# Adobe Experience Manager to Kontent.ai migration > How to migrate from Adobe Experience Manager to Kontent.ai, with a side-by-side comparison and FAQs. --- ## Source: Adobe Experience Manager - **Type:** headless - **Official site:** https://business.adobe.com/products/experience-manager/sites.html - **Pricing:** https://business.adobe.com/products/experience-manager/pricing.html - **Last reviewed:** 2026-07-28 ## Key advantages AEM is the kind of platform you only choose if you’re a Fortune 500 company or you enjoy voluntary suffering. I’m not an Adobe fan. It’s bloated, overpriced, and built to lock you into their ecosystem. But fine, here are the positives. The Adobe integration is the real draw. If your organisation already lives inside Creative Cloud, Analytics, and Target, AEM becomes a giant DXP monolith that handles assets, personalisation, segmentation, and multi-channel delivery from one place. The DAM is genuinely strong, now split into Assets Prime and Assets Ultimate tiers, and it scales to enormous traffic when you throw infrastructure at it. If you’re not operating at scale, you’ll spend absurd money for problems a clean Sanity + modern composable stack solves better and cheaper. If you are considering AEM or escaping it, get in touch. We’ll help you choose something that won’t haunt your ops team for the next decade. ### Integration with Adobe tools AEM connects with Creative Cloud, Analytics, and Target, letting teams move assets, data, and personalisation logic across tools without friction ### Powerful digital asset management The DAM is genuinely powerful. It has AI tagging, smart cropping, versioning, and bulk optimisation for massive media libraries. ### Consistent multi-channel delivery AEM can push content to web, mobile apps, email, and more from one central source. Ideal for enterprises that need consistent messaging across every customer touchpoint. ### Flexible architecture Runs headful, headless, or hybrid. Teams can serve Content Fragments over GraphQL, author on a live frontend with the Universal Editor, or ship through Edge Delivery Services, then mix that with legacy setups. Adaptable for companies with complicated stacks. ### Scalable enterprise-level operations AEM is designed to handle huge traffic, global teams, and heavy workflows. It scales reliably when backed by proper infrastructure and Adobe’s cloud. ### Intuitive user interface For an enterprise platform, the UI is relatively approachable, helping large content teams manage complex workflows without needing to touch code. ## 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. ## Target: Kontent.ai - **Type:** headless - **Official site:** https://kontent.ai - **Pricing:** https://kontent.ai/pricing - **Last reviewed:** 2026-08-03 ## Key advantages Calling your CMS "Kontent dot ai" is a brilliant way to convince people you’ve built an AI-powered future. And to be fair, the platform does have a clean editor, strong workflow tools, and a respectable multi-channel setup. It's perfect for the kind of company that has more infosec members than it does have devs. But calling yourself an AI platform doesn’t mean you’re built like one. Real AI-driven CMS platforms start at the foundation with structured content, flexible modeling, real-time indexing, and an architecture that doesn’t panic the moment you try something complex. Sanity doesn’t even market itself as "AI-first," but it’s been ahead of the curve for years. They shipped an embedding index before "AI CMS" was a pitch deck buzzword. We even built one of the first AI search tools on top of it. So yes, Kontent.ai is great. If you want a polished interface and enterprise workflows, go for it. And if you’re dead-set on building your website there, talk to us first. We’ll walk you through it and maybe even find a better way before you spend six months discovering the limits yourself. ### Intuitive content management You shouldn’t need a week of onboarding to publish a paragraph. Kontent.ai nails this with a clean interface that doesn’t punish you for being a marketer instead of a developer. ### Flexible content modeling Build content the way your brain works. Modular, structured, reusable. No dev intervention every time marketing decides "we need one more field." ### Strong API-first architecture The APIs are predictable, well-documented, and don’t require wild workarounds. Everything connects the way it should and developers stay happy too. ### Tech stack integration React, Vue, Angular, or whatever framework you’re obsessed with this week, Kontent.ai plays nice with all of them and keeps deployments smooth. ### Advanced image transformations You