Alium Research

Top complaints about CMS platforms

CMS platforms — Adobe Experience Manager, WordPress, Contentful and Sitecore in these interviews — draw complaints about changes that need developers, rigid templates and missing capabilities, clunky authoring, cost that climbs, performance and security concerns, and platforms that feel dated. Cost splits the licensed platforms from WordPress, and performance and security concerns come up most on WordPress. Six complaints, which platform draws which, and which ones put the contract in play.

By Roy Dungo, Operations · Alium Research From hundreds of verified buyer interviews Interviews through October 2026 Updated October 26, 2026

Based on verified interviews with the buyers who select and operate these platforms, at DTC and enterprise brands. Buyers are anonymized before publication; vendor names and views are reported as given. No vendor paid to appear or could edit this page.

Ask buyers what frustrates them about their CMS and two complaints come up on every platform: changes that need a developer or specialist, and templates or capabilities that will not stretch to what the team wants to publish. Behind those come authoring that feels clunky for marketers, cost that climbs with scale, performance, maintenance and security concerns, and platforms that feel dated. The platforms divide in two clear ways. Cost is a complaint about the licensed platforms — Adobe Experience Manager, Contentful and Sitecore — and rarely about WordPress, whose users instead raise performance, plugins and security — which is a difference in what buyers complain about, not a comparison of total cost. Rigid templates and missing capabilities are the complaint behind most completed moves. Most of the evidence comes from those four platforms. For the ratings and the pre-purchase view, see what headless CMS buyers wish they'd known.

7.2/10
Adobe Experience Manager's buyer rating — the platform with the most complaints here, most often that changes need developers or IT.
7.2/10
WordPress's rating — the same score; its users rarely raise direct software costs, and most often raise performance and security concerns.
Rigid
Templates and capabilities that won't stretch: the complaint raised on every platform, and the one behind most completed moves.
Which CMS platform earns which complaint A qualitative map from the interview corpus. A filled dot marks a complaint commonly raised by a platform's own users; a hollow dot marks one raised less often. Users of Adobe Experience Manager, WordPress, Contentful and Sitecore all commonly raise changes that need developers, rigid templates and missing capabilities, and clunky authoring. Cost is commonly raised by Adobe Experience Manager, Contentful and Sitecore users and less often by WordPress users. Performance and security concerns are commonly raised by WordPress users and less often by the others. A dated platform is raised less often by users of all four. AEM WordPress Contentful Sitecore Changes need developers Rigid, missing capabilities Clunky authoring Cost that climbs Performance and security Dated, not keeping pace commonly raisedraised less oftennot raised
Where each platform's own users raise each complaint — a qualitative read, not a score; a complaint counts as common when roughly a fifth or more of that platform's complaining users raise it. AEM is Adobe Experience Manager. The two rows that split the platforms are direct software cost, which WordPress users rarely raise, and performance and security concerns, which they raise most. WordPress's authoring cell and Sitecore's dated cell sit near the line, and Sitecore rests on fewer buyers than the other three, so its column moves with a single company. Drupal, Contentstack and other platforms have too few complaining users here to chart.
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The six complaints — graded

Each complaint is classified by how buyers in these interviews typically respond: tolerating the issue, working around it, waiting for the vendor, or reconsidering the contract. These are observed responses, not fixed severity ratings; the same limitation may be manageable for one company and unacceptable for another.

Complaint 01 Often handled internally — by hiring for it

Changes need developers or specialists

Raised on every platform, and most of all on Adobe Experience Manager. One AEM user says “it requires us to use IT to put the words on the page and then they have to have a release”; a Sitecore user that “you really need to invest in having team members who have specialized training in Sitecore”; a WordPress user that “I need to rely on developers to build those blocks.” Buyers mostly staff for it — dedicated platform managers, specialist hires, agencies on retainer — and it rarely moves a contract on its own.

Named for this: Adobe Experience Manager · Sitecore · Contentful · WordPress · Drupal

Complaint 02 Puts the contract in play — behind most completed moves

Rigid templates and missing capabilities

The complaint about capabilities and content structures that do not accommodate what a team needs to publish. Buyers describe restrictive templates, slow component development and gaps in workflow, personalization or preview. Some limitations reflect the capabilities available in the product or the buyer's configuration; others stem from the content models, templates and components their teams or agencies built. A Contentful user finds “it's hard to make a template that's not too restrictive for teams,” and another that “There's just a long road to creating those new components.” An AEM user says “The workflow engine that's built into Adobe Experience Manager is not very good,” and a WordPress chief marketer concludes “we have probably outgrown the Wordpress tool and should probably rebuild it on a different platform.” This complaint is raised most often by Contentful's users here and is the most frequently cited reason for completed CMS moves in these interviews. Those moves reflect requirements buyers could not meet satisfactorily with their existing implementations, not necessarily capabilities that every deployment of the same platform lacks.

