From Sanity to Adobe Experience Manager

We are the Sanity to Adobe Experience Manager migration experts

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Last verified: July 17, 2026

The process

How we migrate from Sanity to Adobe Experience Manager

01
Access and gating audit
First we check the existing Sanity 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.
02
Rendering assessment and extraction
Then we work out how Sanity renders its pages and pull the content out, even without CMS access.
03
AI-assisted sanitization
Everything extracted runs through our sanitization pipeline, which flags slop, normalizes structure, and leaves us clean content to work with.
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.
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.
06
Execute the real migration
Once the dry run is clean, everything moves into Adobe Experience Manager in one controlled cutover.
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.
08
Agentic-browser QA
Finally, automated browsers sweep the new site for data issues, design regressions, and missing SEO signals.
Ready when you are. We'll bring the moving boxes.Start my migration

Challenges with Sanity

Key pain points

We obviously prefer Sanity, so much so that our own website is on Sanity. But if you don't have the right implementation team, you might find yourself in a bad situation. Its highly customizable nature can lead to complexity and time-consuming setup processes for less experienced developers. We've inherited our fair share of stinkers, but we advise that before you jump ship, you let us look over it to see if it's salvageable.

That said, if you are considering moving, we can help you migrate away with automated migration scripts, web scraping, and content mapping. It'll be a 1:1 with whatever platform you choose.

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Not always plug-and-play

Sanity gives you a ton of flexibility, but it’s not a "drag-and-drop" CMS. If your team prefers instant themes and presets, you’ll need a little extra setup to get started.

Potentially high resource demand

As your content model grows, Sanity gives you incredible power and real-time performance. Just keep in mind that very large projects may require a bit more horsepower behind the scenes.

Less ideal for beginners

Editors love Sanity once everything is set up, but teams switching from traditional CMSs may need a short onboarding period to learn the workflow.

Infrastructure management needed

Unlike hosted CMS platforms, you own your content pipeline. That gives you full control and scalability, but also means setup and environments need to be managed properly.

Technical skill required

Since Sanity is schema-driven, developers can model content precisely the way your business needs it. Non-technical teams benefit from that structure, but setup usually requires engineering support.

Complexity in setup

Sanity doesn’t force rigid templates or assumptions. You have to define everything like content, structure, and workflows. The tradeoff: a bit more initial setup for much more flexibility long-term.

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

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.

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

Sanity to Adobe Experience Manager migration FAQs

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

Sanity's Live Content API means content goes live the instant you press publish, with zero caching issues. We've migrated teams from WordPress, Contentful, Drupal, and legacy platforms, and the consistent feedback is that the editorial experience is faster and more flexible. The schema-as-code approach means your content model is version-controlled alongside your codebase. Pricing starts free for small teams and scales predictably, unlike platforms that hit you with surprise API overage bills.

A typical migration has three phases. First, we map your existing content model to a Sanity schema, which usually takes 1 to 2 weeks depending on complexity. Second, we build automated migration scripts that transfer your content, media assets, and relationships. Third, we set up the frontend integration and editorial workflows. For a mid-sized site with 500 to 2,000 pages, the full process usually runs 4 to 8 weeks. We use our Turbo Start Sanity foundation to accelerate the setup so you're not starting from zero.

Most editors are comfortable within the first week. Sanity's Presentation tool gives them a side-by-side live preview that feels intuitive, especially for teams used to visual page builders. The real-time collaboration means multiple editors can work on the same document without conflicts. We typically run a 2-hour onboarding session and provide a custom guide tailored to your specific content model. After that, editors rarely need developer support for day-to-day publishing.

Sanity's Free plan includes 20 user seats, 10,000 documents, 1M CDN API requests, 250K regular API requests, 100GB of assets, and unlimited locales. The Growth plan is $15 per seat/month for up to 50 seats, with 25,000 documents and the same API allowances, plus pay-as-you-go overages, private datasets, and 5 roles including Editor, Developer, and Contributor. Enterprise pricing is custom for organisations that need custom roles, dedicated SLAs, or single-tenant infrastructure. Most mid-size teams we work with stay well inside Growth's limits.

