Leading Sitecore competitors: From WordPress to AEM

Since Sitecore launched XM Cloud, it’s clear that migration is inevitable—especially given the upgrade complexity that often feels like a full replatform. Given how complex Sitecore upgrades are—XM Cloud offers a great solution by handling upgrades automatically.

But there’s a problem: Sitecore XM Cloud is extremely expensive.

While XM Cloud automates these upgrades, its steep costs mean many users are now facing contracts several times higher than before.

If you’re being pushed toward a costly XM Cloud migration, now is the perfect time to explore more flexible, budget-friendly alternatives. Today, we’re rounding up the top Sitecore competitors, chosen based on their capabilities as CMSs, DXPs, and CMPs. But first, a quick look at Sitecore itself.

What is Sitecore CMS? And what does Sitecore do?

Sitecore CMS is, as the name suggests, a content management system (CMS). Sitecore offers a suite of solutions focused on content management, including Sitecore XM (its traditional CMS), Content Hub One (a plug-and-play headless CMS), and Sitecore XM Cloud (a cloud-based, headless-only version of Sitecore XM).

Starting as a CMS, Sitecore has since evolved into a digital experience platform (DXP). It now offers a comprehensive suite of native tools for managing digital experience components like personalization, digital asset management, and customer data management, allowing you to build a fully integrated DXP.

Sitecore also works as a content marketing platform (CMP). For context, a CMP is often seen as a cross between a CMS and a DXP, combining features from both systems.

A CMP fuses the content management strengths of a CMS with the personalized, multichannel features of a DXP. No matter the vendor’s approach, the goal remains the same: to unify content management with targeted customer experiences.

How to compare Sitecore alternatives

Given how Sitecore works, here’s how to compare its different alternatives as a CMS, DXP, and CMP.

Sitecore as a CMS

If you’re considering Sitecore purely as a CMS, you’ll likely compare it with other CMS options such as WordPress or Drupal.

Sitecore as a DXP

If you’re evaluating Sitecore as a DXP, a fair comparison would be with solutions like AEM, which also offers a comprehensive suite of native tools to build a complete DXP stack.

Alternatively, if you aren’t looking for a unified, single-stack solution, WordPress can also serve as a viable Sitecore alternative in a DXP setting, as it can power content within a best-of-breed DXP stack.

Sitecore as a CMP

When considering Sitecore as a CMP, consider alternatives that may not be a full DXP but still provide essential features like analytics, personalization, and omnichannel content delivery—either natively or through integrations. Competitors to Sitecore in the CMP space could include Contentful and even WordPress (which supports all key CMP functions without vendor lock-in). CMPs are often best viewed as composable solutions, enabling businesses to build custom solutions tailored to specific content and experience needs.

WordPress: A future-proof Sitecore alternative in all settings

Here’s how WordPress stands out as a versatile alternative to Sitecore.

WordPress as a CMS alternative to Sitecore

To make an apples-to-apples comparison, you can look at Sitecore’s CMS solutions alongside WordPress. 

Sitecore’s managed CMS solutions—like the latest Sitecore XM Cloud—can be evaluated against enterprise-grade WordPress CMS solutions such as WordPress VIP. In this comparison, WordPress continues to stand out as a CMS. That’s because WordPress provides a seamless user experience through its intuitive editor.

WordPress maintains its core philosophy of simplicity and flexibility, making it easier for users to handle content without heavy reliance on IT support. By contrast, most Sitecore CMS solutions often require IT resources for daily content operations, which adds operational overhead.

WordPress also takes an agile approach to headless setups, allowing it to be used in traditional, headless, or hybrid configurations without the need for extensive replatforming. In contrast, Sitecore’s CMS solutions are set up as either traditional or headless options, and transitioning between these setups generally requires a full replatforming effort. 

WordPress as a DXP alternative to Sitecore

When evaluated as a digital experience platform, Sitecore presents an all-in-one solution with its native solutions for personalization, content management, digital asset management, customer data management, and more to power end-to-end digital customer journeys.

However, WordPress takes a different approach with its best-of-breed philosophy, offering you the flexibility to build a tailored DXP. Rather than relying on a single vendor for everything, with WordPress, you can select the best solutions to deliver each part of your digital experience, whether it’s personalization, analytics, or media management. 

