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From Adobe Experience Manager to Drupal
We are the Adobe Experience Manager to Drupal migration experts
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The process
How we migrate from Adobe Experience Manager to Drupal
- 01
Access and gating audit
First we check the existing Adobe Experience Manager and see whether the data is clean enough to move straight over to Drupal, and plan around any auth walls or bot protection in the way.
- 02
Rendering assessment and extraction
Then we work out how Adobe Experience Manager 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 Drupal 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 Drupal 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 Adobe Experience Manager
Key pain points
AEM’s biggest flaw is simple: everything about it is expensive. The license, the hosting, the maintenance, the consultants, the upgrades, and the people required to even use it. The learning curve is a cliff, implementation cycles move at glacial speed, and the UI feels like punishment for asking to edit content. Performance tanks the moment you customise anything, and collaboration is basically "email the PDF and pray." If you ever see the word specialised in an AEM context, just assume the invoice comes with an extra zero.
It’s the definition of a heavyweight DXP built for organisations with more bureaucracy than sense. For everyone else, it becomes a slow-moving, over-engineered system that requires Adobe-certified babysitters just to stay alive. If you’re considering scrapping it for something faster, saner, and built this decade, we can help you migrate without dragging the AEM baggage along for the ride.
High complexity and cost
AEM is one of the most expensive CMS/DEXP platforms on the market, with licensing, hosting, and maintenance costs that only make sense for very large enterprises.
Steep learning curve
The platform is dense and requires specialised training just to perform routine tasks. Most teams can’t operate it without dedicated experts.
Prolonged implementation periods
Even simple projects take months. Rollouts, upgrades, and workflow changes move slowly and require careful planning to avoid breaking things.
Challenging navigation of capabilities
AEM packs in a huge feature set, but finding and configuring what you actually need can feel like wading through molasses.
Necessary reliance on Adobe partners
You’re essentially forced into using Adobe-certified agencies or consultants for setup, maintenance, and troubleshooting and they don’t come cheap.
Not ideal for smaller companies
The cost, complexity, and operational overhead make AEM a poor fit for startups or mid-sized teams. Most will drown in it long before they benefit from it.
Benefits of Drupal
Key advantages
We'll give credit where it's due: Drupal is a serious CMS for serious projects. If you're building a government portal, a university website, or a massive multilingual platform that needs to serve content in 24 languages, Drupal is genuinely hard to beat. Its content modeling is incredibly deep, its permissions system is enterprise-grade, and its multilingual capabilities are the best in the open-source CMS world. The European Commission runs on it for a reason.
Where Drupal really shines is in complex, structured content architectures. You can model relationships between content types, build granular taxonomies, and set up editorial workflows that would make other CMS platforms weep. If your content team has 50 editors across multiple departments with different access levels, Drupal handles that without breaking a sweat. It's also one of the few traditional CMS platforms that has genuinely embraced decoupled architecture, so you can use it as a headless backend with a modern frontend framework if you want.
The community is smaller than WordPress but significantly more technical. Drupal developers tend to be proper engineers, and the ecosystem reflects that. Module quality is generally higher, security patches are taken seriously, and the project has strong governance. If you're in an enterprise or government context where compliance, accessibility, and security auditing matter, Drupal is a well-trodden path.
That said, we'd only recommend Drupal for projects that genuinely need its power. If you're building a marketing site or a blog, you're using a sledgehammer to hang a picture frame. Talk to us first, and we'll figure out if Drupal is actually the right fit or if you've been sold on it by someone who bills by the hour.
Exceptional content modeling
Drupal's entity and field system lets you build deeply structured, relational content architectures that most CMS platforms can only dream of. Complex taxonomies, references, and custom types are all first-class citizens.
Best-in-class multilingual support
With over 90 languages available out of the box and proper translation workflows baked in, Drupal is the gold standard for multilingual sites. No plugins, no hacks, just native support that actually works.
Granular permissions and workflows
The access control system is absurdly detailed. You can lock down roles, content types, fields, and editorial workflows with a precision that enterprise clients genuinely need and other platforms struggle to match.
Viable headless architecture
Drupal's JSON:API and GraphQL modules make it a legitimate headless CMS option, letting you pair its deep content backend with a modern frontend framework like Next.js or Nuxt.
Strong security track record
The Drupal security team is proactive and well-organized. Security advisories are clear, patches are timely, and the community takes vulnerabilities seriously, which matters a lot in government and enterprise contexts.
Open source with no vendor lock-in
You own your data, your code, and your hosting. There's no monthly SaaS bill that scales with your content volume, and you can move between hosting providers without rewriting anything.
Common questions
Adobe Experience Manager to Drupal migration FAQs
Answers to the most common questions about Adobe Experience Manager to Drupal migration
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.
Get in touch
Tell us what you're building. We reply within one working day. Jono or someone on the team picks up every message personally.
