From Adobe Experience Manager to ButterCMS

We are the Adobe Experience Manager to ButterCMS migration experts

Challenges with Adobe Experience Manager

Key pain points

AEM’s biggest flaw is simple: everything about it is expensive. The license, the hosting, the maintenance, the consultants, the upgrades, and the people required to even use it. The learning curve is a cliff, implementation cycles move at glacial speed, and the UI feels like punishment for asking to edit content. Performance tanks the moment you customise anything, and collaboration is basically “email the PDF and pray.” If you ever see the word specialised in an AEM context, just assume the invoice comes with an extra zero.

It’s the definition of a heavyweight DXP built for organisations with more bureaucracy than sense. For everyone else, it becomes a slow-moving, over-engineered system that requires Adobe-certified babysitters just to stay alive. If you’re considering scrapping it for something faster, saner, and built this decade, we can help you migrate without dragging the AEM baggage along for the ride.

High complexity and cost

AEM is one of the most expensive CMS/DEXP platforms on the market, with licensing, hosting, and maintenance costs that only make sense for very large enterprises.

Steep learning curve

The platform is dense and requires specialised training just to perform routine tasks. Most teams can’t operate it without dedicated experts.

Prolonged implementation periods

Even simple projects take months. Rollouts, upgrades, and workflow changes move slowly and require careful planning to avoid breaking things.

Challenging navigation of capabilities

AEM packs in a huge feature set, but finding and configuring what you actually need can feel like wading through molasses.

Necessary reliance on Adobe partners

You’re essentially forced into using Adobe-certified agencies or consultants for setup, maintenance, and troubleshooting and they don’t come cheap.

Not ideal for smaller companies

The cost, complexity, and operational overhead make AEM a poor fit for startups or mid-sized teams. Most will drown in it long before they benefit from it.

Benefits of ButterCMS

Key advantages

ButterCMS is one of those headless CMS platforms that genuinely nails the onboarding experience. We've seen content teams go from zero to confidently building pages and blog posts within a few hours, which is rare in the headless world. The dashboard is clean, the API explorer is thoughtfully designed, and the starter templates for popular frameworks mean developers aren't starting from scratch every time.

From an agency perspective, the standout quality is how little hand-holding editors need after launch. The interface is intuitive enough that marketers can create pages, manage blog content, and handle SEO metadata without constantly pinging the dev team. The built-in blog engine is a genuine differentiator. Most headless CMS platforms treat blogging as an afterthought, but ButterCMS was originally built around it, and it shows in the quality of the authoring experience.

The API performance is consistently fast, and the SDK support across languages like JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and PHP is solid. Their customer support team is also notably responsive and genuinely receptive to feature requests, which is something we don't often see from CMS vendors. For small-to-mid-sized projects where you need a reliable content API without overcomplicating things, ButterCMS delivers.

We'd particularly recommend it for teams that need a polished blog alongside structured page content, and who value simplicity over infinite extensibility. It's a CMS that knows what it is and does that thing well.

Exceptionally easy onboarding

Content teams can be productive within hours, not days. The dashboard is clean and the learning curve is one of the gentlest we've seen in headless CMS land.

Built-in blog engine

Unlike most headless platforms where you have to model blog content from scratch, ButterCMS ships with a purpose-built blog engine that includes categories, tags, authors, and SEO fields out of the box.

Fast and reliable content API

The read API is consistently quick with global CDN delivery. For content-heavy sites, the performance is solid and predictable.

No seat limits on any plan

Every plan includes unlimited users, which is genuinely unusual in this space. You won't get punished for growing your content team.

Responsive customer support

Their support team is quick to respond and genuinely open to feature requests. We've seen roadmap items added based on customer feedback, which builds real trust.

Strong SDK and framework coverage

Official SDKs for JavaScript, Python, Ruby, PHP, and more, plus starter projects for React, Next.js, Vue, Angular, and other frameworks that actually work out of the box.