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CoreMedia Knowledge Center

CoreMedia vs. Adobe Experience Manager

No more limitations. Get to market faster – at better value.  

Tired of forced cloud upgrades, skyrocketing hidden fees, and rigid systems that can’t keep up? Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) comes at a premium cost, but its all-in-one suite can be limiting as your needs evolve, leaving you overpaying for a set-up that no longer suits your needs. 

It’s time to regain control. Innovate, scale, and succeed with CoreMedia – on your terms: 

  • Your tools, your choice - Total flexibility to integrate with everything from your legacy tools to the latest AI. 

  • Lower risk – Forced to suddenly pay 3x more? Not with us. We stand for transparent and predictable pricing, tailored to your unique business needs. 

  • On-cloud or on-prem, your choice – And if you choose to migrate to the cloud, do it when it suits you, without inflated costs. 

Composable at heart, CoreMedia integrates seamlessly into your existing and future tech stack, so you can move faster, work smarter, and get better results - without the overpriced limitations of a one-size-fits-all platform.

Content Editing

Why migrate to CoreMedia

You choose the tools you need

No need to commit to an all-in-one suite. Stay flexible and pick from our composable solutions that support your business needs. 

Grow-as-you-go integrations

Connect your CMS to leading tools for CRM, DAM, PIM, and more. Keep what works and replace what doesn’t to keep your tech stack future-proof.

Industry leading eCommerce connectors

Leverage the deepest pre-built integrations for platforms like Salesforce, Commerce tools, SAP, Elastic Path, and others to reduce implementation time. 

No hidden costs - ever

Ensure you only pay for what you truly need with our flexible, transparent pricing model. No expensive forced cloud migration or surprise licensing costs.

Cloud or on-premises - your choice

Ensure your data and content stay secure and protected in every scenario with our flexible cloud or on-premises deployment options. We won’t force you into the cloud or hit you with unjustifiably high costs if you choose to move.

Let your tech work for you

Stay agile with tailored content workflows, adaptable layouts, and dynamic experiences. Build what you want, the way you want it. 

Fast content delivery – anywhere, anytime

Preview, adapt, and launch campaigns across channels, markets, and audiences from one interface. Omnichannel delivery remains fast and intuitive, even without technical skills.

Out-of-the-box personalization

Adapt content for different audiences using your existing customer, CRM or eCommerce data, directly within the CMS. Personalized experiences stay manageable across channels without added tools or technical overhead.

Smooth migration

Simplify migration with our streamlined process and expert team, ensuring a low-risk, low-complexity transition of your content in as little as 90 days. Migrating to a new enterprise CMS has never been easier.

Benefits

Don’t get stuck with a costly, complex, specialist-heavy set-up.

CoreMedia’s flexible CMS gets you up and running fast—without the heavy lift and need for costly Adobe specialists. Our modern hybrid headless architecture, seamless third-party integrations, and out-of-the-box eCommerce connectors are trusted by leading multi-brand, multilingual, and multiregional organizations.

Launch in weeks, not months, or even years.

No need to purchase a full suite of products. Say goodbye to the surprise costs of accessing essential features or maintenance. 

With CoreMedia, you’re not locked into an expensive suite. Choose the tools that drive your success, pay only for what you need, and scale fast when you're ready. Choosing a CMS is a big decision, which is why trusted brands like Deutsche Telekom, Henkel and Claas have relied on CoreMedia for decades - avoiding costly transitions. Get ultimate flexibility to boost your ROI today, next year and beyond.

Adobe AEM comes as a bundled suite, making it hard to integrate external tools and forcing you to pay for features you may never use. 

CoreMedia takes a different approach. Our composable portfolio lets you pick only the tools you need - whether it’s personalization, analytics, DAM, or marketing automation. With 150+ pre-built connectors, you can easily integrate the best solutions for your business. Break free from vendor lock-in and customize your tech stack with the best tools, regardless of vendor. 

Freedom to innovate isn’t just about technology—it’s about enabling the people who drive your digital success. With CoreMedia, your developers have full control over customization and extensions, leveraging our open API framework and cloud-native capabilities. 

Enable marketers to create, reuse, and adapt content for different audiences across all digital channels from a single platform. With personalization and optimization embedded into content workflows, teams can validate what works and continuously improve their conversions without heavy development effort.

How to choose the best AEM alternative

Pricing

Adobe AEM sits in the premium price tier of enterprise CMS solutions, with costs starting in the six-figure range. Customers frequently pay for features they don’t use while facing unexpected costs for implementation, training, migration, maintenance, and optimizations. 

CoreMedia offers a flexible, fair and transparent pricing model. Pay only for the features and services you need. Our composable architecture ensures a cost-efficient solution tailored to your business. CoreMedia’s cloud-native CMS includes essential features like personalization right out of the box—delivering a powerful, cost-effective system. 

Integration

Adobe AEM’s approach locks you into a rigid tech stack, limiting your options and requiring costly custom development for essential integrations like eCommerce. With no out-of-the-box integrations available, you’re forced into expensive, time-consuming custom builds. 

