10 Hidden Adobe Experience Manager disadvantages that are slowing you down

Highlights

You’ll learn about the cons of AEM:

• High total cost of ownership: Licensing, hosting and hiring niche developers add up to the cost
• Slow implementation: Long rollout cycles delay time-to-value
• Steep learning curve: Developers and marketers struggle with complexity
• Upgrade friction: Even minor updates risk breaking workflows
• Poor collaboration tools: Limited visibility, no true staging and no audit trails

What happens when you’re launching a global campaign? Do you face clunky workflows, endless updates and frustrated developers? Everyone is wasting their time untangling deeply nested components. That’s the reality many tech and non-tech teams face with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). While it promises many benefits, when it comes to delivery, the enterprise-grade power of the Adobe solution falls short, slowing down your teams, straining budgets and blocking innovation. For these reasons, companies are looking for alternatives to overcome the disadvantages of Adobe Experience Manager and make data-driven decisions.

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10 Adobe Experience Manager disadvantages

Beneath the gimmick of Adobe’s enterprise-grade CMS, teams find a maze of complexity, cost and bottlenecks that pull your business down. Here are some AEM disadvantages you should know:

1. You pay far more than just the license fee

AEM is the costliest CMS available on the market. The licensing fee is just the tip of the iceberg. To get your CMS up and running, you need investments in setup, infrastructure and AEM developers who are familiar with the platform. Before long, these costs can accumulate, making it challenging to utilize all the features.

2. You need help (a lot of it)

Is your team accustomed to plug-and-play features in a CMS? Then, AEM is not for you. The platform relies heavily on professional services for upgrades and configuration. What’s worse is that the dependency continues through integration, upgrades and configurations. This makes your website or business less agile and results in higher long-term costs.

3. You need complex infrastructure to support it

AEM requires a robust backend to function effectively, particularly in on-premises or hybrid setups. You require the IT resources to deal with clusters, scale environments for higher uptime and handle DevOps. Adobe Experience Cloud fails to deliver optimum performance. Instead, many customers find the deployment pipeline extremely complex.

4. You struggle to find skilled AEM developers

Due to the complexity of AEM, it’s a niche skill set. It’s not easy to find developers who are familiar with AEM and its features. Such developers contribute exponentially to your overhead costs. However, if the hired developer quits midway, everyone scrambles to hire an experienced one to ensure your business isn’t stalled. 

5. You cannot launch anything quickly

While you can deploy other headless CMS like Contentstack in less than a week, the AEM implementation takes anywhere from six to 12 months. From initial setup to full rollout, months can pass before your site or content is even live. For fast-moving and growing teams, that’s a major speed bump.

6. You have to work with a clunky and classic UI

AEM’s interface feels more clunky, particularly for those accustomed to cleaner, more user-friendly tools. Simple tasks require more clicks than needed. Moreover, the overall experience is overwhelming for first-time users. For instance, a simple image updation might take five steps, several tabs and some guesswork, compared to drag-and-drop editing on a modern CMS.

7. You frustrate your non-technical users

For non-technical users, AEM can easily become a nightmare to navigate. Many content editors and marketers face an uphill battle in making simple updates or fixing minor layout issues. For example, a content writer who wants to add a banner to a landing page must request the IT team to avoid altering certain functionalities. They cannot click and edit like they do in other CMS platforms, like Contentstack.

8. You won’t enjoy smooth upgrades

Upgrading AEM is rarely a smooth process. Minor changes may create an unforeseen problem, cripple workflows and compatibility or cause custom elements to break. If you have third-party systems and plugins or intensive customization, you need to test various steps for a smooth upgrade. Your development teams work to get your updates, and they are sweating it out to achieve the software release, but your content creation and editing teams sit idle, unable to move forward. The result? Slower release cycles, frustrated teams and unnecessary stress every time an upgrade is on the horizon.

9. You risk downtime every time you update

What happens when you see the dreaded “site’s down” message in the middle of a product launch or major campaign? It’s every team’s worst nightmare, and with AEM, it’s a real risk. Minor changes may result in severe issues, including broken components, plugin incompatibility or workflow failure. Due to the complexity of AEM and reliance on highly custom code, any update you wish to carry out needs to be planned, tested and cross-team coordinated. A single mistake can cause systems to fail, putting pressure on developers. 

10. You witness slower innovation due to dependency on planned releases.

With AEM, you schedule every new feature or improvement in advance. Teams are forced to wait until scheduled release cycles to make changes. You cannot experiment with new features or functionalities. Failure to meet market demands and push improvements in real-time are among the reasons why companies seek AEM alternatives.

Why is Contentstack’s composable DXP a better alternative?

