Migrate from Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) to Magnolia

A successful migration is built on a clear understanding of the technical relationship between AEM and Magnolia. While different in their approach, their shared foundations are what make a structured migration feasible.

The migration path is significantly de-risked because both platforms are built on a common Java heritage:

Understanding the differences in their architecture is key to designing your new, more flexible environment in Magnolia.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to migration. Based on your business drivers, you can choose from two distinct strategies – each designed to give you maximum efficiency according to your business and IT goals.

This strategy involves rebuilding your AEM components and templates natively in Magnolia, providing a clean slate to modernize your entire component architecture using Magnolia's Light Development principles. With Light Development, page templates, components, dialog definitions, theme and styling, and some integrations can be done with front-end technology, making Magnolia more accessible to your front-end developers, speeding up development without heavyweight Java builds. AI tools like Claude and Gemini can also reduce your cost and time to market drastically compared to traditional full manual approaches.

AEM component structures (dialog.xml, HTL scripts) are translated into their Magnolia equivalents (YAML definitions, FreeMarker templates or complete headless aproaches). This is an opportunity to consolidate your component library and eliminate technical debt.

For this path, an automated tool like the Migration Accelerator is the recommended approach. It replaces months of custom scripting with a fast, configuration-based workflow. The tool uses an AI-assisted interface to map content from the old AEM pages directly into your new Magnolia components, handling data transformation and cleanup automatically.

Organizations that want a complete architectural refresh, want to fully embrace Magnolia's modern development model, and whose priority is the speed and predictability of the migration project.
 

Prepare the new environment and CI/CD processes before development or migration.

This strategy is designed for organizations whose primary goal is to eliminate AEM licensing costs while reusing 100% of their existing AEM content and components and keep the light on. Further development is then continued on a renewed stack.

This revolutionary approach pairs the Magnolia CMS authoring interface with the open-source Apache Sling runtime. Your existing AEM components and content run on this compatible runtime, while a custom Integration Adapter allows Magnolia’s modern UI to edit and render them seamlessly. The adapter dynamically transforms AEM dialogs and injects the necessary metadata for Magnolia's editor to function. Additionally, it provides the missing parts in Apache Sling compared to a full AEM product. In this scenario, there is no "content migration," as the JCR is shared between the two systems. This approach provides a fully functional production ready setup for existing content, components and code.

No content migration tool is needed. The entire effort is focused on the one-time development of the integration adapter.

Under the hood AEM is built on top of the open-source Apache Sling framework. All core functionality for Java Runtime (OSGI Container), Java Content Repository (JCR Jackrabbit), Component Rendering (Sling Resources) and Content Package Management (FileVault) comes with Apache Sling. This framework can be embedded as an extension into the Magnolia CMS fully outside of an AEM instance and most importantly without the need for an AEM license. Therefore, it is possible to re-use existing code, components and content-packages without change and the need for component/content migration.

Of course, Apache Sling does not cover all features the AEM product provides. Most importantly, there is no support for authoring. This is covered by the “Integration Adapter” connecting the Magnolia authoring experience with the Apache Sling component rendering. Whereas for standard AEM dialog definitions the dialog transformation can be done dynamically on the fly, there might be custom dialog enhancements in the project that need to be addressed individually. To avoid migration effort the integration adapter can be tailored to address the project's special needs already in the integration adapter itself.
 

Large enterprises with a massive, standardized AEM component ecosystem where a rebuild is financially or logistically unfeasible at the moment of the decision to move off AEM, and the primary business driver is immediate and drastic reduction of TCO. Typically this strategy is used to keep the light on and provide business continuity and no further development is required. New implementations are typically done on a clean slate at a later stage (or can even be continued on this hybrid setup).

Prepare the new environment and CI/CD processes before development or migration.

There is nothing to do here, since all component/content packages are reused without change.
 

The path from AEM to Magnolia is flexible. Your business objectives should dictate your technical strategy.

Whether you seek a complete platform refresh, or a revolutionary hybrid solution to maximize reuse, there is a proven and technically robust strategy to achieve your goals with Magnolia.
 

Schedule a free, no-obligation discovery call with a migration expert to map out your journey.