AEM vs WordPress: Total cost of ownership & budgeting considerations

At rtCamp, we’ve seen that the single biggest Adobe Experience Manager vs WordPress criterion, especially when using only the AEM CMS (and not the DXP), is the total cost of ownership (TCO). Let’s zoom in.

You’ll often hear that AEM is the CMS solution for Fortune 500 brands—and it does power many Fortune 500 web stacks. As you can imagine, its pricing reflects its premium positioning.

Interestingly, though, even happy AEM users highlight how it’s quite expensive:

• AEM’s high licensing fees coupled with its expensive implementation process and the ongoing costs associated with maintenance, updates, and integrations are challenging. 
• And it’s not just about the technical costs it incurs—AEM also requires significant investments in training.
• It’s also seen that for many instances, AEM comes with more features than needed, requiring paying for capabilities that might go unused. Additionally, integrating external tools to meet evolving needs can be challenging—and often expensive—pushing businesses toward Adobe’s native solutions, which also come with high price tags.

Even when AEM delivers solid results and suits a business’s needs, users often question the platform’s cost burden and wonder if more cost-effective solutions exist. In many of these discussions, an alternative like WordPress rarely surfaces—primarily because it’s free, so recommending it doesn’t come with the same incentives. In contrast, CMS platforms like AEM and Sitecore often dominate recommendations, largely due to the incentives tied to their promotion. (There, we said it!)

At rtCamp, we migrate many AEM users to WordPress, and we frequently hear stories of businesses paying more for AEM than the returns justify. Even in its highest-rated reviews, where AEM is celebrated as a powerful digital experience enabler, concerns about its pricing are a recurring theme.

The real question here is about ROI: While AEM is a strong CMS solution, you need to assess whether the value it provides justifies the significant financial investment over the long term. This is especially important if you’re balancing budget considerations with the need for enterprise-level capabilities. 

Understanding your total cost of ownership (TCO) is central to ensuring that AEM’s costs justify the strategic benefits it brings. Otherwise, its pricing may start to outweigh its advantages.

If you compare AEM and WordPress from the TCO perspective, it quickly becomes clear why AEM tends to be much more expensive. AEM requires a significantly higher investment for everything—starting with initial deployment, including licensing and development costs, to extensibility, ongoing maintenance, updates, and long-term support—compared to WordPress. Let’s break down these costs to better understand why this is so.

Licensing, infrastructure, and implementation costs

These include the initial outlay for the platform. 

For AEM, this means a hefty licensing fee tied to Adobe’s proprietary nature, often running into hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, depending on the scale of your implementation. 

If you go with the self-hosted route, you’ll look at additional expenses for the different parts of your AEM infrastructure like servers, load balancers, databases, CDNs, and storage solutions. These costs can escalate quickly due to the resource-intensive nature of the platform. 

Alternatively, choosing AEM’s managed or cloud-hosted versions comes with a much heftier annual contract, bundling infrastructure and maintenance but being extremely investment-intensive.

AEM also takes substantial implementation costs due to the complexity of the platform. It often requires a team of highly specialized developers and consultants for the setting up. 

Let’s talk about WordPress now.

WordPress, being open-source, is free to use, which eliminates licensing fees entirely—a significant cost-saving advantage over AEM (and other proprietary platforms like Sitecore).

Self-hosted WordPress deployments are also economical compared to AEM, thanks simply to how WordPress works with a wide range of affordable database solutions and hosting providers. 

Managed WordPress hosting providers like WP VIP, Pantheon, and Pagely also provide enterprise hosting at considerably lower fees than AEM’s managed offerings. Finally, implementation costs for WordPress are also notably lower. Its widespread popularity means there’s a vast pool of developers and agencies experienced in setting up and customizing WordPress sites—of all scales.

Custom development, integrations, and customizations costs

Custom development in AEM can significantly add to your total cost of ownership (TCO), both upfront and ongoing.

Custom development

If you’re only using the AEM CMS, you may eventually need features that aren’t included out of the box. 

Forms, for instance. If you’re only using the AEM CMS, you don’t get a built-in forms functionality. To address it, you have two primary options. You can either get AEM Forms. AEM Forms is a separate product within Adobe’s ecosystem designed for advanced form handling. Or, you could develop a custom forms solution for your AEM instance. 

However, custom development in AEM can be costly and complex due to its specific tech stack, including Sling models, OSGi configurations, and JCR repository requirements. The specialized skill set needed to work with AEM’s architecture also increases development and maintenance costs. You need to factor in all such custom development in your TCO.

