Case Study
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Migrating hundreds of thousands of pages, re-platforming and extending for the leading composable AI integration platform
From Adobe Experience Manager to Uniform
We are the Adobe Experience Manager to Uniform 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 Uniform
Key advantages
Uniform positions itself as a “composable DXP,” which is enterprise-speak for “it does a bit of everything on top of your actual CMS.” To be fair, the visual workspace is genuinely useful. Marketers get drag-and-drop control, personalization, and A/B testing without pinging developers every five minutes. And if you’re already juggling multiple systems (CMS, commerce, DAM), the orchestration layer can tidy up the chaos.
That said… we’ll be honest, we don’t really build with DXPs like this anymore. Whenever a headless tool starts shouting “DXP” from the homepage, it usually means heavyweight architecture, unnecessary complexity, and a bill only Fortune 500 companies would smile at. If you’re considering it anyway, feel free to get in touch. We’ll happily walk you through better, modern alternatives before you sink a quarter’s budget into something you probably don’t need.
Visual experience composition
Uniform’s visual builder lets marketers piece together pages without pinging developers every 5 minutes. It’s basically a drag-and-drop layer on top of your headless stack.
Multi-source content federation
Uniform pulls content from multiple CMSs, DAMs, and commerce tools into one interface, so you don’t need 10 tabs open to build a single page
Real-time collaboration tools
Teams can edit, plan, and experiment together without overwriting each other’s work. It’s built for big organisations where ten people touching the same page is a weekly occurrence.
Enterprise-grade scalability
Uniform is built to handle traffic spikes and heavy personalisation workloads. It’s overkill for small sites but a safe bet for enterprises terrified of a Black Friday outage.
Omnichannel content management
You can pipe the same content across web, apps, and any other channel marketing dreams up. Useful for brands juggling multiple experiences without wanting to rebuild the same page three times.
Built-in A/B testing
Uniform ships with native testing and targeting, so teams can experiment without gluing together half a dozen tools. It’s marketer-friendly and fast.
Common questions
Adobe Experience Manager to Uniform migration FAQs
Answers to the most common questions about Adobe Experience Manager to Uniform migration
How much does Adobe Experience Manager cost?
AEM is one of the most expensive CMS platforms on the market. Adobe doesn't publish list prices, but AEM Sites licensing typically starts around $60,000 per year on its own, and full AEM as a Cloud Service deployments usually land in the $200,000 to $300,000+ range annually. Implementation adds $500,000 to $1M, and Adobe support contracts add another 15-25% of licensing on top. We've seen companies paying more for their AEM contract than their entire engineering team's salaries. If that ratio sounds familiar, it's time to rethink the stack.
How long does it take to migrate off Adobe Experience Manager?
Plan for 4-8 months minimum for a full migration, depending on how customised your AEM instance is. The biggest bottleneck is usually content extraction. AEM's JCR (Java Content Repository) stores everything in a proprietary node structure that requires custom tooling to export cleanly. If you've built custom OSGi bundles, Sling models, or heavy DAM workflows, those all need to be rebuilt or replaced. Our approach is to run a parallel build, standing up the new stack while the old one stays live, then cutting over once everything is validated. That way editorial teams never lose a day of productivity.
Is AEM worth it for companies not using the full Adobe suite?
Honestly, no. AEM's biggest advantage is its tight integration with Creative Cloud, Analytics, Target, and the rest of the Adobe ecosystem. If you're not using at least three or four of those tools, you're paying a premium for a CMS that's slower to develop on, harder to maintain, and more expensive to staff than modern alternatives. We've worked with companies who adopted AEM because a consultant recommended it, only to discover they were using 15% of its capabilities. A well-architected headless CMS with a Next.js frontend would have cost them a fraction of the price and shipped faster.
What do you need to watch out for when leaving AEM?
Three things catch teams off guard. First, asset migration. AEM's DAM often holds thousands of assets with custom metadata, renditions, and smart crops that don't transfer automatically. Second, URL structures. AEM's dispatcher and Sling resource resolution create URL patterns that need careful redirect mapping to preserve SEO value. Third, Adobe contracts. Many AEM agreements include multi-year lock-ins with steep early termination fees. Check your contract terms before you start planning the migration timeline. We always audit all three of these before scoping any AEM migration project.
How do we migrate away from Uniform?
Uniform is an orchestration layer, not a traditional CMS, so migration means detangling it from the systems it sits on top of. Your actual content likely lives in a separate CMS, DAM, or commerce platform. The Uniform-specific parts, including composition layouts, personalisation rules, and A/B test configurations, need to be rebuilt in your target platform or replaced with dedicated tools. We typically spend 2 to 4 weeks on Uniform-specific teardown, on top of whatever migration the underlying content sources require.
Why do teams leave Uniform?
The price-to-value ratio is the most common complaint. Uniform's enterprise pricing is steep, and teams find they're paying premium rates for an abstraction layer that adds complexity rather than removing it. The learning curve is real. Teams consistently need weeks of onboarding to become productive, and the orchestration model introduces debugging overhead that frustrates both developers and content editors. When the contract comes up for renewal, many teams conclude they'd be better served by a simpler architecture.
Do we actually need a DXP like Uniform?
Probably not. We've worked with teams that adopted Uniform because they were managing content across 4 or 5 different systems and wanted a single editing interface. In practice, most of those teams would have been better off consolidating into one strong headless CMS and using it as the single source of truth. The "composable DXP" pitch sounds good in a sales deck, but it often means you're paying enterprise prices to glue together tools that could be replaced by a cleaner architecture. We're happy to audit your stack and give you an honest answer.
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