How to migrate from AEM to a headless CMS

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) has been a go-to enterprise CMS for years because of its robust content management and digital experience features. While these are valid selling points, AEM’s drawbacks often outweigh its benefits, especially with recent advancements in content management and headless architecture.

In this article, we'll explore the challenges of AEM, compare its limitations to a modern headless CMS, and guide you through migrating your existing AEM projects to a headless CMS solution like Hygraph.

#What is AEM?

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a content management system with a suite of tools for web content management, digital asset management (DAM), and personalization. However, at its core, AEM was built as a monolithic CMS, which means that content management, presentation, and delivery are tightly integrated within the same system. While this approach worked well back then, applications today require better flexibility and omnichannel content delivery, which AEM lacks.

It’s worth mentioning that Adobe also recognized this shift and introduced headless capabilities through AEM Content Services and its GraphQL API. However, these features were added to AEM’s traditional architecture rather than being natively built for headless workflows. As a result, projects that need a truly API-first, scalable, and lightweight content management solution would find AEM’s headless implementation less efficient than dedicated headless CMS platforms.

#Why migrate from AEM to a headless CMS?

Beyond AEM not being a dedicated headless CMS platform, several other challenges make migration to an entirely headless CMS more attractive:

• High costs: AEM is one of the most expensive CMS solutions. Licensing alone can cost over $50,000 annually, not including implementation, customization, and maintenance.

• Limited API flexibility and poor documentation: While AEM offers a GraphQL API, it is not as developer-friendly as dedicated headless CMS platforms like Hygraph. It relies on Adobe-specific architecture, which means you’d face longer development cycles than modern API-first CMS platforms. Additionally, AEM’s documentation is complex, difficult to navigate, and often lacks practical examples, making it frustrating to troubleshoot issues or find best practices.

• Limited omnichannel content delivery: AEM was originally designed for web pages, and while its headless features allow JSON-based content delivery, it was not natively built to manage structured content.

• Vendor lock-in: AEM’s deep integration with Adobe products like Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, and Adobe Campaign also makes migrating away difficult.

• Slow development & deployment: AEM’s workflow requires more configuration and customization than API-driven CMS platforms. Setting up a new project in AEM can be time-consuming and slow down content deployment.

Migrating to a dedicated headless CMS such as Hygraph automatically cancels out AEM's drawbacks, allowing you to benefit from modularity and true omnichannel content delivery. Additionally, you enjoy cost efficiency (Hygraph, for example, is 95% cheaper than AEM) and lower maintenance, as modern headless CMS platforms are cloud-native and fully managed, reducing infrastructure and DevOps costs. Plus, your content teams and developers can work independently, leading to a faster time to market.

A prime example of this transition is Samsung’s migration from AEM to a headless CMS for their Members platform. Originally, Samsung relied on AEM, but as the platform expanded, AEM’s rigid structure and inefficient content workflows made it increasingly difficult to scale and provide personalized experiences.

By switching to Hygraph’s headless CMS, Samsung achieved 50% faster content update turnaround times and a 15% increase in user engagement. Their development team could now focus on innovation while content teams managed updates independently, demonstrating how modern API-first CMS platforms remove AEM’s limitations.

#Preparation before migration

Migrating from AEM to a headless CMS is a big transition that requires careful planning. It involves restructuring content models and workflows and selecting the right platform. The first thing you'd want to do is evaluate your content needs. AEM’s monolithic structure tightly integrates content, templates, and workflows, so it's important to understand how your team creates, manages, and delivers content.

Choosing the right CMS is also important. Ideally, you want to choose a platform with an API-first design, omnichannel support, content modeling flexibility, security, localization capabilities, editor experience, and cost-effectiveness—all of which are built into Hygraph by default. You could also review the Hygraph headless CMS checklist to help you make a more informed decision.

Finally, carry out a content audit. Identify what to migrate, archive, or restructure. Remove outdated content, optimize metadata for SEO, and document content relationships to prevent broken dependencies.

#Step-by-step migration process

With all necessary preparations complete, let’s walk through a typical migration process using Hygraph as an example.

Define content models in Hygraph

In AEM, content is structured using pages, components, templates, and DAM assets, all of which are tied to the presentation logic. In contrast, Hygraph content is structured as reusable API-driven content models and is independent of the frontend.