Ultimately, while Sitecore XM Cloud offers a unified solution, WordPress stands out for its adaptability and the freedom it provides for creating bespoke DXP stacks. This makes WordPress a versatile and future-proof choice for businesses that require flexibility in building their digital experience stacks.

WordPress as a CMP alternative to Sitecore

By leveraging its extensive ecosystem of plugins and integrations, WordPress seamlessly transforms into a powerful CMP—combining content planning, editorial collaboration, analytics, personalization, and omnichannel delivery. Its true composability lets you build a fully customized solution without being tied to a single vendor.

Whether you need structured content modeling, editorial governance, or seamless integrations with your marketing automation tools, WordPress provides a strong foundation to build, optimize, and scale your content operations on your terms. It offers far more flexibility and cost efficiency than Sitecore.

Explore our comprehensive Sitecore vs WordPress handbook to see how WordPress outshines Sitecore. If you’re planning a migration, our detailed, step-by-step Sitecore to WordPress migration guide walks you through every phase of the transition.

For a fully managed solution, our end-to-end Sitecore to WordPress migration service recreates your Sitecore instance on WordPress while preserving every feature, design element, and integration.

Sitecore competitors—a quick snapshot

Here’s a list of Sitecore alternatives organized by use case—CMSs, DXPs, and CMPs. Note that some vendors may appear in multiple categories.

Sitecore alternatives (as a content management system)

Brightspot CMS

Brightspot empowers you to future-proof your content management system with its Content-as-a-Service (CaaS) approach. With its hybrid approach, Brightspot allows you to create your content in adaptable, modular formats stored in a central “repository” that can be delivered everywhere.

To give you a head start, Brightspot comes with dozens of pre-built content types and templates, which can be further customized to suit your needs, streamlining content creation. It also supports hybrid and headless architectures, complete with webhooks and APIs for content delivery management.

Collaboration tools, site administration features, and AI tools are built in, further enhancing its usability. Brightspot’s way of working with modular content is quite similar to WordPress. In WordPress, you can easily achieve this kind of content modularity through custom post types and fields—all without relying on a proprietary solution.

Contentful

Contentful is a composable content management system that enables you to adopt a “future-proof composable content approach” and deliver multi-experiences at scale. Contentful breaks your content into small, modular components, allowing you to create content once and reuse it across all your brands, channels, and markets.

Contentful is all about composable content: “Instead of creating content as one large block, you have a series of smaller chunks, defined by your developer and information architect, that you fill out. Why? Because this allows developers to take your content and quickly integrate it into the frontend.“

This approach however, is very similar to WordPress, which is available as license-free and open-source, without any vendor lock-in. 

Umbraco 

Umbraco brings you three CMS solutions:

• Umbraco CMS: The leading open-source ASP.NET CMS
• Umbraco Cloud: The cloud version of Umbraco CMS
• Umbraco Heartcore: A headless CMS built on top of Umbraco CMS with the original Umbraco CMS at its core.

While Umbraco’s CMS offerings provide value for enterprises seeking an ASP.NET-based solution, WordPress is a stronger alternative. Its broad feature set, user-friendly interface, and extensibility—both in its core and through its vast ecosystem of native integrations—give it the edge.

Kentico

Kentico is now a DXP, but it started as a CMS. Kentico positions itself as the “all-you-need CMS with built-in digital marketing capabilities.“

For content management, Kentico offers a Content Hub—this is where all your content lives. From here, you can deliver it anywhere you need: websites, microsites, apps, emails, social networks, and more.

Along with it, you also get personalizations, email marketing, member portals, forms, form-based automation, and more with Kentico. (While you’re exploring Kentico, do check out our Kentico vs WordPress handbook and also how you can migrate from Kentico to WordPress.)

Content Cloud™

OpenText™ Web’s Content Cloud™ is a composable, cloud-native content management solution offering end-to-end enterprise content management. It connects content, people, and processes, enabling you to deliver exceptional content experiences for end users while boosting operational efficiency and improving business outcomes.

From content creation and lifecycle management to AI, governance, security, and integration, Content Cloud™ provides a comprehensive suite of tools. It is particularly suited for businesses focused on “information-led growth” with a future-proof hybrid, headless content management solution. (OpenText offers a full-fledged digital experiences platform too.)

Connecting your content, people, and processes is the essence of an agile CMS—and WordPress excels at it. Forrester even highlights its strength in this area. Best of all, WordPress is open source and free, with no vendor lock-in, giving you complete flexibility, control, and ownership.

