When Adobe CQ5 hit end of life, Videojet, an industrial printing equipment manufacturer, had two options: upgrade to the current AEM, or leave. Their operation at that time covered 28 websites in 22 languages, and migrating off AEM cost less than staying on it.

That’s not unusual. The typical enterprise deploys 30–40% of licensed DXP functionality and pays for the rest anyway. And each major version upgrade is a near-full reimplementation, priced accordingly. 

The cost compounds because after years of custom components, integrations, editor training, and internal processes built around a platform, switching starts to feel prohibitively expensive. Even when the numbers favor migration, the accumulated investment creates a strong desire to stay.

To help you decide whether to keep your DXP or migrate elsewhere, we’ll break down why the DXP price is what it is and what it adds up to over five years compared to open-source CMS like WordPress.

TL;DR

Why DXP pricing works the way it does

Most articles comparing DXP and CMS platforms spend 80% of the word count on features. They talk about personalization, Digital Asset Management, A/B testing, multichannel delivery, and many more capabilities DXPs offer. But they don’t cover the cost architecture that makes DXPs expensive by design.

DXPs are paid, licensed software, which means the vendor owns the source code and controls the roadmap. When Adobe decides it needs a new cloud architecture, the cost of moving to it falls on you. Something similar happens with Sitecore or any other DXP. If it restructures its product tiers, your contract reflects that at renewal. And you can’t go back to the vendor and say “we only used 40% of this, we’d like to pay 40% of the price.” The only real negotiating position is threatening to leave, and the vendor knows that after years of custom builds and trained editors, leaving is painful enough that most teams don’t follow through.

With 300+ enterprise migration projects under our belt, we gave this cost pattern a name – the Platform Tax.

The Platform Tax, or the price of depending on someone else’s roadmap

The Platform Tax is our framework that captures the cumulative cost of staying on a vendor-controlled platform. It has four components:

None of these costs appear as a line item on the renewal invoice. They accumulate in engineering hours, delayed campaigns, and implementation budgets that keep getting reopened. Most teams don’t add them up until an end-of-life notice or a failed upgrade. And then the calculation is unavoidable. But the moment that forces it is different on every platform.

Platform-by-platform cost triggers: What makes the bill grow

We’re not here to put an exact price tag on each platform and its modules. Most vendors don’t publish their pricing, and the final number depends on many factors. We’ll focus on the underlying economics because each platform has its own way of becoming more expensive over time.

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)

Based on our analysis across AEM migration engagements, AEM’s annual license runs $80,000–$300,000 before hosting, developers, or support. That’s the starting point, and for most enterprise teams, it’s the smallest part of the total cost.

The bigger number is the upgrade. AEM 6.5 core support ends in 2027. From here, you have two paths within the Adobe ecosystem: move to AEM as a Cloud Service (AEMaaCS) or upgrade to AEM 6.5 LTS. Shifting to AEMaaCS is functionally identical to a full migration because the architecture changed, and none of the custom work your team built for AEM 6.5 carries over. The so-called upgrade costs as much as migrating off the platform entirely would have. 

LTS is the lighter option, but where is the guarantee it won’t end in 2028? The question remains open.

Remember the Videojet case from the intro? The company faced exactly this kind of decision. It could upgrade to the latest AEM, invest in it like it’s a full migration, and continue paying substantial licensing fees. Or it could migrate to a new platform. When the numbers were laid out, the decision wasn’t hard. rtCamp migrated all 28 sites to WordPress VIP, built custom DAM features, and completed the project with zero marketing downtime. 

So when you think it’s easier to stay on AEM, make sure the upgrade cost is in your calculation. For a deeper comparison of what AEM and WordPress look like side by side, our breakdown covers the full picture.

Sitecore

Sitecore XP bundles personalization, CDP, marketing automation, and analytics into a single license. You pay for all of it, whether your team uses it or not. In one Reddit discussion, a developer with nearly twenty years of Sitecore experience described the platform as “too complex for its own good” and said it includes “features nobody really uses.” 

Sitecore’s answer to this is XM Cloud, a composable SaaS platform where Sitecore manages the infrastructure. The problem is getting there. Moving from XP to XM Cloud isn’t a version update. Sitecore’s own documentation notes that existing implementations often need backend refactoring and front-end rebuilds, and some capabilities available in XP don’t survive the transition.

None of this means Sitecore is a bad platform. But for organizations paying for capabilities they don’t use, the unused portion compounds at every renewal. And escaping it means absorbing a migration that Sitecore calls an upgrade.

If that’s where you are, this breakdown of Sitecore alternatives maps the options.

Kentico

The story with Kentico is very similar to what we saw with AEM. Kentico Xperience 13 reaches the end of life in December 2026. After that, support ends. So even if you’re satisfied with the platform today, a transition is already on the horizon. And for many teams, it won’t be the first one.

The migration from Kentico Xperience 13 to the current version, Xperience by Kentico (XbyK), broke backward compatibility. Code that worked on Xperience 13 doesn’t work on XbyK. So teams that upgraded to Xperience 13 are now being asked to do it again, and the cost of moving approaches what a full platform migration would have cost them the first time.

This is another example of what we call the Platform Tax. You paid to upgrade once, and the next upgrade costs as much as leaving would have. Except now you’ve spent the budget, absorbed the disruption, and you’re still on Kentico. For teams weighing Kentico against WordPress, our in-depth comparison might be a useful starting point.

We’ve already done migrations from Kentico. One of them is for VinSolutions, part of Cox Automotive. During that project, we helped our client migrate to WordPress VIP multisite, redesigned their platform with Gutenberg and Elementor page builder, and preserved every SEO page rank. As a result, Core Web Vitals improved by 48%.

