From Joomla to Adobe Experience Manager

We are the Joomla to Adobe Experience Manager migration experts

Challenges with Joomla

Key pain points

Joomla sits in the same category as WordPress, except somehow even harder to explain to anyone under 40. If your C-suite is filled with boomers who think “PHP developer” is still a personality type, Joomla will make them feel right at home. You might also have a vested interest in making your hosting provider very rich, because nothing about this platform is light, modern, or low-maintenance.

The dev experience still feels trapped in a pre-composer, pre-type-hints era. Migrations are a genuine horror story: extensions break, templates implode, and you’ll often rebuild the whole site because Joomla decided versioning should be a personality test. The community is smaller, the documentation is hit-and-miss, and the admin panel feels like a UI from a government portal that accidentally became a CMS. Performance on shared hosting is questionable at best, workflow is clunky, and there is barely any modern DX. But if you really, truly want Joomla… we’ll point you to another agency or just sit down with us for half an hour and we'll talk you out of your biggest digital regret.

Steep learning curve

Joomla makes even simple tasks feel like you’re onboarding into a new corporate ERP system. If you’re not already fluent in its quirks, prepare to lose a weekend (or three).

Outdated coding standards

Still clinging to older PHP conventions, missing modern practices, and generally stuck in a time capsule. If you enjoy fighting your own tools, you’ll love it.

Complex migration process

Upgrading versions feels less like an update and more like a full-blown rebuild. Random extensions break, templates combust, and you’re left questioning your career choices.

Extension compatibility issues

Half the ecosystem works… depending on your version, your template, the time of day, and whether Mercury is in retrograde. Reliability is not its strong suit.

Limited template selection

Unless you’re aiming for “government website from 2011,” the design ecosystem doesn’t give you much to work with.

Interface complexity barriers

The admin panel still feels like an escape room puzzle. Everything is technically there, but actually finding or using it is another story.

Benefits of Adobe Experience Manager

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.