·¬ÇÑÉçÇø

CMS resources
CMS comparison hub
Back to CMS comparison hub

Making the move off Adobe AEM: 3 brands enjoying the best CMS alternative to Adobe AEM

Brightspot CMS case study promo: Sotheby's

Upgrade your digital game with Brightspot, the Adobe AEM alternative you've been looking for.


If your business is tethered to a complicated content management system (CMS) like Adobe's Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), it’s time to break the chains.

After all, Adobe AEM is notoriously challenging to adopt, difficult to deploy and expensive to manage. Its archaic foundation typically requires heavy IT involvement and nine- to 18-month implementation cycles. Not only that, but Adobe AEM offers fewer than a dozen out-of-the-box integrations.

When you’re developing and managing high-volume, multichannel content production workflows, it’s impractical to expend valuable resources on cumbersome CMS upkeep. You need a user-friendly, integration-ready, cost-effective solution—a powerful Adobe AEM alternative.

As you weigh your CMS options, consider the case of three brands that left Adobe AEM behind for a better solution.

Discover how Sotheby's, TV Azteca and Scripps found the best alternative to Adobe AEM and transformed their digital experiences.

Sotheby's: Transforming an art-world institution for the digital age

Digital CMS Mobile Example

The art world has embraced digital transformation—and Sotheby's was at the forefront of this shift. Seeking to provide an exceptional online experience for its discerning clientele, Sotheby's faced challenges with its legacy AEM platform. They needed a CMS solution that would support their digital innovation and offer flexibility without excessive development support.

Enter Brightspot. Sotheby's made a pivotal decision to transition from print catalogs to a dynamic digital format. With Brightspot's CMS, they were able to breathe new life into over 600 annual exhibitions, incorporating various media-rich formats and content types, including embedded videos. Seamlessly integrated with Sotheby's auction engine, users can seamlessly navigate between editorial pages and auction listings, ensuring a cohesive experience.

Managing millions of assets became effortless with Brightspot's digital asset manager, empowering editorial teams to access and organize content using associated metadata and descriptions. Since 2020, Sotheby's content team has successfully published over 900 digital catalogs, 5,000 articles and 2,200 videos. An impressive 85% of auctions now rely solely on digital catalogs, resulting in substantial savings for the company.

Sotheby's website boasts a dynamic calendar, enabling users to easily filter, sort and search for ongoing and upcoming auction sales and exhibitions. Artist- and brand-specific features simplify searches based on individual interests. Furthermore, Brightspot enables Sotheby's to effortlessly produce and present content in multiple languages, allowing users to switch between languages seamlessly using the global language switcher and page-level translation switcher.

Thanks to Brightspot, Sotheby's has successfully embraced digital transformation, providing an unparalleled online experience for art enthusiasts while achieving significant cost savings and streamlining content management processes.

TV Azteca: Boosting efficiency and reducing costs

TV Azteca broadcaster

Your CMS should solve problems, not create them. But for TV Azteca—Mexico’s second-largest mass media company and one of the top producers of Spanish-language television programming in the world—Adobe AEM had become costly and time-consuming, inhibiting the company’s digital innovation.

So, the multimedia conglomerate chose the best alternative to Adobe AEM—Brightspot CMS. By relaunching six sites and six headless apps on Brightspot, TV Azteca was able to consolidate its multisite publishing into one CMS solution. Now, the company can manage all sites and apps—including the content and styling for each—from a single authoring point.

This has enabled the multimedia giant to boost ease of publishing and efficiency for its editorial teams, while also reducing costs. Not only that, but the Brightspot platform also optimizes artificial intelligence, big data tools and other integrations that allow TV Azteca to remain competitive as a high-volume publisher in an evolving digital landscape.

With this Adobe AEM alternative, TV Azteca’s content creators and developers are enjoying significantly greater power, freedom and agility. The icing on the cake? Replatforming on Brightspot has saved the global media company about $1 million annually.

Scripps: Reinventing the editorial experience for one of the nation’s largest broadcasters

Brightspot CMS case study: Scripps

It’s no surprise that Scripps—one of the nation’s largest broadcasters—outgrew Adobe AEM. With a portfolio of 61 television stations in 41 markets across the United States, the news media publisher needed to reinvent the editorial experience for its digital content contributors. It was time to modernize the digital newsroom.

Enter Brightspot, the best alternative to Adobe AEM. Not only does this powerful solution provide Scripps reporters with a fast and reliable way to file breaking news and other local stories, but it also gives editors and producers an accessible and intuitive editorial interface to get the story out. With Brightspot CMS, every piece of content can easily be edited, published and shared across the entire Scripps network, and local stories with national interest can be syndicated accordingly.

Plus, with Brightspot’s foundational flexibility and extensibility, Scripps development teams can customize, enhance and extend the CMS to suit their unique business needs.

With more than 50 Scripps sites operating out of a single Brightspot instance, all CMS users now have access to the same world-class editorial experience. These publishing efficiencies translate to essential time and cost savings, empowering journalists with the tools they need to create a better-informed world.

Want to enjoy the best alternative to Adobe AEM? Brightspot is here to help. Contact us today to learn more!

Share
Robyn Tellefsen
About the Author
Robyn Tellefsen
Robyn Tellefsen is a writer for Brightspot. She has 20+ years of experience creating and editing fresh, original content to help brands achieve their business goals. Robyn is a skilled communicator, with expertise across multiple verticals and media. When she’s not writing, you can find her absorbed in the pages of a novel.

More from Brightspot

Related resources

Don't let a legacy CMS stand in the way of your digital transformation. Brightspot works with customers’ existing logic and can be deployed to complement existing AEM, Wordpress and other legacy CMS solutions.
Find out how we’ve helped numerous Adobe customers either make the most of their Adobe AEM investment or transition entirely to Brightspot.
Now you can replatform faster than the time it took for you to decide to redesign and relaunch your site—in less than six months.
Mexico’s TV Azteca, the country’s second-largest media company behind Televisa and one of the top producers of Spanish-language television programming in the world, relaunched six sites and six headless apps on Brightspot.
In this quick video demo, we explore some of the many ways our next-gen CMS makes the lives of content creators that much easier, thanks to powerful features such as bulk upload, live preview, suggested tags and more.
Discover how TV Azteca transformed its digital landscape with Brightspot CMS, gaining greater enhanced efficiency, agility and cost savings across dozens of sites in its media portfolio.
Let us give you a demo
Hear how Brightspot can turn your digital strategy goals into a reality and see how the lives of your content creators and developers will be changed using our platform.


Request Demo