can resize, crop, and optimize visuals without leaving the CMS. Think of it as an in-house designer that doesn’t complain about aspect ratios. ### Real-time collaboration Writers, editors, and developers can work together without stepping on each other’s commits. Instant updates, fewer Slack messages, and zero "who overwrote my draft?" moments. ## Key pain points We've always been known to talk trash about WordPress, Framer and especially Prismic. It's fun and theraputic but truth be told Kontent.ai deserves it's fair share of aggro. Pricing is hidden behind "book a demo" and their vague "price calculator". Basic features require developer elbow grease, and replacing a single image gives you a brand-new URL like it’s 2009. At scale, the API rate limits and bare-bones taxonomy start to feel less "enterprise" and more "please slow down, you’re scaring the CMS." If you’re absolutely set on using Kontent.ai, give us a shout. We’ll try to make it work… or find you something that won’t make your content team cry into their spreadsheets. ### Hidden pricing model Kontent.ai loves a "contact sales" button. Great if you're an enterprise with a procurement department, not so great if you're just trying to budget a project. Until you get a quote, you’re basically guessing. ### Complex initial setup requirements The platform is polished, but the setup isn’t plug-and-play. Getting projects wired correctly, especially when it comes to multi-channel setup, usually requires a developer, documentation, and a quiet room to scream into. ### Missing out-of-box preview system Unlike most modern CMS platforms, there's no native live preview. You have to build a custom preview pipeline, which adds effort, cost, and another item to the dev team’s already depressing backlog. ### Asset replacement URL issues Swap an image or file, and Kontent.ai generates a new URL, which means link rot and cleanup duties no one asked for. Publishing teams feel this pain the fastest. ### API rate limiting constraints API-first is great until you hit the rate limit. 100 requests per second is fine for small sites, but high-traffic apps need careful caching or extra infrastructure to avoid bottlenecks ### Limited Management API coverage The Management API doesn’t expose every UI action, so automation hits a ceiling. Some tasks still require clicking through the interface, which defeats half the point of going headless. ## Frequently asked questions ### 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. ### What happens to image URLs when you replace assets in Kontent.ai? This is a genuine pain point. Every time you replace an image or file in Kontent.ai, the platform generates a completely new URL. That means any hardcoded references, cached versions, or external links to the old asset break instantly. For content teams publishing at scale, this creates a maintenance burden. You need to update every place the old URL was referenced, or accept broken images. Most CMS platforms handle asset replacement by keeping the same URL and invalidating the cache. Kontent.ai's approach feels like an oversight that hasn't been fixed. If you're managing hundreds of assets, this adds real friction to daily editorial work. ### How much does Kontent.ai cost? Kontent.ai hides pricing behind a "book a demo" wall, which is never a good sign for budget planning. Based on what we've seen across client engagements, the Developer plan is free but extremely limited (1 user, 2 languages). The Scale plan starts around $1,249/month (billed annually), and Enterprise pricing goes higher depending on API usage, content items, and seats. The real cost is in implementation. Kontent.ai requires upfront developer time to set up content models, build a custom preview pipeline (there's no native live preview), and configure workflows. Budget 4-8 weeks of developer time for initial setup on top of the subscription cost. ### Is Kontent.ai worth it compared to other enterprise headless CMS platforms? Kontent.ai does enterprise content workflows well. The role-based permissions, multi-step approvals, and content scheduling are polished. The API is predictable and well-documented. Where it falls short is flexibility. The content modelling tools are competent but not as powerful as Sanity's, and the lack of a native preview system means your team needs to build and maintain custom preview infrastructure. At similar price points, Contentful offers a larger ecosystem and Sanity offers deeper customisation. We'd recommend Kontent.ai primarily for teams already invested in the Kentico ecosystem or organisations where workflow governance is the top priority over developer experience.