How The Decline of AEM Signals a New Era for Enterprise CMS

Today’s technological landscape is evolving at a remarkable speed. Heavyweights like Sitecore and AEM once led the charge for heavy CMS where businesses could control digital experiences under one roof. Companies were able to create, manage, and deliver personalized content across multiple channels. It was an enterprise CMS capable of so much but could provide so little when it came to flexibility. 

Usability was complex. Customizations were rigid. And developers were often the crutch to implement even minor updates. It was a nightmare situation for marketers who yearn for the agility to launch campaigns swiftly, make real-time updates, and fine-tune website content without waiting on development cycles.

Less friction. More leads. That’s the end goal.

Studies show business agility is a crucial ingredient in winning formulas, helping companies improve their financial performance by between 20-30% and reduce time to market by at least 40%.(McKinsey & Company, 2020).

As a consequence, businesses are dashing through the revolving doors of AEM and Sitecore and flocking to HubSpot Content Hub as an all-in-one marketing powerhouse. 

In this blog, we’re going to explore how these legacy platforms are giving way to more agile, integrated solutions. We'll break down the key components of traditional, heavy CMS platforms and explore the standout features of HubSpot Content Hub that position it as a top choice in the market.

The Decline of Heavy CMS Platforms

Can you relate to this? Your sales and marketing teams struggle to connect the dots between customer touchpoints. Key insights are buried within separate platforms. Team members are on a wild goose chase for this information, and can sometimes find data gaps in their insights, preventing them from building a holistic view of customer behavior. 

It’s a frustrating ordeal that wastes time and money. Yet, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Let’s go deeper. 

High Costs

Enterprise CMS like AEM don’t have standardized pricing criteria, tailoring them directly to the needs of the customer. This often leads to unpredictable and escalating costs, especially for larger organizations with complex needs. 

Bear in mind, this is only the licensing fee. Factor in additional expenses like maintenance, support, and infrastructure and you’ve got yourself a heavy bill. This directly applies to AEM, where an analysis from Gartner highlighted that high cost was one of the biggest drawbacks to this enterprise content management system.

With only 35% of B2B marketing decision-makers expecting a budget increase of more than 5% in 2025, and the majority seeing an increase of just 1% to 4% (Forrester, 2024), this minimal gain makes the high costs of legacy CMS platforms even harder to justify. Factor in the projected 2% inflation rate in the U.S. for 2025 (Statista, 2024), and these margins look even slimmer.

What’s more, it’s expected that businesses will lose an estimated $650 billion due to system downtimes and cybersecurity breaches and that cloud-based technology could decrease downtime by around 57% more migrated applications, leading to a 26% reduction in costs for breaches (Mckinsey, 2021).

But here’s another conundrum regarding price. Growing often means increasing your user base, server demands, and infrastructure capability. 

The pricing model of a heavy enterprise CMS solution scales along with these demands, adding layers of licensing fees based on both the number of users and infrastructure requirements. 

You’re essentially caged within a pricing model that ravages capital, where every incremental change—whether it's expanding your team or increasing traffic—triggers a corresponding spike in costs. 

There’s a personalization element that you can also use. Through its advanced  workflow actions, you can create sophisticated custom coded workflow actions, & can trigger webhooks, all from within a HubSpot workflow.  This can extend the capabilities of a native integration, and empowers users to connect HubSpot and other softwares in unique ways.  

Estech Systems faced a similar situation, experiencing a major disconnect between marketing, sales, and revenue efforts. Mole Street’s migration for Estech Systems into HubSpot liberated them from the chores that come from the manual exportation of data between platforms.

Complexity

A heavy enterprise CMS platform locks users within a labyrinth of technical dependencies. Make a simple right or left turn within its architecture and you’ll be confronted with a wall. A developer will be required to knock it down, burning more capital and time. 

Businesses yearn for simplicity but are faced with complexity in several key areas within AEM and Sitecore.

Infrastructure Demands

AEM integrates a myriad of infrastructure components within its monolithic umbrella. This includes web servers, application frameworks, and content repositories.

Managing and fully leveraging these assets requires expert-level technical knowledge. Consequently, this creates a dependence on technicians and web developers to perform the simplest of tasks, placing marketers in a straightjacket as they try to respond to shifting market demands.

