From Adobe Experience Manager to Contentful

We are the Adobe Experience Manager to Contentful 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 Contentful

Key advantages

With over 42.9% market share and more than 14,000 companies using it, Contentful is one of the most popular headless CMS choices among our customers. And why not?

It's built for structured freedom, which lets you create once and reuse forever from its huge repository. Meaning, no more copy-paste déjà vu or hunting through a maze of components. It's also one of the only CMS with first-party support for A/B testing and personalization. The plugin ecosystem is vast, and it keeps developers happy and content teams nimble with SEO, internationalisation, validation, and more.

And for the editors who like to see it as they build it, the live side-by-side preview makes every change visible in real time.

API-first design

Contentful was built for APIs from day one, which means your content plugs cleanly into apps, websites, and mobile.

Developer-friendly flexibility

Schemas, content models, and references can be tuned however you like. If your stack is anything beyond “cookie-cutter,” Contentful won’t get in your way.

User-friendly interface

Editors enjoy using it. Clean UI, quick search, structured fields, and no “where does this go again?” confusion.

Extensive integration capabilities

Plug in analytics, eCommerce, automation, and translation. Contentful plays nicely with almost anything. And if something isn’t supported yet, you can wire it up yourself without hacking the platform apart.

High scalability

From a tiny blog to a fire-hose of global traffic, Contentful easily scales. You can completely avoid surprise outages, or “please hold while the CMS catches up.”

Cloud-based architecture

You don't have to install, patch, or maintain anything. It’s fast, globally distributed, and always up to date. Your content team can ship from anywhere without a DevOps babysitter.