With CoreMedia, you stay in control of your tech stack. Leverage a composable offering of personalization, optimization and testing tools or choose from 150+ pre-built connectors to seamlessly integrate the best tools for your business - whether it’s eCommerce, marketing automation, analytics, DAM, CDP, or other solutions.  

Flexibility

Adobe’s all-in-one legacy DXP requires multiple products to be successful, limiting your ability to adapt to changing business needs. 

With CoreMedia, your teams gain the freedom to innovate. Our fully extensible, customizable platform evolves with your business needs. Developers can integrate with leading third-party apps. Marketers can easily coordinate global campaigns from a single interface. Editors can reduce time-to-web from weeks to hours—or even minutes. 

No more unnecessary lock-ins or developer dependencies. Just the flexibility to grow at your own pace.

Onboarding and support

Adobe AEM is known for its steep learning curve, need for specialized training and developers, costly professional services, and limited support. 

The right support when you need it makes all the difference. With CoreMedia, you get a dedicated account manager, experienced professional services and access to a global network of certified implementation partners. Our 700+ trained consultants bring real-world industry experience to every project, ensuring a smooth migration, fast deployment, and personalized support every step of the way.

Deployment and development

Adobe mandates the use of the latest version in AEM as a Cloud Service, and forced updates can sometimes break deployed code in production environments. 

With CoreMedia’s Content Cloud Deployment Self-Service, you can streamline your deployments and be assured that you are always deploying to a stable working version of your production environment.

The important questions, answered (FAQs)

CoreMedia answers all the key questions to help you make the right decision.

How does modern personalization differ from traditional AEM personalization?

Traditional personalization often relies on pre-built profiles and separate tools that filter content after creation. Modern approaches help teams adapt and test content where it is authored, shortening the time from ideation to optimized experience. CoreMedia supports this by integrating personalization into content authoring and delivery processes, helping teams shorten the time from ideation to optimized digital experiences.

Can CoreMedia integrate with Adobe products and third-party tools?

Yes. CoreMedia supports integrations with a wide range of third-party tools and can connect to existing enterprise systems such as DAM, PIM, CDP, analytics, eCommerce platforms, and marketing automation solutions, including Adobe ecosystem products where required.

When should organizations consider migrating from Adobe Experience Manager to a composable CMS?

Organizations may consider migrating from AEM to a composable CMS like CoreMedia when they need greater flexibility in tool choice, clearer cost transparency, or a modular architecture that aligns with evolving business needs.

Can CoreMedia be used as a replacement for Adobe Experience Manager in enterprise environments?

Yes. CoreMedia is used by global enterprises to manage and deliver digital experiences with flexible integrations, omnichannel content delivery, and personalization capabilities suitable for large-scale requirements.

What are good alternatives to Adobe Experience Manager for personalization and experimentation?

Good alternatives to AEM for personalization and experimentation include CoreMedia, Optimizely, and other CMS platforms with built-in personalization or support for third-party experimentation tools. These solutions vary based on integration needs and existing ecosystems.

Smooth migration in less than 90 days

Migrating content from one CMS to another requires a structured approach. Our smooth migration process and expert-led team make migrating hassle-free, ensuring all your content, users, metadata and assets get migrated with zero disruptions. By employing a smart agile methodology, Enterprise Ireland migrated to CoreMedia within just 90 days. 

Kickstart your migration with a thorough assessment of your AEM content and map it to the CoreMedia content model. We recommend a discovery phase at the beginning of the project to determine what needs to be migrated. From a technical perspective, this involves extracting the content, using AEM's built-in tools to export and transform the content into CoreMedia's format, and using CoreMedia's ingest service to import it. Our experts help guide your development teams in the best way to get you up and running in weeks not months.

Enterprise Ireland website

“CoreMedia's latest technology standards enable us to launch websites faster than ever before and prepare us for the future” 

Martin Schönfeld, Head of Digital Platform and Technology Management, Henkel

"CoreMedia's built-in DAM capabilities, unified content management, and scalable infrastructure made it an easy decision for us. It seamlessly integrates with our tech-stack and significantly enhances our content management workflows." 

Ramin Khoschandam, Product Owner, Phoenix Contact GmbH

"For over two decades, we’ve been continuously improving with CoreMedia to deliver relevant content where it needs to be seen.”  

Vito Rollo, Head of Customer Insight (Global IT), CLAAS

"We recommend CoreMedia as a scalable, flexible, reliable, highly secure CMS with a best of breed approach." 

André Fialho, Business Developer Manager, init

"We are choosing CoreMedia very often for high-traffic projects, that involve many customers and many editors." 

Stephan Stechow, Head of Strategic Alliances, Bitgrip

"The German Bundestag uses CoreMedia as their CMS for 10 years. They handle a lot of content, so security and scalability are huge factors. The website hasn't been down for the last few years." 

Klemens Mangl, Team Lead Project Management, Babiel

"What stands out with CoreMedia is the stability of the product. I never saw CoreMedia failing in over 20 years." 

Jörg Forchner, Portfolio Topic Lead, Content Management Experience (CMX), Telekom MMS

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