Complex Deployments

Deploying AEM is not straightforward. An “instance” of AEM typically involves running at least two copies of the platform on separate servers: an author environment for content creation and a production environment for delivering content to end users. 

Synchronizing content between these environments, especially in an auto-scaling cloud setting, creates additional layers of complexity. This makes updating and changing digital content problematic because it often requires manual coordination between different instances, increasing the risk of delays, errors, and inconsistencies.

Customization and Maintenance Challenges

Personalization is a key asset to AEM but it comes at a cost. As organizations build out their own applications on top of AEM, they must continuously maintain them to ensure compatibility with future upgrades. 

So what does this mean? Well if you create your own application, your team will have to test, rework code, and sometimes reconfigure applications to align with the new system updates. This is an expensive cyclical process that will have to be carried out periodically. 

What’s more, the customization can break when updates are rolled out, requiring firms to invest more time and money into resolving the issue. If this can’t be handled in-house, companies will be forced to outsource it to expensive agencies, burdening them with another form of dependence. 

Frictions in Making Updates

Avoiding application failures requires relentless monitoring of AEM updates. But this can be challenging. For on-premise installations, updates are not always readily available and can incur extra licensing fees. That’s one expense. 

Applying updates requires a lot of heavy lifting and may need further adjustments to remain compatible, costing more time and money. There’s another. This can open the floodgates to operational delays and mounting maintenance costs, all while frustrating end users, who rely on timely updates and new features. 

Performance Limitations

Performance impediments are a common characteristic of a heavy CMS. While powerful, Sitecore users frequently report frustration due to slow load times, glitches in content management, and even complete failures of SXA sites to load, particularly during periods of peak traffic. Once again, this exposes businesses to delays and hinders their ability to keep the operational wheels running smoothly. 

Inability to Seamlessly Integrate Different Tools

SaaS is eating the world as we know it. The industry is expected to grow from USD 339.1 billion in 2024 to USD $818.8 billion in 2029 (Statista, 2024). Businesses love SaaS products because of their plug and play capabilities, able to fill gaps in their digital ecosystem which help companies to improve the quality of their services. 

However, the composability of AEM makes the integration of these tools problematic – a term that refers to the ability to seamlessly combine different components or elements to create significant structures. 

Visualize your internal systems as Lego blocks, where each piece can be built on top of each other to create something larger. APIs are the connectors between these blocks. But here’s the problem….

Adobe Experience Manager’s APIs are rigid and require significant customization for different tools to connect properly to the ecosystem. Their reliance on custom APIs and intricate workflows means that connecting third-party tools isn’t always straightforward and can lead to compatibility issues. 

This requires heavy development and configuration work to try and circularize a square peg that’s to be fitted in a round hole. 

AEM has its own boutique range of built-in tools (like Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target), and as we alluded to before, they don’t always integrate seamlessly with third-party tools like Google Analytics, Zapier, or MailChimp. 

This is deliberate because AEM wants to keep customers locked within the Adobe ecosystem. Consequently, businesses are stuck with a limited range of software products, unable to leverage the best in class tools in the market. It’s a suppression tactic that benefits AEM but limits the user’s flexibility and control.

Businesses always want the best in class of anything that's within budget, which is why many are now viewing more agile solutions as the right enterprise CMS to adopt.

Companies desire less risk, more speed, and complete control of their content management system. So how exactly can Hubspot Content Hub meet these demands? Good question. Let’s investigate. 

What Businesses Want From Modern CMS Platforms

Efficiency. Speed. Fewer obstacles. More output.  The end goal for businesses never changes. The evolving factor is technology and its ability to cater to modern business needs. 

In today’s world, businesses view the agile CMS as the key to revolutionizing their ability to manage customer experiences. They are right to think so. 

These cloud-based alternatives are powerful but nimble, technical but easy to manage, flexible but comprehensive. CMS’ like HubSpot Content Hub have leaner architecture and fewer layers of complexity to enable easy navigation for non-techies. 