Sitecore alternatives (as a digital experience platform) 

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) DXP brings a comprehensive suite of Adobe solutions, including AEM Sites, AEM Forms, AEM Community, AEM Cloud Service, AEM Assets, and more. 

AEM comes with a robust content management solution, often chosen by enterprises for its scalability and extensive toolset. AEM’s CMS can be deployed as a traditional CMS, a headless CMS, or in a hybrid setup. A key distinction between AEM and Sitecore is that AEM doesn’t treat headless and headful architectures as binary options. 

Also, as noted by Smashing Magazine, AEM is a “conglomerate of open-source technologies with several touches from Adobe,” which positions it as a hybrid system that combines the flexibility of open-source with the proprietary control of Adobe. While this hybrid nature offers flexibility, it also presents challenges for businesses, particularly when integrating third-party tools or fully harnessing AEM’s capabilities, which requires specialized expertise.

Check out our AEM vs WordPress handbook where we talk about these in detail. It offers our take on AEM’s tech stack—featuring legacy architecture, a Java-based backend that often runs outdated versions, and various proprietary Adobe technologies—and its impact on your content channel.

Optimizely One

Optimizely debuted Optimizely One, its digital experience platform, at Opticon last year. Optimizely One is pitched as an “operating system” for digital teams. 

Essentially, with Optimizely One, users get all the applications they need to deliver high-impact digital experiences in a single dashboard. These applications range from a shared workspace for planning marketing campaigns to a CMS for content management.

Additionally, Optimizely Graph—powered by GraphQL—prepares content for headless delivery. The platform also includes everything necessary for personalization and experimentation. 

Optimizely aims for Optimizely One to become the “go-to marketing platform” for enterprises, recognizing a gap in the market despite the maturity of marketing technologies.

While Optimizely is a trusted leader in the experimentation space, it’s fundamentally an experimentation-first solution. It excels in A/B testing, personalization, and optimization, but as a full DXP, it lacks the flexibility and composability that enterprises need for long-term scalability.

Optimizely can add significant value as your experimentation partner in a WordPress-powered DXP. With WordPress as the flexible, open-source backbone managing your content and integrations, Optimizely drives targeted testing and optimization. Together, they create a powerful, customizable digital ecosystem without relying on a single infrastructure.

Liferay

Liferay gives you all the essential “building blocks” you need to create and power all your digital solutions, including enterprise websites, portals for customers, suppliers, partners, intranets, and more. These building blocks encompass solutions for content management, asset management, search, personalization, and site management. 

The core idea behind Liferay is to empower you to create with its native platform capabilities, configure these features to fit your brand, and then connect and customize them with the rest of your tech stack.

While Liferay offers native solutions for content and asset management, personalization, and site management, businesses are limited to its ecosystem, requiring specialized expertise and ongoing investment in its framework. WordPress, on the other hand, delivers true flexibility without the constraints.

As an open-source platform, WordPress allows enterprises to build and customize digital solutions—whether websites, intranets, customer portals, or knowledge bases—using best-in-class tools that fit their needs. With seamless integrations, a vast ecosystem, and full ownership of your infrastructure, WordPress empowers organizations to scale and evolve without vendor lock-in or unnecessary overhead.

Acquia

If you’re looking to move from Sitecore to an open-source CMS, then you might probably be considering options like WordPress and Drupal. If you’re considering the latter, then you have a Sitecore DXP alternative in the form of Acquia. 

Built on top of Drupal CMS, Acquia offers everything you need to power your digital experiences. The solution includes:

• The (open-source hybrid) Drupal CMS
• Acquia DAM (for digital asset management)
• Acquia CDP (for managing customer data)
• Acquia Campaign Studio (for planning multichannel marketing campaigns)
• Acquia Convert (for personalizations and testing), among others.

Some of these features are powered by third-party solutions, such as Acquia Convert, which leverages VWO for experimentation.

While Acquia and Drupal can provide Sitecore-like DXP capabilities in an open-source package, they come with the trade-off of requiring a high level of technical support and expertise—often comparable to or even exceeding that required by closed-source solutions like Sitecore.

Maintaining a Drupal infrastructure is demanding. As a result, despite its strong presence in the enterprise CMS space, Drupal’s market share and adoption have slowed.

