Evaluating AEM vs Sanity
When a mid-market B2B technology company approached us for a DXP evaluation, they knew exactly what they needed: a headless architecture that could power their next five years of digital growth. What they didn't expect was just how different two "enterprise-grade" solutions could be.
Their content estate included roughly 10,000 pages consisting primarily of news releases and product detail pages, all well-structured and ready for migration. Their evaluation criteria were clear: performance at scale, content authoring ease, five-year total cost of ownership, platform sustainability, and time-to-market. On paper, both Adobe Experience Manager and Sanity could check these boxes. In practice, the evaluation revealed a platform gap that would ultimately make the decision straightforward.
Setting the Stage
The client's technical team had extensive experience with traditional enterprise CMS platforms. Their marketing organization operated lean, with content teams accustomed to working independently without heavy developer support for day-to-day operations. Speed mattered to them, both in terms of site performance and how quickly they could publish and iterate on content.
They came to the evaluation with open minds. Adobe Experience Manager carried the weight of industry recognition, with Gartner consistently placing it in the Leaders quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms. Sanity, while newer to the enterprise conversation, had been gaining traction on G2 as the top-rated headless CMS. The client wanted hard evidence, not marketing claims.
We structured the evaluation around five weighted criteria that mapped directly to their business objectives.
Criterion 1: Performance Architecture
With 10,000 pages serving a global audience, performance wasn't negotiable. The client's existing platform struggled with cache invalidation complexity, and they wanted architecture that would deliver consistent sub-second load times without requiring constant DevOps attention.
AEM's Approach
AEM as a Cloud Service delivers content through a dispatcher layer that requires careful configuration. In headless mode, content surfaces via GraphQL APIs backed by Content Fragments. The platform offers persisted queries to reduce execution overhead, and Adobe's CDN provides edge caching with web-optimized image delivery.
The complexity emerges in the details. AEM's headless architecture evolved from a page-centric foundation, which means developers work within constraints designed for a different era. The dispatcher configuration alone requires specialized expertise to tune for optimal cache hit rates. Organizations with high-traffic applications often find themselves adding additional caching layers to achieve the performance they need.
Sanity's Approach
Sanity takes a fundamentally different architectural stance. Content lives in the Content Lake, a cloud-native data layer optimized specifically for content queries. The GROQ query language allows developers to request exactly the fields they need, eliminating over-fetching entirely. Content delivery happens through a global CDN designed from day one for headless operations.
The platform's Live Content API enables real-time content updates without full cache invalidation. For the client's use case, this meant product updates could propagate instantly across all channels without the cache-warming gymnastics required by traditional architectures.
Evaluation Results
We ran performance benchmarks simulating their traffic patterns. Sanity's edge-first delivery consistently outperformed AEM's dispatcher-based approach, particularly for uncached content scenarios. More importantly, Sanity achieved these results with dramatically simpler infrastructure, requiring no dispatcher tuning, no custom caching layers, and no specialized performance engineering.
Criterion 2: Content Authoring Experience
The client's content team consisted of marketing professionals, not technical specialists. They needed an authoring environment that would empower independent content operations without creating a dependency on developers for routine tasks.
AEM's Reality
AEM's authoring capabilities remain robust for traditional web content management. The Universal Editor provides visual editing for headless content, and Content Fragment Editor offers form-based authoring for structured content. However, the platform's complexity becomes apparent quickly.
Industry analysts note that AEM's authoring environment presents a steep learning curve. The component-based approach, template system, and permission model require significant training investment. Organizations frequently discover that their content teams need developer assistance for tasks that should be routine, from modifying templates to troubleshooting workflow issues.
The headless authoring experience introduces additional friction. Content Fragment authoring loses the visual context that traditional page editing provides, and authors must mentally map abstract fields to their rendered presentation. For teams accustomed to WYSIWYG editing, this disconnect creates productivity barriers.
Sanity's Reality
Sanity Studio presents a different philosophy. The editing environment is fully customizable, built with React, and designed around structured content principles. Authors work within interfaces tailored to their specific content types, with real-time collaboration that mirrors the Google Docs experience.
The platform's Presentation feature enables visual, click-to-edit authoring while maintaining structured content integrity. Authors see their content in context without coupling the authoring experience to page-centric templates. Multiple team members can work simultaneously on the same content without lock conflicts.
Evaluation Results
We conducted authoring workshops with the client's content team using both platforms. Sanity's intuitive interface and real-time collaboration generated immediate positive responses. The team completed structured content creation tasks in roughly half the time required in AEM's Content Fragment environment.
The most telling metric was confidence. After a two-hour introduction, the team felt comfortable operating independently in Sanity. With AEM, they expressed concerns about the learning investment required and the ongoing developer dependency for content operations.
Criterion 3: Five-Year Total Cost of Ownership
Enterprise CMS investments extend far beyond licensing. The client needed a realistic picture of what each platform would cost across implementation, operations, and evolution.
AEM's Cost Structure
Adobe Experience Manager operates on enterprise contract pricing that varies by organization. Industry sources indicate that AEM Sites licensing typically starts around $60,000 annually, with costs scaling based on traffic, users, and feature requirements. Total implementation costs regularly exceed $100,000 in the first year when accounting for customization, integration, and training.
The hidden costs compound over time. AEM requires specialized talent, with certified developers commanding premium rates and limited availability. Ongoing maintenance demands dedicated expertise for dispatcher configuration, upgrade management, and performance optimization. Organizations often discover that their operational costs exceed their licensing fees.