It’s an ideal solution for organizations that need to adapt quickly to shifting demands. Key features of an agile CMS include:

Enhanced Content Delivery Across Channels 

Today’s businesses require omnichannel strategies to deliver personalized content across the web, mobile apps, email, and social platforms. This sentiment is echoed in the 2021 IDC MarketScape report, which emphasizes that “an organization's online digital presence is a mission-critical component” that requires “publishing into app experiences on mobile, IoT, and other connected devices.”

The report then delves deeper into the challenges that companies face, including quotations from companies explaining the challenges faced when operating with heavy CMS’. 

“Making changes, or creating new templates was prohibitively resource intensive, and frustrating for business users, feeling locked into mediocre web experiences. Our CMS really held us back from doing anything creative, or innovative.” - Business A

“The overall business goals were (and still are) to remove inefficiencies when working across teams within the organization. Today, teams are unable to leverage resources from other teams because processes, tools, and code are different. We need a central CMS platform that will enable all users to work in the same way, so moving across teams is seamless." - Business B

Scalability Without Operational Disruptions

Growth requires agility, and scaling shouldn’t lead to operational headaches. Modern CMS platforms are designed to scale seamlessly, allowing businesses to handle increased traffic, user demands, and data growth without the disruptions that come with traditional platforms like AEM. The scalability offered by agile CMS platforms ensures that businesses can grow without being weighed down by the need for frequent infrastructure upgrades or complex integrations.

Single Source of Truth

Agile CMS platforms act as a centralized hub where all content stakeholders—across marketing, sales, and project management—can collaborate, edit, and align their efforts. This unified approach ensures consistency and efficiency.

Live Previews and Customizable Workflows

Agile CMS platforms empower teams to move quickly with real-time previews and customizable workflows. These features streamline the design process and allow businesses to tailor editorial pipelines to their specific needs, driving productivity without the technical barriers often found in legacy systems.

API-First Integration

With an API-first approach, platforms like HubSpot Content Hub make it easy to integrate with third-party tools such as Google Analytics, Mailchimp, and Zapier. This interoperability provides businesses with a more cohesive ecosystem, enabling them to manage and scale operations without being locked into rigid structures.

Why HubSpot Content Hub is Leading the Pack

HubSpot Content Hub is all in one AI powered content marketing software that helps marketers create and manage content that fuels the entire customer journey.

• HubSpot

With an emphasis on flexibility, every digital brick in this powerhouse was purposefully built to serve marketing teams. Generating leads and facilitating growth is the aim of the game. This is especially true for SMBs and mid-market companies, who don’t have the technical expertise to fully utilize heavy CMS’. 

With a shift in focus toward more flexible CMS, let’s explore how HubSpot Content Hub empowers marketing teams to work faster, reduce dependencies on developers, and streamline content management.

A Unified Platform That Supports Seamless Integration

One of HubSpot Content Hub’s most valued features is its ability to bring CRM, marketing, and content management together under one unified platform. Chasing and consolidating data across multiple tools is a thing of the past. 

HubSpot Content Hub enables cross-departmental collaboration, breaking down the walls between teams and building bridges to allow streams of data to move seamlessly between them. Sales teams can now access marketing data without badgering the CMO. Marketing teams can pull customer insights directly from the CRM without delay. Everything works as a single, cohesive unit where teams march in unison towards a shared goal.

Integrated. Consolidated. Unified. Call it what you like but the result is an interconnected ecosystem that provides marketers with the insights required to make calculated, smart decisions that impact their campaigns. 

Data becomes more accessible. Insights become more accurate. And strategies become easier to execute. Marketers essentially have access to a unified source of truth.

What’s more, HubSpot supports API-first integrations with third-party tools like Google Analytics, Zapier, and Salesforce. Users can augment their tech stack with these tools and access treasure troves of insights, all without having complex customizations or expensive development. 

Want to know more about how HubSpot can integrate these tools to provide unified decision-making across teams? We have an entire section on this in our blog 5 Ways HubSpot Operations Hub Powers Data-Driven Decisions With a Unified Tech Stack. Check it out!

Cost Efficiency and Ease of Use

Flexibility is at the heart of HubSpot Content Hub, impacting everything from pricing to the user experience. With its modular, scalable features, the platform allows businesses to pay only for what they need and add features that are congruent with their needs. 

