# Prismic to Adobe Experience Manager migration

> How to migrate from Prismic to Adobe Experience Manager, with a side-by-side comparison and FAQs.

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## Source: Prismic

- **Type:** headless
- **Official site:** https://prismic.io
- **Pricing:** https://prismic.io/pricing
- **Last reviewed:** 2026-07-28

## Key advantages

Prismic is phenomenal for simplistic page-builder-style websites. Its simplistic drag-and-drop page builder, along with the newer code-based version, helps you generate like-for-like components and automates the developers' process.

The built-in media optimisation tool is also great, so you can ensure that even if you're uploading 4mb images, they're going to be scaled down with minimal compression artefacts.

### Content scheduling capabilities

Prismic makes it ridiculously easy to plan content ahead with built-in scheduling without any plugins or workarounds. Just pick a time, hit schedule, and your release goes live exactly when you want it.

### Intuitive visual editor

The editor feels natural even for non-technical teams, with clean previews and simple fields. It keeps the writing flow distraction-free while still giving developers structure.

### Efficient slices feature

Slices let you build repeatable, flexible components that marketers can rearrange without breaking layouts. It’s the closest thing to structured Lego-blocks for content teams.

### Rich media embedding

Embedding images, videos, and rich assets takes seconds. You don't need to hack templates. Just paste, pick, and publish.

### Flexible component reuse

Developers create once, marketing teams reuse forever. Slices and custom types make content scalable without adding complexity.

### Drama-free publishing

Publishing is fast, predictable, and drama-free. If you want to do a small tweak or a full-page release, everything ships smoothly with minimal cognitive load.

## Key pain points

We have a long history with Prismic, and at one point, we were agency partners, so count us as biased. However, if you're anything like us, we've had an absolutely terrible experience with Prismic.

They've historically changed their API ad hoc, resulting in many broken websites, which is especially bad for an agency. They've dumped infrastructure on the community, resulting in expensive migration bills and client dissatisfaction and they've updated their system with no way to migrate other than to rebuild your entire website for literally years.

If you're having a hell of a time, we can help you move away and do it without breakages. We've had to migrate quite a few folks and we have a standardised process that lets us migrate images, videos, text and content structure to the platform of your choice.

### Dependency on third-party hosting

You don’t control the infrastructure, Prismic does. So you’re tied to their uptime, limits, and CDN behaviour.

### Limited native integrations

Most serious integrations require extra tooling or custom code because Prismic’s built-in ecosystem is pretty thin.

### Steep learning curve

Slices, custom types, and the editor workflow take time to understand, especially for teams new to component-driven CMS structures.

### Lack of built-in versioning

There’s no full document history or global rollback, meaning mistakes are harder to recover from without workarounds.

### Escalating pricing model

Costs jump fast as you add seats, locales, or repositories, making it expensive to scale a growing content team.

### Limited out-of-box features

Beyond basic content creation, most advanced needs require custom development, external tools, or plugins.

## Target: 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.

## Frequently asked questions

### How much does Prismic cost?

Prismic has a free plan for 1 user with limited API calls. The Starter plan is $10/month per repository for small teams. The Small plan is $25/month per repository for up to 7 users with more locales and API bandwidth. Medium is $150/month per repository. Large and Enterprise plans go higher. The pricing jumps are significant once you need multiple locales or repositories. We've had clients hit the ceiling on the Small plan faster than expected because of how Prismic counts API calls and custom types.

### What are the best Prismic alternatives?

Sanity is the alternative we recommend most. It gives you better content modelling, real-time collaboration, and a query language (GROQ) that's far more flexible than Prismic's API. Contentful is another option with a bigger ecosystem, though pricing is steeper. If you liked Prismic's Slices concept, Sanity's block-based content approach works similarly but with more depth. We've migrated multiple former Prismic agency partners to Sanity, and the developer experience improvement is always the first thing they mention.

### Can I migrate from Prismic to another CMS?

Yes. We've migrated quite a few Prismic projects, mostly to Sanity. We export your custom types, documents, and media through Prismic's API, then restructure everything for the target platform. Prismic's Slice-based content maps well to Sanity's portable text and block system. Typical migrations take 3-5 weeks. We keep your existing Prismic site live throughout, so there's no downtime. The biggest challenge is usually handling Prismic's media library, since images need to be moved to a new CDN.

### Is Prismic a good CMS for developers?

It's decent for simple projects. The Slice Machine tooling is clever and the TypeScript support has improved. But Prismic's API has limitations that frustrate developers on bigger projects. You can't do complex queries, filtering is basic, and the content modelling is shallow compared to Sanity or Contentful. The bigger issue is Prismic's track record of breaking API changes and infrastructure shifts that have caused production outages. Developers who need reliability and deep customization are better served elsewhere.

### Why are teams leaving Prismic?

The main reasons we hear are API instability, limited content modelling depth, and pricing that doesn't match the feature set. Prismic has a history of making breaking changes to their API and infrastructure without adequate migration paths. One major version change left agencies (including us, when we were partners) with broken client sites and expensive rebuild bills. Teams also outgrow the content modelling quickly. Once you need complex relationships between content types, Prismic's flat structure becomes a bottleneck.