Acquia’s solutions—while comprehensive—rely heavily on proprietary elements like Acquia DAM, Acquia CDP, and Acquia Campaign Studio. These components require significant technical expertise to configure and maintain, leading to a steep learning curve and the need for ongoing support—resulting in complexity akin to platforms like Sitecore.

In contrast, WordPress offers the open-source flexibility of Drupal with a far more user-friendly interface, a vast plugin ecosystem, and a lower barrier to entry. WordPress provides enterprises with a truly composable platform that seamlessly integrates with best-in-class tools for personalization, digital asset management, analytics, and more—without the proprietary constraints or overwhelming technical demands.

WordPress is also equally scalable and secure while being much more adaptable and cost-effective, empowering teams to focus on growth rather than navigating constant technical upkeep, as with Acquia.

(You can read more about how Drupal compares with WordPress in our Drupal vs WordPress handbook.)

Salesforce Experience Cloud

Salesforce Experience Cloud is a customer experience platform built on top of Salesforce’s CRM. Salesforce Experience Cloud lets you create connected websites, portals, applications, and more—all of which tap into your Salesforce CRM as a single source of truth for customer data. This streamlined approach allows for highly personalized, one-to-one interactions that feel seamless across platforms.

However, Salesforce Experience Cloud isn’t a typical DXP. It’s for you if your focus is on nurturing partner relationships, enhancing customer service, or managing B2B commerce through digital solutions like portals, forums, sites, and storefronts. 

Experience Cloud’s CRM-driven design makes it a powerful choice for enterprises prioritizing CRM-based engagement and personalized service experiences across their various customer touchpoints.

Salesforce Experience Cloud’s tight integration with Salesforce’s CRM makes it a compelling option for businesses deeply embedded in the Salesforce ecosystem. But for organizations seeking true flexibility, scalability, and cost efficiency, a solution like WordPress is the better choice.

Unlike Salesforce Experience Cloud, which primarily serves as an extension of Salesforce’s CRM, WordPress is a fully composable platform that integrates with any CRM, marketing automation tool, or commerce solution—without locking you into a single vendor. 

With WordPress, enterprises can build customer portals, knowledge bases, forums, and digital experiences tailored to their needs, all while maintaining complete ownership of their data and infrastructure.

Oracle

With Oracle Customer Experience (CX), Oracle provides you a robust DXP that connects your marketing, sales, and service experiences to manage your end-to-end customer relationships. Oracle CX includes a suite of applications designed to support every phase of the customer journey.

For marketing, you get applications for marketing automation, campaign management, a customer data platform, and behavioral intelligence, among others. On the sales side, Oracle CX offers features like sales automation, sales planning, commerce, and subscription management. 

For service, Oracle CX provides solutions for knowledge management, service centers, intelligent advisors (bots), etc. Oracle also offers a hybrid headless CMS, Oracle Content Management, that’s supported by extensive documentation and seamlessly fits with the rest of the Oracle CX stack.

While Oracle’s suite of applications covers marketing, sales, and service, businesses are locked into a rigid ecosystem with steep licensing fees and heavy dependencies on Oracle’s infrastructure.

WordPress, on the other hand, offers true flexibility. As an open-source platform, it integrates seamlessly with best-in-class CRM, marketing automation, and eCommerce tools—without forcing businesses into a single vendor’s ecosystem.

With WordPress, enterprises can build a fully connected digital experience on their own terms, with complete control, scalability, and cost efficiency. Why choose an expensive, closed system when WordPress delivers the same capabilities—without the constraints.

Sitefinity DX 

Sitefinity DX is Sitefinity’s composable DXP software platform that lets you “DX Your Way.” With Sitefinity DX, Sitefinity wants to make DXPs less complicated for organizations in the mid-market.

In fact, Sitefinity calls Sitefinity DX as a mid-market DXP solution that’s cost-effective, efficient, and user-friendly at the same time. You can compose your Sitefinity DX stack by choosing from Sitefinity’s different applications for content management, portal development, website building, and campaign management, among others.

Another DXP that comes from Sitefinity’s family is Progress. With its advanced personalization and marketing capabilities, Progress targets enterprises as opposed to mid-market organizations.

Since Sitefinity DX markets itself as a “mid-market” DXP that’s cost-effective and user-friendly, why settle for a limited, proprietary system when WordPress offers more—without the constraints?

