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AEM migration

Migrate off Adobe Experience Manager

We help Australian enterprises move off Adobe Experience Manager onto a modern, lower-cost DXP. AI-assisted content migration, engineers with production AEM experience, and a parallel-run plan that protects your live site.

Talk to our migration teamSee Migration Accelerator

Why teams are leaving AEM

In our 2026 discovery work with Australian enterprises, the same three reasons come up. We will be honest if any of them do not apply to you.

Total cost of ownership

Adobe licence renewals, AMS or AEM as a Cloud Service hosting, and the specialist developer rates required to keep a custom AEM build healthy. The five-year cost outruns the perceived switching cost on most mid-market estates.

Authoring complexity

AEM is powerful for engineers and slow for marketers. Touch UI workflows, replication delays, and bespoke component libraries create a learning cliff your content team did not sign up for.

Composability lock-in

Mobile apps, kiosk experiences, agent workflows and AI surfaces all need content. Pure AEM authoring assumes a single web channel. Headless-first DXPs serve all of them from one source.

What a noice AEM migration looks like

A predictable, parallel-run migration where the new platform proves itself in production before AEM is retired. No big-bang weekend cutovers.

AI-assisted content move

Migration Accelerator captures pages from AEM, infers their structure, and writes them into the new platform under human approval. Typically 60 to 80 percent less manual effort.

Production AEM experience

The team executing your migration runs AEM platforms today for Telstra Health, NCSR and BNY Mellon. We understand the source platform from production experience, not slide decks.

Parallel run pattern

Reverse proxy or CDN-level routing keeps both stacks live. Migrate by brand, region or journey. AEM stays in production until the new platform earns the cutover.

Target-platform choice

We default to Magnolia (we are a Platinum Partner) but migrate AEM to Drupal, Sitecore XM Cloud, Contentful, Contentstack, Sanity, Strapi, or a headless Next.js build. Discovery decides the target, not us.

SEO continuity guaranteed

301 redirect map for every retired URL. Server-rendered HTML on the new platform. Search Console and GA4 monitoring through the warm-up window. SEO continuity is a release blocker.

Australian delivery

Melbourne team running in AEDT and AEST. Discovery workshops in your office. Australian Privacy Act, Notifiable Data Breaches and APRA CPS 234 baked into the architecture, not bolted on.

Six stages, predictable budget

The shape of an AEM migration is the same whether you have 800 pages or 80,000. Scope per stage scales; the stages do not.

1

Discovery and target selection

Two to four weeks. AEM audit, content inventory, integration map, sized roadmap, and a target-platform recommendation backed by a five-year TCO model. You receive an architecture pack for security and procurement.

2

Content remodelling

AEM components map to new content types. We negotiate the trade-offs (what merges, what splits, what gets retired) with editorial and design leads. This is where the editorial wins of the migration get designed in.

3

Build target platform

Iterative sprints on the target CMS. Templates, integrations, search, personalisation, DevOps. Demos every fortnight against a live environment your team can use.

4

AI-assisted content migration

Migration Accelerator snapshots AEM, infers content shape, proposes mappings, and writes pages into the target. Editorial teams approve in batches. We track migration coverage by stakeholder, brand or region.

5

Parallel run

Both stacks live. Reverse proxy or CDN-level routing moves traffic incrementally. SEO, accessibility and core analytics are monitored continuously. AEM stays available until the new platform earns the cutover.

6

AEM retirement and managed support

Once content, traffic and stakeholders are on the new platform, AEM is wound down on a known date. Your Adobe licence is released. The same team stays on under managed support, so platform context does not vanish at go-live.

See it in action

National Cancer Screening Register case study
UX ResearchDesign Systems

National Cancer Screening Register

Enterprise UX transformation & managed AEM support

A complete redesign with improved UX, a new design system, and ongoing managed support.

Read case study

AEM migration: FAQ

The questions we get most often from Australian and New Zealand teams scoping an AEM migration.

Three reasons come up in almost every discovery we run in Australia. First, total cost of ownership: AEM licence, AMS or AEM as a Cloud Service hosting, and the specialist developer rates required to maintain it. Second, complexity: AEM authoring is powerful but slow for marketing teams and the developer experience is bespoke. Third, composability: enterprises increasingly want to expose content to multiple channels and AEM is harder to operate in a headless-first mode than newer DXPs.

Yes. AEM remains a sensible choice when you are heavily invested in the wider Adobe stack (Target, Analytics, Customer Journey Analytics, Real-Time CDP), when you have hundreds of authors with mature governance, or when contractual constraints already lock you in for multiple years. We will tell you if your case looks like that. We do not lead with migration recommendations when the platform fit is still strong.

A mid-sized AEM estate (a single brand, one to three locales, roughly 800 to 3,000 pages) typically migrates in fourteen to twenty-six weeks end to end. Larger multi-brand or multi-region estates run six to nine months. The bulk of the timeline is content remodelling and editorial review, not technical extraction.

We work to our 2026 rate card (AUD 165 to AUD 275 per hour or AUD 1,320 to AUD 2,200 per day, ex GST). Most Australian AEM migrations sit between AUD 250k and AUD 1.2M excluding GST and target-platform licences. Cost drivers are template count, integration count (CRM, commerce, search, personalisation), content volume, and how clean the existing AEM implementation is. We share an itemised range at the end of a one-hour scoping call.

Migration Accelerator is our AI-assisted content migration product. It crawls and snapshots the source AEM site, infers the content shape, proposes a template and component mapping into the target platform, and writes pages in bulk under human approval. It cuts the manual rebuild effort by 60 to 80 percent on typical projects. The output is plain content in the new platform, not a translation layer or runtime dependency.

Most commonly Magnolia DX Core or Magnolia Cloud (we are a Platinum Partner). We also migrate AEM to Drupal, Sitecore XM Cloud, Contentful, Contentstack, Sanity, Strapi, and bespoke headless setups on Next.js or Nuxt. Target-platform choice is a discovery output, not an upfront assumption.

No, provided URLs, redirects, structured data and core content are migrated cleanly. We treat SEO continuity as a release blocker. The cutover plan always includes a 301 redirect map for every retired URL, server-rendered HTML on the new platform, and Search Console + GA4 monitoring through the warm-up window.

Yes. We support parallel run patterns where parts of the site stay on AEM while migrated sections move to the new platform. A reverse proxy or CDN-level path routing keeps both stacks live and lets you migrate by brand, region, journey or stakeholder group rather than in a single weekend cutover.

Yes. Our AEM developers currently run AEM platforms for Australian enterprise clients including Telstra Health, the National Cancer Screening Register and Bank of New York Mellon. That same team executes the migration and stays with you on the new platform after go-live.

Authors get hands-on training on the target CMS during the build phase, not after. We run two short workshops (orientation, then template-by-template) and embed two of our team into the editorial rooms during the first content-load sprint. Most authors are productive on the new platform within their first full day of use.

Ready to scope an AEM migration?

A one-hour scoping call gets you a sized roadmap, a five-year TCO model, and a target-platform recommendation backed by the engineers who will deliver it.

Get in touchAEM support services