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From Contentful to Adobe Experience Manager

We are the Contentful to Adobe Experience Manager migration experts

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The process

How we migrate from Contentful to Adobe Experience Manager

  1. 01

    Access and gating audit

    First we check the existing Contentful and see whether the data is clean enough to move straight over to Adobe Experience Manager, and plan around any auth walls or bot protection in the way.

  2. 02

    Rendering assessment and extraction

    Then we work out how Contentful renders its pages and pull the content out, even without CMS access.

  3. 03

    AI-assisted sanitization

    Everything extracted runs through our sanitization pipeline, which flags slop, normalizes structure, and leaves us clean content to work with.

  4. 04

    Content-model design with the client

    Before anything moves, we agree the Adobe Experience Manager content model with you, shaped around how your editors actually work.

  5. 05

    Transform and soft-migrate

    We transform the content to the agreed schema and run a full dry run, so mappings and edge cases prove out before production.

  6. 06

    Execute the real migration

    Once the dry run is clean, everything moves into Adobe Experience Manager in one controlled cutover.

  7. 07

    Redirect mapping and throttled sitemap submission

    Every old URL gets mapped to its new home with the right redirect, so rankings and link equity survive the move.

  8. 08

    Agentic-browser QA

    Finally, automated browsers sweep the new site for data issues, design regressions, and missing SEO signals.

  9. Ready when you are. We'll bring the moving boxes.Start my migration


Challenges with Contentful

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.

The pattern teams keep hitting is the same: the jump is forced by one limit, not by needing the bigger feature set. The content type cap alone can push you onto 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.

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Potentially high costs

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

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

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

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

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 - Contentful

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.



Benefits of Adobe Experience Manager

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.

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Integration with Adobe tools

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

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

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

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

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.

Dark UI design application showing a cursor selecting an element labeled 'Jenny' and a large blank frame.

Intuitive user interface

For an enterprise platform, the UI is relatively approachable, helping large content teams manage complex workflows without needing to touch code.





Common questions

Contentful to Adobe Experience Manager migration FAQs

Answers to the most common questions about Contentful to Adobe Experience Manager migration

Contentful has a Free tier with 10 users, 100K API calls per month, 25 content types, and 10,000 records. The Lite plan is $300/month for 20 users, 1M API calls, and 100GB CDN bandwidth. Enterprise is custom pricing with unlimited API calls and an uptime SLA of up to 99.99%. We've seen teams hit the free tier's API ceiling or content type cap fast, and the jump to Lite is often forced by a single limit rather than a feature need.


Not sold on moving? Sometimes the platform is fine and the build is the problem. We also fix Contentful sites in place.

Contentful development agency


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