The table below also highlights the major differences between AEM and Hygraph content modeling.

Say you have a blog page in AEM that includes a hero banner, text, images, and metadata. In AEM, this content is tied to a page template and components, which makes it rigid and hard to reuse across different platforms.

In Hygraph, instead of pages, create a "Blog Post" content model with fields like title, body, author, publish date, and featured image. For navigation, instead of manually structuring a page hierarchy, define a "Navigation Item" model with a reference field that links it to any content type (e.g., Blog Post, Product, or Landing Page). This way, your menus will be dynamic and adaptable across platforms.

Extract & import AEM content to Hygraph

After creating all the necessary content models in Hygraph, the next step is to migrate your content from AEM to Hygraph. For this phase, you want to start by using the AEM Content Services API to export structured data. If necessary, transform deeply nested AEM page structures into reusable fields that align with Hygraph’s schema. Once the data is structured correctly, import it using Hygraph’s API.

For assets (images, videos, etc.), export them directly from your AEM dashboard. Once the export is complete, upload the asset files to Hygraph via the Hygraph dashboard.

Set up workflows & permissions

The next step in the migration process is to set up all necessary workflows and assign permissions. AEM has complex editorial approval workflows and rigid role-based permissions. However, things are much simpler with Hygraph.

To proceed, assign custom roles for editors, marketers, and developers. You can also leverage Hygraph’s workflow automation to manage content approvals and automate tasks like triggering API calls, clearing cache, or sending Slack notifications. Furthermore, you can improve your workflow by integrating third-party applications from the Hygraph Marketplace. For example, you could integrate the Shopify extension to bring your Shopify catalog directly into Hygraph.

Rebuild the frontend with an API-first approach

Once all your data has been successfully imported into Hygraph, the next step is to rebuild your frontend with an API-first approach.

With Hygraph, you have full and independent control over rendering, design, and user experience. You can integrate your content into React (Next.js), Vue (Nuxt.js), Svelte, Flutter, or even static site generators like Astro and Gatsby, then consume content via GraphQL queries. To speed up development, you can also leverage Hygraph’s starter templates and marketplace integrations.

Test, optimize & deploy

Finally, before going live, make sure everything runs smoothly by testing your GraphQL queries, frontend rendering, and API performance. You want to make sure to:

• Verify content delivery: Test API responses to ensure correct data retrieval.

• Optimize performance: Use caching, lazy loading, and image optimization for faster load times.

• Monitor & iterate: Track API performance, user engagement, and analytics for continuous improvements.

• SEO & redirects: Set up 301 redirects to preserve SEO rankings from AEM URLs.

With everything in place, deploy your frontend and start delivering fast, scalable, and flexible content experiences powered by Hygraph.

#Challenges to anticipate

Without a doubt, some technical challenges are unavoidable during a migration like this. Some of the key challenges to anticipate and how to prevent them include:

• Data loss: One of the biggest risks is data loss during migration, especially when moving from AEM’s hierarchical content structure to Hygraph’s API-driven model. To prevent this, thoroughly audit and back up content before migration and validate data post-import.

• Workflow redesign: Redesigning workflows for the new system is also necessary, as AEM’s page-centric approach differs from Hygraph’s modular content modeling. Editorial approval processes, content relationships, and integrations with other systems may need to be restructured to fit the new API-first model.

• Maintaining SEO rankings: Finally, maintaining SEO rankings during the transition is important to avoid traffic loss. Since URLs, metadata, and redirects may change, ensure to set up proper 301 redirects and optimize new content to maintain search visibility.

Additionally, while Hygraph is intuitive and easy to grasp—even for first-time users; it may take some time to fully leverage its advanced features. For this reason, it's important to ensure that teams receive proper training to effectively use the new headless CMS.

#Conclusion

In this article, we explored why migrating from Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) to modern headless CMS solutions like Hygraph makes sense, highlighting key benefits such as cost-effectiveness, flexible integrations, omnichannel content delivery, and faster development and deployment. We then covered how to prepare for the migration, execute it step by step, and anticipate potential challenges with strategies to address them.

Companies like Samsung Electronics Germany have already seen improved content workflows, faster updates, and increased engagement after making the switch. Now, it’s your turn!