AEM → Contentful
Your release calendar shouldn't own your speed to market.
If a simple content change needs a developer and a deploy, that's not a quality gate — it's a tax. We move enterprise brands off Adobe Experience Manager onto Contentful, and run it with you after.
You already know why you're here
You already know why you're here
Speed to market
Speed to market
Simple changes take two to four times longer than they should. A seasonal campaign shouldn't wait on a deploy — but on AEM, somehow, it does.
Key-person risk
Key-person risk
Your velocity bottlenecks on one or two scarce AEM specialists. React and Next.js talent is abundant and built for iteration. You're one resignation away from a problem.
The dependency tax
The dependency tax
You're paying enterprise-platform money and still can't ship a landing page without a developer. That's the permanent cost of a monolith built to manage armies of people doing production work.
Be honest about what you're actually using.
Be honest about what you're actually using.
Adobe Experience Manager earns its price in exactly one case: you're all-in on Adobe Marketing Cloud — personalization, Target, campaign orchestration, the full profile graph — and using it hard. If that's you, keep it, and we'll tell you so. But most brands we talk to are paying for that entire ecosystem to run a content management system. If you're carrying AEM's weight, integration complexity, and infrastructure cost without leaning on Adobe's marketing machine, you're paying for the suite and using the CMS. That's the tell that it's time to leave.
Where the difference actually shows up
Where the difference actually shows up
Integrations
Integrations
AEM wants to own your data — syncing your whole SAP/commerce catalog into its repository, where pricing goes stale and the sync connector becomes a permanent line item. Contentful references the SKU and composes live data at the edge. The price on the page is the real price, with nothing to keep in sync.
Multi-brand velocity
Multi-brand velocity
Launching a brand on AEM means Multi-Site Manager, Live Copies, Java, and infrastructure — months of it. On Contentful you clone a content model into a new Space and point your existing design system at it. New brand sites in weeks, not quarters.
Performance
Performance
AEM's dispatcher-and-DAM stack fights you for Core Web Vitals. Contentful's CDN-first Images API serves modern formats and device-right sizes by default — green Lighthouse scores on image-heavy pages, without the optimization tax.
The real risk is standing still.
The real risk is standing still.
Marketing work is splitting in two: production is going to AI, judgment stays human. The legacy monoliths were built for the production era — to coordinate large teams doing manual work. Contentful is the infrastructure for what comes next. Treating this as "system A to system B" turns a strategic move into an IT chore. The strategic frame is simpler: the platform you're on was built for a way of working that's ending.
Migration used to be the scary part. AI changed that.
Migration used to be the scary part. AI changed that.
The migration cost curve has collapsed. On client work today, AI compresses development hours by 70–80%. Less dev means less dev risk — and course corrections that used to blow up timelines are now trivial. You can rehearse a migration before you commit to it. We proved it on ourselves: we replatformed thirdandgrove.com from Drupal to Contentful in 11 hours, with zero lines of human-written code — content model, full content and media migration, theme rebuild, and SEO cleanup. That was on February's AI models. It's faster today.
11 hrs
0
70–80%
We know AEM cold. We just don't sell it.
We know AEM cold. We just don't sell it.
Third and Grove has no AEM practice — and never will. But our VP of Engineering ran AEM engineering teams for years, so we know exactly what you're carrying and what it costs to leave — he wrote the definitive public breakdown of where each platform actually wins. Founded in 2013, we became one of the top Drupal shops in the world, then deliberately walked away from monolithic platforms to focus on Contentful. That's the seat a vendor can't hold: an independent partner who has actually run both platforms at scale, telling you the truth about the trade-offs. From Adobe it sounds like sour grapes. From us it's diligence.
A business case first, then a migration.
A business case first, then a migration.
Build the case
Build the case
A focused discovery or POC produces a board-ready case for change: the ROI math, the risk-of-inaction analysis, and a migration roadmap. The build doesn't earn budget — the case does.
Model the content
Model the content
We design a Contentful content model around how your team actually works — not a copy-paste of your AEM tree. Content model and visual layer become two faster, parallel tracks.
Migrate in phases
Migrate in phases
Section by section, both systems live. No big-bang cutover, no content freeze that drags on for a quarter. AI lets us rehearse before we commit.
Change management as a real track
Change management as a real track
The content production process will change — that's the point. We make process its own work track with its own owner, and we train your team to work the way marketers actually work now: alongside AI. Surprises kill replatforms. Change, planned for, doesn't.