Sanity's Cost Structure
Sanity follows transparent, usage-based pricing. The Growth plan starts at $15 per user per month, with Enterprise tiers available for organizations requiring advanced governance, SSO, and dedicated support. There are no opaque enterprise contracts, no hidden capacity fees, and no surprise true-ups.
The platform's composable architecture also reduces integration costs. Sanity works with standard JavaScript tooling, meaning any competent web developer can contribute. Organizations aren't locked into a specialized talent pool or forced to maintain relationships with certified implementation partners.
Five-Year Projection
We modeled both scenarios across a five-year horizon including licensing, implementation, operations, and projected scaling. AEM's total cost of ownership exceeded Sanity's by a factor of four to five times. The disparity grew more pronounced in years two through five, as AEM's operational overhead accumulated while Sanity's usage-based model scaled predictably with content volume.
Criterion 4: Platform Sustainability
The client wanted assurance that their platform choice would remain viable and competitive through 2030. This meant evaluating not just current capabilities but strategic direction and ecosystem health.
AEM's Trajectory
Adobe continues investing in AEM, with recent emphasis on Edge Delivery Services and Universal Editor capabilities. The platform benefits from deep integration with Adobe's marketing stack, including Analytics, Target, and Campaign. For organizations committed to the Adobe ecosystem, this integration delivers real value.
However, AEM's architectural heritage creates sustainability questions for headless use cases. The platform's headless capabilities have been layered onto a page-centric foundation, introducing complexity that purpose-built headless platforms avoid. Organizations pursuing modern composable architectures often find themselves working against AEM's design assumptions rather than with them.
Sanity's Trajectory
Sanity has evolved from headless CMS to what the company calls a Content Operating System. The Spring 2025 release introduced Canvas for AI-assisted content creation, Functions for serverless automation, and enhanced Dashboard capabilities for content operations visibility. These features position the platform for AI-driven content workflows, not just traditional CMS operations.
The platform's structured content approach aligns with emerging requirements for AI-ready content. As organizations increasingly need content that machines can process, enrich, and automate, Sanity's schema-driven architecture provides inherent advantages over platforms designed for human-rendered pages.
Evaluation Results
Both platforms demonstrate commitment to continued development. However, Sanity's architectural choices position it more favorably for the shifts we anticipate in content management, including increased automation, AI integration, and multi-channel delivery requirements. The client's technical team recognized this alignment and weighted it heavily in their assessment.
Criterion 5: Implementation Timeline
The client operated under real market pressure. They couldn't afford an 18-month implementation project while competitors moved faster. Time-to-market mattered almost as much as the destination.
AEM's Timeline Reality
Enterprise AEM implementations typically span 6 to 12 months for initial launch, with complex projects extending well beyond. The timeline reflects necessary investments in environment setup, template development, component customization, dispatcher configuration, and team training. Organizations rarely find shortcuts that don't create downstream problems.
For headless implementations, the timeline extends further. Teams must establish content modeling conventions, build GraphQL schemas, configure persisted queries, and integrate frontend applications with AEM's API layer. Each step requires specialized expertise and careful coordination.
Sanity's Timeline Reality
Sanity implementations routinely achieve production deployment in weeks rather than months. The platform's cloud-native architecture eliminates environment provisioning. Schema-as-code allows developers to version control content models alongside application code. Standard JavaScript tooling means any modern web developer can contribute productively.
For the client's specific use case, we projected an 8-week implementation timeline with Sanity compared to a 6-month minimum for AEM. This difference represented not just calendar time but market opportunity cost.
The Verdict
After six weeks of evaluation, the client's decision became clear. Sanity won across every criterion that mattered to their organization.
Performance architecture delivered better results with simpler infrastructure. Content authoring empowered their team rather than creating developer dependencies. Total cost of ownership projected 70% to 80% lower over five years. Platform sustainability aligned with their technical direction. Implementation timeline cut time-to-market by more than half.
This wasn't a close call. It was a decisive outcome that validated what we increasingly see in the market: modern headless architectures, purpose-built for API-first content delivery, outperform legacy platforms adapted for headless operations.
What This Means for Your Evaluation
Every organization brings unique requirements to their DXP evaluation. The criteria that drove this client's decision may differ from yours. If you're deeply invested in Adobe's marketing stack, AEM's integration advantages may outweigh other considerations. If you require traditional page-based authoring with limited headless requirements, AEM's mature site management capabilities remain compelling.
However, if your priorities align with this client's focus on performance, authoring simplicity, cost efficiency, and implementation speed, the evaluation evidence points consistently in one direction. The headless CMS market has matured beyond its early adopter phase. Platforms like Sanity now deliver enterprise capabilities without enterprise complexity.
The question isn't whether headless architecture can meet enterprise requirements. It's whether legacy platforms can keep pace with purpose-built alternatives. Based on this evaluation, the answer is increasingly clear.
Ready to Evaluate Your Options?
Are you evaluating AEM, Sanity, or other platforms for your technology stack? Making the right DXP decision requires more than feature comparisons and vendor demos. It demands a structured methodology that accounts for your specific business requirements, technical constraints, and long-term strategic direction.
HT Blue brings years of hands-on platform experience to every evaluation engagement. Our DXP assessment framework draws on research from Gartner, Forrester, and our own implementation insights across dozens of enterprise migrations. We've seen what works, what fails, and what truly matters when organizations commit to a content platform for the next five years.
Whether you're considering a migration from legacy systems, evaluating headless alternatives, or building a business case for platform modernization, we can help you navigate the decision with confidence. Reach out to start a conversation about your evaluation needs.