No painful upgrade cycles

Contentstack does not have any scheduled upgrades or risky migrations like Adobe Experience Manager. The design is upgrade-free. You get the latest features offering personalized experiences with no downtime, manual updates and version issues, and your team can concentrate on the building process, not updates.

Cloud-native from day one

Contentstack operates in the cloud, utilizing auto-scaling and built-in redundancy. You don’t have to manage infrastructure, handle on-premise headaches or hosting bills. The platform is designed for companies seeking global performance, reliability and minimal maintenance.

Faster time-to-value

It takes days rather than months to integrate Contentstack into your tech stack. You also save your time with free prebuilt connectors, low-code tools and flexible APIs. Teams deliver value faster, launching your content, campaigns or microsites without facing developer bottlenecks.

MACH-certified for future-ready architecture

Contentstack is a MACH-certified (Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless) product and as such, it's built for speed, agility and lasting flexibility. You’re not tied into a monolith, as you can opt for user management features and whatever you want, whenever you want.

Lower total cost of ownership (TCO)

Contentstack’s headless CMS offers minimal engineering overhead, maintenance operations and doesn’t force you to make upgrades. This is a long-term cost-saving solution. You invest less money in the infrastructure and more money in innovations, which reduces your total cost of ownership (TCO).

Marketer-friendly and intuitive

UI is developed with non-technical users in mind. Coders can create pages, reuse blocks, control translations and publish news without needing to engage developers. This results in shorter content cycles and reduced bottlenecks.

Built-in enterprise governance

Contentstack has built-in workflow support, permissions, audit trail and localization support. No matter how many brands, markets or teams you handle, you remain compliant and coordinated.

Real-time collaboration

Contentstack establishes connections between content and development teams through features such as live preview, modular and adjustable content blocks and environment-specific workflows. All of them collaborate and increase the rate at which deliveries can take place with fewer errors.

Seamless integrations with best-of-breed tools

Whether you’re using Google Analytics, Salesforce, Algolia, digital asset management (DAM) systems or any other enterprise tool, Contentstack integrates with it. You get the freedom to use the tools your team already loves, without being forced into a vendor ecosystem.

Visit Contentstack’s Marketplace to learn about the tools it can integrate with. 

Scales as you grow without lock-in

Whether you're managing digital experiences for one website or multiple, Contentstack scales; there are no arbitrary limits or restrictive licenses. And since it’s API-first, it grows with your architecture.

A partner ecosystem that has your back

Whether you need to migrate or optimize, Contentstack's network of certified partners gets you the best from Contentstack. You get help with onboarding, custom integrations, strategic guidance and more.

Case study: How Dawn Foods accelerated its digital transformation with Contentstack

Dawn Foods moved from Adobe’s CMS to Contentstack to support its digital transformation using the MACH technology. The platform allowed content managers to update content 80% faster without a developer. Over a six-month period, it released six major versions and more than 40 quick fixes in response to user feedback. The flexibility, usability and scalability of Contentstack ensured high adoption and better online ordering experiences.

After using Contentstack, Gireesh Sahukar, Vice President of Digital at Dawn Foods, said:

“I have worked with content in other systems such as Adobe, Kentico, Sitecore and more. It was pretty painful. To think that my team is managing all the content without needing technical skills whatsoever is astonishing.”

Read the case study here.

Why Contentstack wins the Adobe Experience Manager comparison

Here’s why Contentstack is a better alternative to AEM: 

FAQs

What are the disadvantages of AEM?

AEM is expensive, complex to maintain and requires specialized development. It lacks built-in localization workflows and native content preview.

Is Adobe Experience Manager worth it?

AEM is worth it only for large enterprises invested in Adobe’s ecosystem. For agile teams, the high cost and slow delivery cycles are a dealbreaker.

What are the performance issues of AEM?

AEM has poor page load speed, long publish phases and scaling issues for customized environments.

What are the advantages of Adobe Experience Platform?

AEP provides real-time profiles, unified data and seamless Adobe integration to personalize and analyze visitor behavior.

Learn more

If upgrade cycles keep slowing things down, if your integrations take weeks instead of days, if your costs keep scaling but the returns don’t, then it might be time to ask the hard question: is AEM still the right fit?

When marketers feel stuck and developers are constantly putting out fires instead of building new things, it’s a sign your CMS is working against you, not for you. This is where Contentstack comes to the rescue. The platform is quick, adaptable and designed to facilitate teams working faster. No upgrade issues, no awkward processes, just a system that provides your team with the velocity and flexibility they need to do it faster and do it better.

Are you tired of your current CMS? Consider switching to a modern CMS like Contentstack, where new teams can operate efficiently. To know more about how Contentstack helps, talk to us.