Drupal

Unlike AEM, Sitecore, and Kentico, Drupal is open source. There are no licensing fees or vendor renewal invoices. But that doesn’t mean the cost of maintaining a Drupal platform disappears.

Drupal 7 reached end of life in January 2025. Teams still on it are now running unsupported software. Drupal 10 follows, reaching end of life in December 2026, when Drupal 12 is released. Each major version demands significant developer effort. Themes, modules, and custom code often need to be updated or reworked. So every few years, you have to invest in another upgrade cycle or allow technical debt to build up.

There is no vendor collecting rent, but each new Drupal version requires engineering work to stay on a supported release. That’s not an argument against Drupal. Its open-source model gives organizations more control over where they spend their budget, but “open source” and “free” are not the same thing. The same is true of WordPress. Our article describes where the two open-source platforms differ. 

Rather than waiting for Drupal 9’s end of life, our client FleetNet America, part of Cox Automotive, decided to migrate to WordPress VIP multisite with rtCamp. We completed the migration in a matter of weeks without downtime. Page speed score went from 48 to 93, and Core Web Vitals, previously failing, passed.

Arc XP

Arc XP is different from every other platform on this list. Built primarily for publishers and media organizations, it follows a SaaS model where pricing scales with usage. As traffic and audience size grow, so does the bill. Success becomes more expensive, even when the underlying technology and feature set remain unchanged. Based on our experience, organizations can spend anywhere from $100,000 to more than $4 million annually on Arc XP.

Usage-based pricing would be easier to justify if platform risk stayed constant. But that’s not always the case. Arc XP has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs, including a workforce reduction of roughly 25% in September 2024.

When your publishing operation depends on a platform, you also depend on the team behind it. So vendor resilience is one more variable to weigh when deciding whether the cost of staying on Arc XP makes sense. The natural next question is what the alternative looks like, and our Arc XP vs WordPress comparison answers it.

If the sections above covered more detail than you needed, here’s everything condensed to one line per platform.

The cost trigger, by platformAEMUpgrade to AEM as a Cloud Service = near-full reimplementationSitecoreLicensing tiers force you to pay for capabilities you’ll never deployKenticoBackward compatibility broke, teams have to replatform againDrupalOpen-source, but each major version is a significant rebuildArc XPUsage-based pricing means your platform cost scales with your traffic

With the five platforms above, the cost isn’t what you agreed to pay. Open-source WordPress works differently. It isn’t free, but the cost structure doesn’t have a vendor on the other end of it.

What enterprise WordPress costs and who controls that number

Enterprise WordPress requires real investment. Infrastructure, senior engineering for architecture, custom builds, and ongoing maintenance, none of that disappears because the license does.

The difference is who controls the cost.

On a DXP, the renewal invoice arrives with a number the vendor set. Upgrade cycles that require near-full reimplementation aren’t optional. You either absorb them or fall behind on security and support.

On WordPress, the cost is in what you choose to build. There is no renewal invoice or forced upgrade cycle. WordPress has maintained backward compatibility, so core updates run automatically, and what your team builds in year one still runs in year five.

When we compare DXP vs CMS in the five-year perspective, we’ll see that the Platform Tax doesn’t just add up, it compounds. Licensing, upgrade cycles, and consultant dependency put DXP’s 5-year TCO between $900,000 and $1.8M+. WordPress has none of those line items because you pay only for engineering.

So you don’t end up with a mess in your head about what costs what, let’s sum it up.

DXP (AEM/Sitecore/
Kentico)CMS (WordPress)LicensingExpensive licensing tiers, $80K–$300K/year (AEM). Zero. Open-source, no license fee.UpgradesEach major version = near-full reimplementation. Upgrade cost approaches migration cost.Core updates are backward-compatible. No forced upgrade cycles.% used30–40% of licensed features in typical enterprise deployment.You build what you need. No unused modules.5-yr TCO$900K–$1.8M+ (license + consultants + upgrade cycles).Engineering cost only. No vendor rent.OwnershipVendor-controlled. Keys held by the platform.You own the infrastructure.

If the table above has you leaning toward WordPress, you’re probably thinking about implementation. We recommend reading our guide on how to implement a WordPress-powered DXP, starting with the WordPress CMS at the core.

Make sure what you’re paying is worth what you’re running

DXPs aren’t expensive because they can do more. In many cases, companies pay for far more functionality than they use. And once a platform becomes deeply embedded, renewing often feels safer than changing, even when the math says otherwise. And the vendors who built these platforms know it.

Enterprise WordPress, properly architected, scales to the same level as the platforms on this list. We’ve built at that scale for Al Jazeera, Penske Media, Private Media, and Cox Automotive, among others. rtCamp has been doing this since 2009, with WordPress VIP Gold Partner status and ISO 27001 v2022 certification behind every engagement. So when the next renewal cost arrives, ask if what you’re currently running is worth what you’re currently paying. And what you’ll pay to stay current over the next five years.

TL;DR

Why DXP pricing works the way it does

The Platform Tax, or the price of depending on someone else's roadmap

Platform-by-platform cost triggers: What makes the bill grow

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)

Sitecore

Kentico

Drupal

Arc XP

What enterprise WordPress costs and who controls that number

Make sure what you're paying is worth what you're running

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CMS, DXP

Credits

Aviral

Aviral Mittal

Author

Aviral Mittal

Author

Aviral Mittal is the Chief Marketing Officer at rtCamp, where he established and leads the marketing function, building and growing a team of 20+ specialists across content, SEO, design, and growth…

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Contributions and Updates: Usama Usama Usama Quraishi Marketing Executive , Abhijit Abhijit Abhijit Prabhudan Technical Writer

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