Adobe Experience Manager vs Sitecore

Pricing and buying scope

This comparison uses AEM Sites as a Cloud Service and SitecoreAI, the SaaS platform Sitecore launched on 10 November 2025 as the upgrade for XM Cloud customers. Adobe and Sitecore both run the CMS as a cloud service. Adobe publishes no AEM prices, and Sitecore's platform page describes SitecoreAI without prices, so each quote depends on the products and usage it names.

• Other editions. AEM 6.5 and 6.5 LTS, on premises or on Adobe Managed Services, are separate editions with their own licences. Adobe supports on-premise 6.5 until 28 February 2027 and recommends planning an upgrade to 6.5 LTS. Sitecore XM and XP are the self-hosted products, and Sitecore's FAQ says they remain fully supported, with paths to SitecoreAI for customers ready to move to SaaS.
• Licence. AEM Sites is licensed by Content Requests per month, which also set the author tier at up to 20 or 40 concurrent users. Assets, which new customers license as Ultimate or Prime, and Forms, licensed by submissions or renditions per year, are separate products. Sitecore documents SitecoreAI as one platform for content management, digital asset management, content operations, audiences and conversion optimisation, so ask which of those the order form covers and on what usage.
• Existing investment. Inside Adobe, the Content Transfer Tool moves content from 6.5 to Cloud Service, and custom code is refactored and deployed only through Cloud Manager. Inside Sitecore, the Pathway migration app, available on request, maps XM or XP templates, items, renderings and content into a SitecoreAI project whose layout, templates and components are set up first. Pathway does not migrate page or partial designs, xDB data, email marketing content or personalisation.
• Editorial governance. Both have workflows, language versions, roles and single sign-on. AEM adds Launches, which group page changes and promote them together, and Multi Site Manager live copies. In SitecoreAI, a page version can have a scheduled publishing-availability window, but a person still has to publish it during that window. SitecoreAI sets field read and write rights per role, which AEM reaches only through repository access rules on named properties.
• Frontend and hosting. AEM renders pages itself, with HTL components or Edge Delivery Services. SitecoreAI is headless. The site is a separate application built on Sitecore's Content SDK and hosted with Vercel, Netlify or another provider, so the frontend code and its hosting contract stay with the team or its partner.
• Moving between them. Components are rebuilt in either direction, because AEM components run inside AEM and SitecoreAI's live in the frontend application. Content models, workflows and permissions are set up again, content and assets are mapped and moved, and personalisation or analytics wiring such as Adobe Target is replaced. Pathway can crawl a public non-Sitecore site into a prepared SitecoreAI structure, but one crawl covers up to 200 URLs.
• Staying put. Staying on AEM makes sense when Assets, Forms, Target or Analytics are wired into the site, or when the review started with the 6.5 support date and Cloud Service or 6.5 LTS meets it. Staying on Sitecore makes sense when the templates and content are worth keeping: Sitecore's FAQ says XM Cloud customers are upgraded to SitecoreAI automatically, and an XP estate can upgrade to 10.5 or move to SitecoreAI with Pathway.

Ask for each line separately:

• Licence: AEM Sites Content Requests and author users, with Assets and Forms as separate lines; the SitecoreAI capabilities and usage in the order form; frontend hosting.
• Implementation: content models and components, content and asset migration, workflows and permissions, integrations, the redirect map and training.
• Operation: Cloud Manager pipelines or frontend hosting, monitoring, custom code upgrades, support and incident response.

Support dates for AEM 6.5 and Sitecore XP 9.3 to 10.5 are on WAYF's CMS end-of-life page, with the vendor source for each.

For an XP estate, WAYF's analysis of Sitecore's support model sets out what Extended Support stopped including on 1 June 2026.

Discovery, content modelling, frontend work, migration, integrations, and the people and infrastructure needed to run the site sit outside a licence quote unless it says otherwise. Compare totals using the same authors, languages, sites, environments, traffic, storage, support and overage terms.

Primary pricing sources: Adobe AEM product description, effective 2 Sep 2026 (checked 19 Oct 2026); Adobe AEM architecture (checked 19 Oct 2026); Adobe AEM 6.5 LTS FAQ (checked 19 Oct 2026); Adobe migration to Cloud Service, implementation phase (checked 19 Oct 2026); SitecoreAI FAQ (checked 19 Oct 2026); SitecoreAI overview (checked 19 Oct 2026); SitecoreAI scheduled page publishing (checked 21 Oct 2026); SitecoreAI front-end hosting (checked 19 Oct 2026); SitecoreAI Pathway migration (checked 19 Oct 2026). Use the comparison tool to carry the same requirements into a shortlist, then use WAYF's CMS migration RFP template when implementation scope needs a comparable response.