It’s an adaptable approach that extends to integrations, where HubSpot’s API-driven model supports seamless connections with third-party tools. Like stacking Lego, you can build on your digital ecosystem and customize elements of your tech stack in a way that fits directly with your needs.

Competitive Pricing Model

HubSpot provides three pricing tiers—Starter, Professional, and Enterprise: 

• Starter is ideal for those establishing their foundational marketing and CMS strategies.
• Professional unlocks more advanced tools for personalization and optimization, including A/B testing, adaptive testing, and dynamic content.
• Enterprise supports larger, complex organizations with features that enhance scalability and governance, including multi-site functionality, enhanced security, and more extensive user permissions.

This model allows businesses to select a package that aligns directly with their current needs, enabling them to change packages as they grow. It prevents organizations from having to pay for heavy upfront pricing investments and ongoing fees that continuously sap marketing budgets. 

Businesses can select the precise features they need at that moment and expand their capabilities over time without fear of being hit with unexpected costs. 

Not only does this give you an iron grip on expenditure but it also ensures that you’re only paying for what you use, making it an ideal solution for growing teams with evolving requirements.

Efficient A/B Testing and Real-Time Insights for Marketers

Testing is at the heart of any successful marketing team. Theories need to be tested, proved, and refined. It's a never-ending process which is why enterprises lean heavily on A/B testing to discover what marketing messages resonate. 

However, with a heavy CMS, developers are often required to carry out split tests, which can cost businesses an inordinate amount of money to execute. Developer reliance and costly feeds – it’s a double blow that drains both time and capital. 

HubSpot Content Hub offers a more practical and agile solution through its intuitive, marketer-friendly A/B testing feature. Within this system, marketers can independently set up and run split tests without needing developer support.

What’s more, HubSpot’s A/B testing tools are integrated directly into the platform, allowing for real-time insights into audience responses. This empowers marketing teams to test page layouts, headlines, call-to-action placements, and more — all with just a few clicks.

Delving deeper, the platform provides marketers with powerful reporting and analytics, enabling them to keep their finger on the pulse of user engagements. As a result, they can tweak, tinker, and adjust their strategies in real time, evolving asynchronously with their customer’s needs. 

Teams can pivot based on live customer data, and implement SEO strategies to improve SEO and optimize their website. Decision-making becomes faster. And they can execute more tests in shorter periods of time to get closer to the truth. 

User-Friendly Interface

HubSpot Content Hub eliminates the steep learning curve required for heavy CMSs through a variety of features that make it accessible and intuitive for non-technical users.

The platform’s drag-and-drop interface allows users to easily edit and create pages without developer support, while built-in tools like A/B testing, Brand Voice, and Content Remix streamline content personalization, brand consistency, and repurposing. 

Content Hub’s features protect the pristine simplicity of its interface, allowing marketing teams to focus on strategy and audience engagement, rather than dealing with complex system navigation or relying on extensive IT assistance.

Marketing Teams Need Agile CMS’ to Excel In Today’s Fast-Paced Digital Environment

As technology continues to make quantum leaps forward, marketing teams are pressured to become more proactive than reactive in their campaigns. Tech and AI have made everything faster – leads, customer engagements, and opportunities for client acquisition come and go at a remarkable speed. Blink and you may miss out. 

Consequently, enterprise CMSs like AEM and Sitecore make it difficult to keep the content mill turning at a competitive rate. Yes, power is important but so is flexibility.

Over-reliance on developers immediately creates bottlenecks that slow down marketing teams in delays and inefficiencies. Rigid pricing structures drain unnecessary capital and often saddle them with unexpected, periodic costs. 

This is not a good place to be. Success doesn’t come from ambition alone; it’s built on tools that help you adapt, streamline, and thrive at every turn. An agile CMS, like ContentHub, provides this and can accelerate your marketing velocity through its user-centric features. The operational wheels turn faster as marketers can increase their output with minimal friction, allowing them to stay on the front foot in today’s cutthroat business landscape. 

If you’re ready to find the CMS that best fits your business needs, choosing the right one becomes crucial. For a closer look at how HubSpot stacks up against WordPress, check out our CMS Comparison Guide: HubSpot vs. WordPress.