Named for this: Contentful · Sitecore · Adobe Experience Manager · WordPress · Contentstack

Complaint 03 Often worked around

Clunky, slow authoring for marketers

The complaint from the people who publish. “At least the user or the authoring part of the CMS is very bad,” says one AEM user; a Sitecore user lists “the user experience, which is a bit outdated, and the slowness of the platform at times.” It peaks on Sitecore. Buyers rarely leave over it alone; they work around it, with feeds that push content in from other systems, simplified front ends, and in one case a team that “built a proprietary CMS within AEM to have other users publish content.”

Named for this: Sitecore · Contentful · Adobe Experience Manager · WordPress · Contentstack

Complaint 04 Puts the contract in play

Cost that climbs with scale

Cost complaints concentrate on Adobe Experience Manager, Contentful and Sitecore, whose users in these interviews describe licensing, implementation expenses or limited value for the price. WordPress buyers rarely raise direct software costs, although that does not mean their implementations are free to operate: hosting, plugins, development and ongoing maintenance can still contribute to total costs. An AEM user calls it “very expensive with high licensing and implementation costs, and it requires significant technical resources”; a Contentful user says “for what we pay and for what it does, it could be either more robust or it could be less expensive.” Cost is behind most of the moves away from Contentful in these interviews, and it is the reason named most often in planned and evaluated moves.

Named for this: Adobe Experience Manager · Contentful · Sitecore

Complaint 05 Mostly tolerated — security is the exception

Performance, maintenance and security concerns

These concerns come up most often among WordPress buyers. They describe slow page loads, plugin or update-related breakage, and security maintenance that requires ongoing attention. The underlying causes can vary by hosting environment, theme, plugins and implementation, so these experiences do not establish that every WordPress site is inherently slow or insecure. “Anything involving any movement on the page is just slow,” says one WordPress user. Other platforms draw it less often, though one AEM user describes “a lot of the glitchiness in the system, publishing glitches, user access and administrative issues.” Most buyers address performance and maintenance problems within their existing implementations. Security concerns contributed to some completed departures from WordPress and Drupal, although those decisions reflect the buyers' specific environments and requirements rather than proving that another CMS is universally more secure — one company that moved to Adobe Experience Manager for security found its pages loaded more slowly.

Named for this: WordPress · Adobe Experience Manager · Drupal

Complaint 06 Often waited out

Dated, and not keeping pace

The smallest of the six: platforms that feel old, or behind on AI and answer engines. “It just seems like it's kind of archaic,” says a WordPress user; another doubts it addresses answer engine optimization. An Adobe Experience Manager user puts it more bluntly: “I think the technology is old. There are smarter solutions.” Buyers mostly wait for their vendor's roadmap rather than move; it is named in only a couple of completed moves, and on Sitecore it mostly comes from teams running older versions.

Named for this: WordPress · Adobe Experience Manager · Sitecore

Who leaves, and why? Completed moves in these interviews most often follow rigid templates or missing capabilities, with cost next; cost leads in planned and evaluated moves. Each platform's leavers go somewhere different. Sitecore users most often moved to Adobe Experience Manager. Adobe Experience Manager users scattered — to headless platforms, newsroom systems and in-house builds. Contentful users moved to lighter and cheaper options. WordPress users moved up-market, to Adobe Experience Manager or Optimizely, or consolidated onto a suite they already ran.

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The stories behind the complaints

A consumer packaged goods company's ecommerce leader finds Sitecore hard going: “It is just so slow. It is nearly impossible to get anything done, and very simple tasks are extremely time consuming.” The team built around it rather than through it, setting up a product-data feed into Sitecore so that it would not have to do the work inside the platform. Leaving is on the table for part of the business but not all of it: “So it's something that would be a very heavy lift for teams to change.” SVP, ecommerce and digital marketing · consumer packaged goods company
A large insurer moved sites off WordPress onto Adobe Experience Manager for security, and traded one complaint for another. “My only criticism of AEM is it's like the code is clunky,” the digital marketing lead says, “when we've moved our sites onto AEM, they load slower.” The buyer is careful about where the fault lies: “maybe it's the way our team is using it.” Associate director, digital marketing · large insurer
A consumer subscription company's product lead finds Contentful too slow to experiment with: “it takes so long to build a page,” and the team is “having to do it manually versus being able to treat it like a headless server.” The cost is in testing: “if you have a system that's siloed and not as flexible, it makes it difficult to test and experiment at scale.” Director of product · consumer subscription company