To give you some perspective, the average annual salary for a frontend AEM developer typically ranges around $119,356, while that of a fullstack WordPress developer is $98,266 per year:

Let’s now look at the impact of integrations on your TCO for both platforms.

Integrations

As your business grows, so do your CMS needs. AEM’s costs can escalate quickly as you integrate more of Adobe’s suite to your setup. These comprise both licensing fees—already high for Adobe’s solutions—and development costs. Development costs, too, are substantial as AEM needs you to hire Adobe-certified developers and expensive professional services. Also, while Adobe makes AEM’s  integrations within the Adobe ecosystem as seamless as possible, integrating tools or platforms outside the Adobe suite can be complex and development-intensive.

WordPress, in contrast, doesn’t tie you to any proprietary ecosystem. In fact, integrations are one area where WordPress truly excels. 

While AEM focuses on compatibility within the Adobe environment, WordPress is designed for flexibility. You can seamlessly integrate your existing tech stack with WordPress—it’s built to offer this freedom. This means you can choose alternatives that offer the best value for money.

You also save on development costs as WordPress benefits from a vast community of developers and agencies worldwide, offering a range of expertise at competitive rates. 

Customizations

Customizations, too, can add significantly to your TCO for both AEM and WordPress.

When it comes to AEM, every enterprise or large-scale setup will use a host of customizations. These can be:

• Component customizations: AEM uses a component-based design. Depending on your needs, you may want to customize these components. 
• Workflows: You may also want to customize AEM’s workflows to better suit your internal processes.
• Design customizations: You may also customize page designs to match your enterprise branding.

Again, these customizations often require Adobe-certified developers or teams familiar with its proprietary tools (e.g., Sling, OSGi). Rates for such specialists are premium, driving up your TCO. 

Even with a WordPress setup, you’ll need similar customizations. You may need custom post types, workflows, custom themes, and more. But that said, the WordPress ecosystem has a vast pool of developers trained in its entire tech stack, making talent a lot more accessible and affordable. A lot of times, many requirements can be met with off-the-shelf plugins substantially reducing the development costs.

Updates, maintenance, and training costs

Both CMSs incur significant costs for updates and maintenance based on the scale of implementation.

Updates

Updating to a newer version of AEM often incurs substantial costs due to its complex architecture and reliance on Adobe-certified expertise. AEM updates typically require:

• Extensive development resources: Updates are rarely straightforward and often involve hiring Adobe-certified developers or professional services. These specialists ensure compatibility with existing customizations and integrations, but their expertise comes at a high cost. Also, if you use the fresh installation method to update your AEM infrastructure, this would involve setting up the latest AEM version from scratch while migrating your existing content, components, and configurations manually or using migration tools. All of this translates to an even higher need for development bandwidth. 
• Testing and migration: Moving to a new version involves extensive testing and migration of content and configurations, adding to project timelines and expenses.
• Infrastructure adjustments: Updates may necessitate changes to infrastructure components such as servers or databases to meet new version requirements, increasing the overall cost. In fact, you may also be pushed to newer AEM plans because of these. 

Even with WordPress, your updates will be more resource-intensive if you’ve a large-scale setup but will still be significantly more economical than AEM. This ties back to how WordPress works:

• Ease of updates: Core WordPress updates are designed to be simple. Moreover, managed hosting providers frequently offer automatic updates, further reducing the effort and cost. WordPress updates don’t feel like replatforming exercises that they often feel like in CMSs like AEM. They’re more agile. 
• Infrastructure flexibility: WordPress updates typically don’t demand extensive infrastructure changes. Also, WordPress’s compatibility with a wide range of enterprise hosting environments makes scaling more straightforward.
• Development resources: When developer involvement is needed—for complex setups or custom themes—WordPress’s popularity means there’s a large pool of affordable talent to draw from, significantly lowering costs compared to AEM.

Maintenance

AEM is significantly more resource-intensive when it comes to maintenance. That’s because its very specialized tech stack often necessitates specialized expertise for even routine maintenance. These recurring demands can drive up costs over time, making AEM a less cost-effective choice for organizations focused on managing long-term operational expenses.

Customizations need maintenance too, adding to the overall TCO.

The same applies to optimizations as well. AEM would need Adobe-certified developers or partners to fine-tune the system, which can be costly.

Training

When it comes to training, onboarding new users, continuous education, and admin training are all more expensive for AEM compared to WordPress. For more on this, skip to the operational considerations section where we explore this topic in greater depth.