Composable DXP vs monolithic DXP: The expert guide to legacy CMS migration

Are you finding that your digital experience platform is hindering your business's growth? For many enterprises, the initial promise of an all-in-one, monolithic Digital Experience Platform (DXP) has turned into a frustrating reality of technical debt and complexity. What was once a powerful solution has now become a barrier to innovation, slowing down both development and marketing teams. This has sparked a critical industry-wide debate: Composable DXP vs Monolithic DXP.

The struggle between traditional monolithic suites and the modern, flexible approach of a composable DXP is a significant challenge for today's IT and marketing leaders. Moving away from a legacy platform can seem daunting, but it is essential for future growth. This guide provides a practical, expert-driven roadmap for migrating from monolithic platforms such as Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) or Sitecore. It clarifies the process and provides a clear business case for making the switch.

We interviewed several of Magnolia's implementation partners, all of whom are experts in CMS migration projects. These include Marvin Kerkhoff, Senior Solution Architect at Arvato Systems, Riste Drangovski, Co-founder at Codeit Solution, Raphael Gomez, APAC Director and Jeremy Summers, CTO of Crescendo Collective, Bindya Raj, Vice President, Global Delivery Head Digital Experience & WongDoody at Infosys, Jake Tracey, Director at Noice, and Alec Bennet, CTO and Jon Weller, Senior Consultant DXP and Cloud at TBSCG. Each partner brings their own unique expertise and insights to the topic.

The appeal of using a single-vendor suite often hides long-term challenges. As business needs to evolve, these rigid systems struggle to adapt, leading to significant operational pain points and escalating costs. The partners we have interviewed, who are on the front lines of these digital transformation projects, consistently see clients facing the same set of issues.

One of the most significant challenges with legacy platforms is the sheer complexity they impose on technical teams. The need for highly specialized, and therefore expensive, developers creates a bottleneck for even simple tasks.

According to Jake Tracey, our leading partner expert from Noice, "Fielding a development team in something like a monolith is quite difficult because it is a highly specialized field. Their APIs are ancient now, and a lot of the documentation is quite poor and fragmented." Outdated and proprietary technology not only slows down development but also makes it difficult to attract and retain top talent who prefer working with modern, standards-based systems.

For marketing teams, according to Alec Bennett from TBSCG, it’s a “challenge that monoliths can do almost everything, but unlocking features often needs dev work. When customers need something niche, it’s hard to integrate other vendors because they’re locked in.” Raphael Gomez of Crescendo Collective recalls stories from a migration from Sitecore to Magnolia, where authors were mentioning how on their previous setup “they needed developers for every single thing”.

Beyond the initial licensing fees, the true total cost of ownership (TCO) for monolithic platforms can be staggering. The closed nature of these systems often leads to vendor lock-in, where businesses are forced into expensive and time-consuming upgrade cycles.

As Jake Tracey noted from a client experience, a seemingly standard upgrade from AEM 6.1 to 6.3 "required rewriting every dialogue, a massive hidden cost for clients." These unforeseen expenses are common. Riste Drangovski of Codeit Solution summarizes the sentiment shared by many businesses, stating that common frustrations with monolithic platforms include "high costs, insufficient support from vendors, and difficulties with integration."

To build a comprehensive business case, explore our detailed analysis in Composable DXP vs Monolithic DXP: The real Total Cost of Ownership.

Embarking on a legacy CMS migration requires a strategic shift in thinking. The market is moving away from the one-size-fits-all model and embracing a more flexible, best-of-breed-over-best-of-suite philosophy.

A successful migration begins not with technology, but with self-analysis. Before evaluating AEM alternatives or Sitecore alternatives, it's crucial to understand the specific pain points you need to solve.

Jake Tracey advises, "knowing the reasons that you're wanting to migrate really helps inform the decisions that you're going to make." This clarity is essential. As Riste Drangovski adds, organizations "need to understand why they want to migrate or what's the goal of the migration... [and] how open the new system will be so they don't get locked" into another restrictive vendor relationship.

A clear understanding of your goals will guide your selection process and ensure you choose a platform that truly enables your business.

A composable approach empowers you to build a powerful, future-proof tech stack by selecting the best tool for each specific need. This approach avoids the limitations of a single suite and allows for greater innovation.

The core benefit, as Jake Tracey explains, is that "By having open APIs it means that you don't have to rely on [a single vendor] to be the only entry point of your application. It's really like picking the right tool for the right problem." Bindya Raj from Infosys always advises clients that “best of breed DXP is like having a dream team”, where each module, just like a player in the team, is best in the class and tailored to deliver superior outcomes across the customer journey.

This freedom to choose enables a more agile and effective digital experience. Plus, it’s also about adaptability, “100% adaptability”, as Alec Bennett adds: “You know what you know today but you don't know where your business is going in the future. A composable stack allows you to cope with any level of change.”

Magnolia is designed to directly address the frustrations of monolithic systems. By offering a powerful, flexible, and developer-friendly platform, Magnolia empowers both IT and marketing teams to build exceptional customer experiences without the constraints of legacy technology.

Magnolia provides a modern development environment that accelerates onboarding and boosts productivity.

For a deeper technical comparison, read our full guide: Why developers are seeking monolith alternatives: A technical comparison.

A key advantage of Magnolia is its intuitive authoring interface, which gives marketing teams the autonomy they need to execute campaigns and initiatives quickly.

Learn more about how a composable CMS can transform your marketing efforts in our dedicated article: From handcuffed to empowered: How an agile CMS unlocks marketing velocity

Magnolia provides a pricing model that best fits your composability needs, from implementation to maintenance.

A migration to Magnolia is not a leap into the unknown. It's a structured process that leverages automation to deliver measurable business results quickly and efficiently.

Our partners have perfected methodologies that minimize manual effort and accelerate the migration timeline. Marvin Kerkhoff from Arvato Systems explains their approach: "We try to migrate everything in an automated fashion. We wrote a script that automatically pulls all of the pages, and then automatically creates them in Magnolia."

Such a process emphasizes early Magnolia integration, avoiding content pushes to old systems, especially for one-to-one migrations. Automation is crucial, with scripts generating the entire site map and transferring content with a single click. This method also manages risk by quickly transferring even older content and allows for parallel operation of old and new systems, facilitating a smooth, gradual transition beneficial for large, complex websites.

This automated approach yields dramatic results. A project that would have taken "half a year to do it manually" was completed in just "two months."

Automation not only helps cut manual content migration work, but it helps guarantee critical data is preserved and moved accurately.The team at Noice have the “AI-powered migration accelerator for this, which captures things like the SEO metadata, keywords, relationships”. So all of that that would have to be manually entered all the time is just an automated process.

The benefits of migrating to Magnolia extend far beyond technical improvements. Businesses see tangible improvements in key performance indicators.

Alec Bennett concludes that moving to Magnolia has been for one client “a rebirth of their digital experience platform as a whole.” This gained new traction within their leadership team, sparking discussions about targeting, personalization, and conversational search. “You can see the passion back in the organization. It really is that strong.”

Migrating from a costly, restrictive legacy CMS to a flexible, composable platform like Magnolia is not only achievable but essential for future growth. It unlocks developer potential, empowers marketing teams, and delivers a lower total cost of ownership. By leaving behind the monolithic model, you can build a seamless and unified digital experience that is ready for whatever comes next.