The counter-current: the build is often part of the problem

CMS buyers put part of the blame on their own implementation more than most. “The main weakness is, unfortunately, largely due to us, not Contentful,” says one; a Magnolia user thinks “it's probably more on the setup of the instance and the way that it was implemented for us rather than any true issue with Magnolia itself.” Each platform has what its users value: Adobe Experience Manager's integration with the rest of Adobe's suite and its governance across brands; Contentful's instant publishing — “Changes in Contentful become available to our users immediately”; and WordPress's ease for marketers, which “doesn't require deep technical knowledge from a coding perspective to make simple updates.” What keeps unhappy buyers in place is the size of the move: “I think we're gonna stick with WordPress because it'll be a big project to move away from at this point.” Before you conclude the platform is the problem, separate what the vendor controls — licensing, authoring, capabilities — from what depends on your build, your agency and your content model.

What this means — whether you run one or you're buying one

If you already run a CMS, most complaints are handled internally or worked around: buyers hire for the developer dependence, build feeds and front ends around clunky authoring, and add security and performance tools in front of the site. Rigid templates and cost are different, because they are the complaints most likely to end in a move. If you're evaluating one, our recommendations — not practices buyers describe — are to have a marketer, not a developer, build a page and a new component during the trial; to compare total cost of ownership, including licensing, hosting, integrations, implementation, plugins and the development or maintenance resources required, not just the CMS subscription; to test page speed and publishing on your own content; and to decide your content model before choosing the platform, since much of what buyers blame on the tool traces back to the build. For cost, see what buyers actually pay for a CMS; for where buyers go, Adobe Experience Manager alternatives, Contentful alternatives, Sitecore alternatives and WordPress alternatives.

Common questions

What are the most common complaints about CMS platforms?

Among the Adobe Experience Manager, WordPress, Contentful and Sitecore users in these interviews, six complaints recur: changes need developers or specialists; templates are rigid or capabilities are missing; authoring is clunky and slow for marketers; cost climbs with scale; performance, maintenance and security concerns; and the platform feels dated. Rigid templates and missing capabilities are the complaint behind most completed moves, and cost is the one named most often in planned and evaluated ones.

What are the biggest complaints about Adobe Experience Manager?

Adobe Experience Manager users in these interviews most often say changes need developers or IT, that its authoring and workflow are clunky, and that it is expensive to license and implement. Many also value its integration with the rest of Adobe's suite and its governance across brands and markets.

What are the biggest complaints about WordPress?

WordPress users in these interviews most often describe performance, maintenance and security concerns, often involving plugins, updates and hosting, and that they rely on developers or agencies to build what they need. Direct software cost rarely comes up, though hosting, plugins, development and maintenance still carry costs; ease of use for marketers is what its users praise.

What are the biggest complaints about Contentful?

Contentful users in these interviews most often say its templates and content models are rigid, so new pages and components need an engineer, and that its cost becomes hard to justify. Several buyers attribute part of the problem to their own implementation, and its instant publishing is what its users praise.

Why do companies switch CMS platforms?

In these interviews, completed moves most often follow rigid templates or missing capabilities, and cost is named most often in planned and evaluated moves. The directions differ by platform: Sitecore users most often moved to Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Experience Manager users scattered to headless, newsroom or in-house platforms, Contentful users moved to lighter and cheaper options, and WordPress users moved up-market. Many unhappy users stay because a migration is a large project.

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Methodology. Alium conducts verified interviews with software buyers — the digital, ecommerce, marketing and product leaders who select and run these platforms. This page aggregates what users of content management systems say about the platforms they run, in interviews conducted through October 2026, focusing on the complaints they raise about a named platform in their own words and what they did about them. Only complaints by current or former users about content management itself are counted; complaints about a vendor's search, personalization, commerce or analytics products, and from prospects, are excluded. Most of the evidence comes from Adobe Experience Manager, WordPress, Contentful and Sitecore users. Complaints are counted by company and coded by theme; they are editorial codings of interview content, not survey scores. Ratings are averages of verified buyer ratings; the full table is on the headless CMS lessons page. Buyer identities are verified at interview time and anonymized before publication; vendor names are reported as given. No vendor paid to appear or was able to edit this page.