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From Adobe Experience Manager to Directus
We are the Adobe Experience Manager to Directus migration experts
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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 Directus
Key advantages
Directus instantly wins points with us because, well… it has a rabbit for a logo. But beyond that, it's genuinely a solid database-first CMS. If you like the idea of a CMS that sits directly on top of your SQL database without any abstractions, Directus feels incredibly natural.
You can self-host it, tweak it endlessly, and treat your schema exactly the way you want. Editors get a no-code admin UI that feels polished, developers get REST and GraphQL out of the box, and teams get workflows, versioning, automations, and proper permission controls. It's flexible, fast, and a great fit if your content is really just structured data waiting for a smarter interface. If your project revolves around relational data and you want total control from database to API, Directus is one of the cleanest ways to build it.
Intuitive non-technical interface
Editors get a clean, no-code admin panel that feels more like a productivity tool than a CMS. Non-technical teams can handle content updates without pinging developers every five minutes.
Database-agnostic SQL integration
Directus plugs straight into your SQL database and turns it into an API instantly. If your data lives in Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, or SQLite, it just works.
Field-level permission controls
You can lock down every field, table, and action with granular role-based permissions. Perfect for teams that care about security and don't want interns accidentally deleting production data.
Built-in REST/GraphQL support
Your entire database is instantly exposed as both REST and GraphQL endpoints. Just plug into your frontend and start shipping.
Extensive UI customization
Directus lets you tweak the interface, add custom views, tailor layouts, and build the exact editing experience your team needs. It feels like a CMS you can actually shape instead of fight.
Real-time collaborative editing
Multiple contributors can work in the Studio at the same time without stepping on each other's toes. Collaborative editing shipped in February 2026, so drafts stay clean and the whole workflow feels built for modern teams, not 2010 intranets.
AI Assistant with image and PDF support
The built-in AI Assistant can process images and PDFs as well as text, and it works across OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Gemini. It's a genuinely useful addition rather than a feature-list checkbox.
Common questions
Adobe Experience Manager to Directus migration FAQs
Answers to the most common questions about Adobe Experience Manager to Directus migration
How much does Adobe Experience Manager cost?
AEM is one of the most expensive CMS platforms going. Adobe publishes no list prices, so everything is a custom enterprise quote. From contracts we've seen, AEM Sites licensing tends to start around $60,000 per year on its own, and a full AEM as a Cloud Service deployment usually lands in the six figures, often $200,000 or more annually once you factor in usage. Implementation runs another $100,000 to $500,000+, and Adobe support contracts add 15-25% of licensing on top. We've watched companies pay more for their AEM contract than for their entire engineering team's salaries. If that ratio sounds familiar, it's time to rethink the stack.
Can I migrate from AEM to Sanity?
Yes, and it's one of the more common moves we handle. The work is real but tractable. For an enterprise instance, plan for a few weeks to a few months depending on how customised AEM is. The biggest bottleneck is content extraction. AEM's JCR (Java Content Repository) stores everything in a proprietary node structure that needs custom tooling to export cleanly. Custom OSGi bundles, Sling models, and heavy DAM workflows all get rebuilt or replaced, usually with something far simpler. We run a parallel build, standing up Sanity and a modern frontend while AEM stays live, then cut over once content and redirects are validated. Editorial teams keep working throughout.
What are AEM's main limitations?
Cost is the headline, but it isn't the only one. Development is slow because nearly everything routes through Java, OSGi, and Sling, so even small changes need a dedicated dev. Performance degrades the moment you customise the platform. The author UI is dense, and routine content work often still depends on engineers. You're also tied to Adobe-certified partners for setup and upkeep, and contracts tend to carry multi-year lock-ins. The headless side (Content Fragments served over GraphQL, plus the Universal Editor) works, but it's bolted onto a DXP monolith rather than built lean from the start.
Is AEM overkill for most sites?
For most sites, yes. AEM earns its keep when an organisation already lives inside Creative Cloud, Analytics, and Target and needs governance across hundreds of properties. If you're not using several of those Adobe tools, you're paying enterprise rates for a CMS that's slower to build on and more expensive to staff than the alternatives. We've met teams who adopted AEM on a consultant's recommendation, then found they used maybe 15% of it. A Sanity backend with a Next.js frontend would have cost a fraction and shipped faster. Three things to watch if you do leave. DAM assets with custom metadata and renditions don't transfer automatically. Dispatcher and Sling URL patterns need careful redirect mapping to hold SEO value. Contract lock-ins can carry steep early-termination fees.
How do we migrate content out of Directus?
Directus sits directly on your SQL database, which is both a blessing and a curse during migration. The blessing is that your content is in standard PostgreSQL, MySQL, or SQLite tables, so extraction is as simple as SQL queries. The curse is that Directus stores relational data and file references in its own conventions, so you need to untangle junction tables and re-map asset URLs. We write custom migration scripts for each project. A typical Directus migration with 50 to 100 content types takes 3 to 5 weeks.
Why do teams move away from Directus?
The two biggest triggers we see right now are licensing uncertainty and pricing sticker shock. Directus moved to the Monospace Sustainable Core License (MSCL) with v12 in May 2026, replacing the old BSL. Organisations under $5M revenue and 50 employees get a free Innovation Grant, but even above those thresholds the MSCL still permits free use of the Core tier — so larger orgs aren't categorically forced onto paid plans, though many opt into the cloud or a commercial self-hosted license for the production features sitting outside Core, and the community is noticeably split, with some teams forking old versions or migrating off entirely. On the cloud side, the old unlimited tier is gone; the Professional plan is $99/month and caps you at 5 users, 75K database entries, and 250K API requests. Growth past those limits means a jump straight to custom Enterprise pricing. On the development side, any custom interface work still requires Vue.js, which creates friction for React-focused teams. Breaking changes between updates also erode trust over time. Teams that started with Directus for its open-source appeal often outgrow it when they need predictable pricing and cleaner editorial workflows.
Can we keep our existing database when migrating from Directus?
You can keep your database infrastructure, but you'll likely restructure the schema. Directus creates its own system tables (directus_users, directus_permissions, directus_files, etc.) alongside your content tables. During migration, we extract the content tables, transform the data to fit your new CMS's content model, and leave the Directus system tables behind. If you're moving to a headless CMS like Sanity, the data moves from SQL rows to structured JSON documents, which typically results in a cleaner content model.
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