AEM is one of the most expensive CMS platforms going. Adobe publishes no list prices, so everything is a custom enterprise quote. From contracts we've seen, AEM Sites licensing tends to start around $60,000 per year on its own, and a full AEM as a Cloud Service deployment usually lands in the six figures, often $200,000 or more annually once you factor in usage. Implementation runs another $100,000 to $500,000+, and Adobe support contracts add 15-25% of licensing on top. We've watched companies pay more for their AEM contract than for their entire engineering team's salaries. If that ratio sounds familiar, it's time to rethink the stack.

Yes, and it's one of the more common moves we handle. The work is real but tractable. For an enterprise instance, plan for a few weeks to a few months depending on how customised AEM is. The biggest bottleneck is content extraction. AEM's JCR (Java Content Repository) stores everything in a proprietary node structure that needs custom tooling to export cleanly. Custom OSGi bundles, Sling models, and heavy DAM workflows all get rebuilt or replaced, usually with something far simpler. We run a parallel build, standing up Sanity and a modern frontend while AEM stays live, then cut over once content and redirects are validated. Editorial teams keep working throughout.

Cost is the headline, but it isn't the only one. Development is slow because nearly everything routes through Java, OSGi, and Sling, so even small changes need a dedicated dev. Performance degrades the moment you customise the platform. The author UI is dense, and routine content work often still depends on engineers. You're also tied to Adobe-certified partners for setup and upkeep, and contracts tend to carry multi-year lock-ins. The headless side (Content Fragments served over GraphQL, plus the Universal Editor) works, but it's bolted onto a DXP monolith rather than built lean from the start.

For most sites, yes. AEM earns its keep when an organisation already lives inside Creative Cloud, Analytics, and Target and needs governance across hundreds of properties. If you're not using several of those Adobe tools, you're paying enterprise rates for a CMS that's slower to build on and more expensive to staff than the alternatives. We've met teams who adopted AEM on a consultant's recommendation, then found they used maybe 15% of it. A Sanity backend with a Next.js frontend would have cost a fraction and shipped faster. Three things to watch if you do leave. DAM assets with custom metadata and renditions don't transfer automatically. Dispatcher and Sling URL patterns need careful redirect mapping to hold SEO value. Contract lock-ins can carry steep early-termination fees.

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

Sanity development agency

Projects migrated without a hitch

Join the growing list of successful migrations

Slingshot Bio

Roboto converged Slingshot Bio's WordPress and Shopify sites into one headless Shopify build on Next.js and Sanity, instrumented end to end and AI-ready.

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Jamb

We rebuilt Jamb on Sanity and Next.js, merging two legacy PHP sites into one calm catalogue without losing the SEO equity their antique and reproduction collections had built up.

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Jamb mantelpiece with gilded mirror, hanging lantern, and antiques

Tray.ai

Migrating hundreds of thousands of pages, re-platforming and extending for the leading composable AI integration platform

View case study

The Tray.ai website homepage after the large-scale re-platforming migration

Mario Testino

From Sanity overages to instantaneous publishing, we brought Mario Testino into the fast lane, and did it in style.

View case study

The Mario Testino photography portfolio site with instant publishing

Get in touch

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We are the Sanity to Adobe Experience Manager migration experts

How we migrate from Sanity to Adobe Experience Manager

Access and gating audit

Rendering assessment and extraction

AI-assisted sanitization

Content-model design with the client

Transform and soft-migrate

Execute the real migration

Redirect mapping and throttled sitemap submission

Agentic-browser QA

Challenges with Sanity

Benefits of Adobe Experience Manager

Common questions

Sanity to Adobe Experience Manager migration FAQs

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