WordPress powers both enterprises and mid-market businesses, providing a fully composable, open-source ecosystem where organizations can build their ideal tech stack with best-in-class tools—without being restricted to a single vendor’s solutions.

Magnolia

Magnolia is a composable DXP for enterprises designed to transform content into exceptional digital experiences across brands, channels, and markets. 

Magnolia’s core philosophy is composability, viewing essential digital experience components—like content management, personalization, analytics, and more—as “DXP partners.” This approach makes Magnolia the control center for your digital strategy, rather than a one-size-fits-all solution.

So, for example, while Magnolia includes its own Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, it’s highly flexible and lets you use your own existing DAM too. This adaptability lets you customize your Magnolia DXP to match your specific requirements—making it as native or as diverse as your business demands.

While Magnolia pitches itself as a composable DXP, WordPress has been delivering that flexibility for decades—without the costs and constraints of a proprietary system. Whether it’s content management, personalization, analytics, or DAM, WordPress seamlessly connects with best-in-class solutions while avoiding vendor lock-in.

Enterprises don’t need a proprietary “control center”—they need full ownership, scalability, and cost efficiency. And that’s exactly what WordPress delivers.

ContentStack

ContentStack is a composable digital experience platform built around its pioneering enterprise-grade headless CMS. ContentStack wants to help enterprises address the “long-standing technical debt inherent in their marketing tech stacks.” In fact, it wants organizations to migrate to its “modern” DXP and “retire the legacy” solutions like AEM, Sitecore, and Oracle.

With a 100% MACH-compliant architecture, ContentStack promises a DXP that can empower enterprises to break free, both technologically and contractually, from their outdated digital experience platforms.

While ContentStack positions itself as a ‘modern’ DXP helping enterprises break free from legacy platforms, it simply replaces one form of vendor lock-in with another. WordPress, on the other hand, offers true freedom—an open-source, enterprise-grade CMS that eliminates costly contracts and rigid architectures.

With a massive ecosystem of plugins, seamless integrations, and a thriving community, WordPress delivers all the benefits of composability without forcing enterprises into a closed ecosystem.

Sitecore alternatives (as a content marketing platform)

As discussed above, a lot of CMSs can extend beyond their traditional content management capabilities and turn into a CMP. Alternatively, lots of DXPs if only set up with content essentials can be CMPs too.

In line with that, the CMSes and DXPs that you have above can all be potential CMPs.

Let’s look at Sitecore to get some perspective. Sitecore’s CMP is designed to help you manage the entire content lifecycle—from ideation through production to analysis. Here’s how Sitecore describes the role of a CMP within a CMS/DXP ecosystem:

“A Content Marketing Platform enables marketers to create the content needed to drive the entire digital experience. Acting as a unified platform for content creation, management, and analytics, a CMP interacts within a broader ecosystem of marketing technologies, including a CMS, DXP, DAM, and distribution channels.”

Optimizely’s CMP offers similar capabilities. It allows teams to manage content from the initial campaign planning stage through production and distribution, creating a clear workflow for campaign execution.

With Optimizely CMP, you can plan and track your content projects, collaborate with teams, oversee production workflows, and publish to various channels, including your chosen CMS (such as Optimizely’s CMS).

“Optimizely’s Content Marketing Platform brings teams together to plan, collaborate, and execute campaigns, covering the entire content workflow—from brief to finalized content.”

WordPress, too, can function as a CMP when customized with plugins for collaboration, editorial workflows, and a centralized editorial dashboard.

Almost all the solutions on this list, when configured with CMP capabilities, support a strategic and unified approach to content marketing essential for organizations handling complex digital experiences. With CMP features, they offer seamless workflows that connect content ideation, production, and distribution—making it easier for marketing teams to maintain consistency, collaboration, and real-time alignment across multiple channels.

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So, there you have it: an overview of Sitecore’s competitors and what each brings to the table. 

To be fair, as a CMS, WordPress outshines Sitecore. When it comes to DXPs, WordPress’s CMS can serve as a strong foundation for a best-of-breed tech stack, enabling you to create a highly flexible and scalable digital experience platform. It’s also easily extensible as a CMP.

If you’re considering whether WordPress could be the right alternative to Sitecore for your unique needs, get in touch. We offer up to 20 hours of free consultation to help you explore how your digital strategy can improve while you make a move from Sitecore. Let’s talk.