscape where speed is directly linked to growth, even small delays add up and, over time, become a structural barrier to innovation.
The maintenance burden no one talks about
Beyond implementation and day-to-day use, AEM introduces a longer-term operational challenge that is often underestimated: maintenance.
Keeping the platform stable, secure, and up to date requires ongoing investment and, with AEM, it’s rarely straightforward.
Many organisations find themselves dealing with:
- Complex, time-consuming upgrades that are difficult to prioritise
- Falling behind on versions, increasing risk and limiting their access to new features
- Growing technical debt driven by years of customisation
- Inconsistent environments that are hard to manage and align
- Ongoing reliance on scarce and expensive AEM developers
Over time, these issues compound. The platform becomes harder to change, slower to evolve, and more expensive to maintain. At a certain point, organisations realise something critical: they no longer control their roadmap… their platform does.
Why replatforming is back on the agenda
Against this backdrop, replatforming is no longer seen as a last resort. Increasingly, it’s a strategic move to regain control, reduce cost, and unlock speed.
Modern CMS and DXP platforms are built differently. They prioritise flexibility, usability, and integration, enabling organisations to move faster without sacrificing capability.
The benefits of modern CMS and DXP platforms are tangible and immediate. Businesses choosing to replatform can enjoy:
- Lower total cost of ownership, with reduced licensing, infrastructure, and support costs
- Less reliance on niche, high-cost specialists, making teams easier to build and scale
- Faster deployment cycles, enabling quicker launches and continuous iteration
- Greater autonomy for marketing teams, reducing dependency on development resources
- API-first, composable architectures that support flexibility and future growth
- Improved user experiences for both developers and content teams
Platforms such as Contentful, Optimizely and Storyblok are designed to fit into modern ecosystems, not control them. They allow organisations to build modular, adaptable technology stacks that evolve alongside their business. Replatforming isn’t just a technical upgrade; it provides a shift in how digital teams operate.
A different kind of foundation
AEM made sense when digital ecosystems were centralised, controlled, and slower-moving.
But today’s environment demands something different: speed, flexibility, and efficiency at every level.
Modern platforms support this by design. They reduce friction between teams, accelerate time-to-market, and enable organisations to respond to change in real time. For many businesses, that shift is no longer optional.
The key takeaway
Adobe Experience Manager may have made sense to your business a decade ago, but today, it could be a costly barrier to speed, innovation, and growth.
What next?
If your organisation is starting to feel the weight of AEM, whether through cost, complexity, or a lack of agility, it may be time to reconsider your platform strategy.
Replatforming doesn’t have to be disruptive. With the right approach, it can be a controlled, phased transition that delivers both immediate and long-term value.
Book a replatforming consultation to explore what a more agile, cost-effective, and future-ready CMS could look like for your business.
Thinking about moving away from AEM?
Common questions we hear from enterprise teams:
- Is AEM still worth the cost?
Many organisations find that the total cost of ownership, which includes licensing, developers, and maintenance, is difficult to justify compared to modern CMS platforms. - What are the main alternatives to AEM?
Platforms like Contentful, Optimizely and Storyblok offer more flexible, composable architectures with faster deployment and lower operational overheads. - How long does AEM replatforming take?
Most enterprise CMS migration projects take between 6-9 months, often delivered in phases to reduce risk. - Will we lose functionality if we move?
In most cases, no. Modern CMS and DXP platforms replicate core Adobe Experience Manager capabilities while improving speed, usability, and integration flexibility. - Why are companies replatforming now?
To reduce costs, increase agility, and enable marketing teams to move faster without relying on developer bottlenecks.
