Why enterprises are reconsidering Adobe AEM for Sitecore XM Cloud

Let’s break down the differences in the areas that matter most to executives, not just technologists.

1. Total cost of ownership (TCO)

• AEM: The costs stack up fast for licenses, hosting, upgrades, developer headcount, and integration projects. Enterprises often find themselves spending millions annually just to maintain status quo.

• XM Cloud: SaaS subscription pricing eliminates upgrade projects, infrastructure costs, and most of the hidden spend. Clients routinely cut platform costs by double digits and those cost savings drop straight to the P&L.
  
  Financial reality: Every $1M saved on platform overhead is $1M you can redirect to customer acquisition, product innovation, or straight into EBITDA improvement.

2. Speed to market

• AEM: Implementations often run 9–12 months. Launching a new site or campaign can drag for weeks as developers untangle code dependencies. By the time you’re live, competitors may already be three campaigns ahead.

• XM Cloud: Cloud-native, composable, and designed for speed. Businesses routinely launch new experiences in weeks, not months.
  
  Financial reality: Faster launches = faster revenue recognition. If your time to market is cut in half, your revenue curve accelerates without additional marketing spend.

3. Reducing developer dependency

• AEM: Marketers wait in line for developer resources to make even simple changes. Developers burn cycles fixing content structures instead of building differentiating products. It’s a double tax: slower marketing AND wasted engineering capacity.

• XM Cloud: Intuitive editing tools empower marketers to own day-to-day content changes, freeing developers to focus on innovation.
  
  Financial reality: A Fortune 500 with a 20-person dev team spending 50% of its time on “content updates” is effectively burning millions in payroll on work that XM Cloud hands back to marketing. That’s instant efficiency and a direct SG&A reduction.

4. Cloud-native vs. cloud-hosted

• AEM: Adobe’s “Cloud Service” is hosted, not cloud-native. It still requires patching, upgrades, and manual infrastructure management. Enterprises pay both the license AND the operations bill.

• XM Cloud: True SaaS. No upgrades. No patching. No infrastructure headaches. Always on the latest version.
  
  Financial reality: Enterprises can eliminate entire categories of spend like upgrade projects, hosting contracts, maintenance fees. This is hard-dollar OpEx savings you can measure.

5. Composable vs. monolithic

• AEM: A single, monolithic system. You buy everything, even if you only need half. Even worse, performance bottlenecks or dependencies drag the entire system down.
• XM Cloud: Composable architecture. Take what you need, integrate the rest. Best-of-breed flexibility with no lock-in.
  
  Financial reality: Composable = less sunk cost. Instead of locking capital into modules you don’t need, you buy the components that deliver ROI.
  
  

The biggest reason to rethink AEM

If we had to boil it down to one word, it’s drag.

Drag on timelines. Drag on costs. Drag on innovation.

AEM doesn’t just slow down your teams, it also slows down your balance sheet. Every delayed launch, every overrun upgrade, every extra developer hour spent on basic content work shows up as inefficiency on your P&L.

In a digital economy where speed and efficiency are the twin engines of growth, drag isn’t just inconvenient. It’s unacceptable.

Learn more about switching from Adobe AEM to Sitecore XM Cloud.