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View Case StudyTray.ai
Migrating hundreds of thousands of pages, re-platforming and extending for the leading composable AI integration platform

From Contentful to Adobe Experience Manager
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Key pain points
Contentful is one of those platforms where the bill can catch you off guard. The free tier caps you at 25 content types and 100K API calls, and a single marketing site can blow past both without warning. The next step up is $300 a month, and enterprise pricing often lands in the $50K to $100K+ a year range.
Users on Reddit regularly flag the same thing: tier jumps are forced by hitting one limit, not by needing the bigger feature set. Content model caps alone can push you into a higher plan you don't otherwise need.
The other issue is that Contentful has strong opinions about how content should be modelled, and those opinions aren't always documented. Projects built without that knowledge tend to accumulate performance problems and awkward workarounds. Before writing Contentful off, speak to us, a lot of the pain we see is implementation, not platform.

Pricing climbs fast
Contentful isn't a cheap CMS. Once you pass the free tier's content type or API call limit, you're on the $300/month Lite plan, and enterprise pricing often starts at $50K+ a year.

Complex for non-technical users
Marketers and editors may need a small learning curve before they feel at home. It’s powerful but not always plug-and-play.

Integration dependency
A lot of magic happens through third-party tools. Great for flexibility, but it does mean extra setup instead of getting everything out-of-the-box.

Limited native features
Contentful keeps the core CMS clean and minimal, but that also means more building and configuring to get advanced functionality.

Learning curve for new teams
If your team is moving from a traditional CMS, expect some onboarding time. Structured content is amazing but new for many.

Requires careful management
Because it’s so flexible, projects need good governance. Without it, content models can get messy and harder to maintain over time.
Key advantages
AEM is the kind of platform you only choose if you’re a Fortune 500 company or enjoy voluntarily suffering. I hate anything Adobe builds. It’s bloated, overpriced, and aggressively designed to lock you into their ecosystem. But fine, here are the positives: the Adobe integration is unmatched. If your entire organisation already lives inside Creative Cloud, Analytics, and Target, AEM becomes this giant DXP monolith that handles assets, personalization, segmentation, and multi-channel delivery without breaking a sweat. The DAM is legitimately powerful, and it scales like a tank.
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
Robust 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
Supports both classic and headless approaches, letting teams mix legacy setups with modern frontends. It’s adaptable enough 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.
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