Adobe Experience Manager vs Strapi

Pricing and buying scope

This comparison uses AEM Sites as a Cloud Service, which runs only on Adobe's cloud, and Strapi 5 on its Community, Growth and Enterprise plans, self-hosted or on Strapi Cloud. Adobe publishes no AEM prices, and a quote depends on which AEM products are in scope.

• AEM licence. Sites, Assets and Forms are licensed separately: Sites by Content Requests per month, which also set the author tier at up to 20 or 40 concurrent users, Assets as Ultimate or Prime packages for new customers, and Forms by submissions or renditions per year. AEM 6.5 and 6.5 LTS, run on premises or on Adobe Managed Services, are separate editions with their own licences; Adobe's FAQ recommends that on-premise 6.5 customers plan an upgrade to 6.5 LTS.
• Strapi plans. Community is free under the MIT licence and covers locales, roles and the Media Library. Growth is $45 USD per month, billed monthly, for three users, plus $15 USD per month for each extra user, and adds Releases, Live Preview and Content History. Review Workflows and audit logs come with Enterprise, an annual subscription quoted by sales; single sign-on is included there or sold as a Growth add-on.
• Hosting. Self-hosting adds the team's own server, database and storage. Strapi Cloud costs $35, $90 or $450 USD per project per month on monthly billing for Starter, Pro and Business, with backups from Pro. Paid CMS features on Cloud still need a separate licence key.
• Illustrative scenario. Five editors publish product pages with PDF datasheets in four languages through AEM components, and a regional manager approves each page. AEM Sites covers the language copies and approvals. On Strapi, an approval step that blocks publishing needs Enterprise; Growth, at $90 USD per month for these six users, would need a custom one.
• Migration. Content and files move after mapping. Strapi can generate small, medium and large image sizes on upload, so AEM renditions need a decision, and AEM asset metadata needs mapping. Content Fragment Models and components are rebuilt as Strapi content types and components. Pages rendered by AEM need a new frontend; one that already reads Content Fragments over GraphQL can keep its components and rewrite its queries. Redirects for changed URLs move to that frontend or its hosting, integrations are rebuilt against Strapi's APIs and webhooks, and the approval workflow is configured again.
• After launch. Adobe runs and updates AEM as a Cloud Service, and Cloud Manager is the only route for the team's code. Self-hosted Strapi leaves servers, backups, patches and upgrades with the team or its partner. Strapi Cloud runs the servers and backs up the production database from Pro, excluding uploaded files; the frontend is hosted separately.
• Staying on AEM. It makes sense when the site relies on AEM Forms processing or Multi Site Manager live copies, which Strapi lacks built in, or on Adobe Target and Analytics wired through AEM. A move to Cloud Service or 6.5 LTS may also meet the requirement behind the review for less than a rebuild.

Ask for each line separately:

• Licence: AEM products, Content Requests, author users, environments, storage and add-ons over the full term; the Strapi plan, users, single sign-on and hosting.
• Migration: content model mapping, the frontend, assets and metadata, the redirect map, integrations, workflow set-up and training.
• Operation: hosting, monitoring, backups including uploaded files, upgrades, security patches, support and incident response.

Teams on AEM 6.5 also face Adobe's support dates, which WAYF's AEM migration guide sets out with a three-year cost model.

In the Ingersoll Rand case study, the China sites moved off Oracle Content Manager with WAYF on Payload, and the migration covered tens of thousands of media assets and redirects, each checked against the legacy build.

These are licence or hosted-plan prices. They exclude discovery, content modelling, frontend work, migration, integrations, and the people and infrastructure needed to run the site. Compare totals using the same editors, locales, environments, content volume, traffic, storage, support and overage terms.

Primary pricing sources: Adobe AEM product description (checked 18 Oct 2026); Adobe AEM architecture (checked 18 Oct 2026); Adobe AEM 6.5 LTS FAQ (checked 18 Oct 2026); Adobe AEM 6.5 technical requirements (checked 18 Oct 2026); Strapi CMS pricing (checked 18 Oct 2026); Strapi Cloud pricing (checked 18 Oct 2026); Strapi Cloud project settings (checked 18 Oct 2026); Strapi Review Workflows (checked 18 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.