Is Sitecore Still a Valid Choice for CMS in 2025?

If you’re reading this, you’re likely already feeling the strain of managing a legacy Sitecore setup. Maybe it’s costing too much. Maybe it’s too complex to maintain. Or maybe your brand websites have simply become something you avoid touching—outdated, underused, and disconnected from your current business goals.

That’s not a unique situation. In fact, we’ve worked with clients in exactly this position.

Take Bennetts, for example. Their team was managing three separate websites on a legacy Sitecore setup that had become too rigid and expensive to evolve with their business. When we stepped in, the goal was clear: rebuild all three using modern architecture, remove technical bottlenecks, and empower internal teams to make changes quickly and confidently.

Bennetts

+44% Mobile Performance

+24% Desktop Performance

Revolutionizing Bennetts across three websites

Let’s walk through why so many companies are moving away from Sitecore—and how we’re helping them transition to something better.

Sitecore has its strengths

Sitecore isn’t failing because it’s a bad product. It’s still one of the most powerful digital experience platforms (DXPs) out there, and for some enterprise use cases, it gets the job done well. Why do some companies still stick with it?

If you’re running a highly complex, multinational digital operation and using all the bells and whistles — Sitecore can work. The challenge? For many businesses, those bells and whistles are overkill. And the trade-offs (cost, complexity, speed) start outweighing the benefits.

Where Sitecore falls short

Let’s take a look at where Sitecore falls short and what you can do about it.

1. High total cost of ownership

Sitecore has always been positioned as an enterprise solution. But over time, that power comes with an increasingly heavy price tag. Between licensing fees, infrastructure costs, upgrade cycles, and the need for specialized developers, total cost of ownership (TCO) adds up fast.

In some cases, Sitecore licenses alone can cost $500K+ per year. That doesn’t include hosting, development, or ongoing maintenance. For companies with modest traffic and limited editorial needs, that kind of spend is wildly disproportionate.

In contrast, with modern headless CMSs like Sanity, Contentful, or Storyblok and deployment platforms like Vercel or Netlify you pay for what you use. Pricing is transparent. Infrastructure is often bundled or easy to optimize. And you’re not locked into a single vendor's roadmap.

2. Complexity that slows everyone down

Sitecore was never built for simplicity. From the beginning, it promised a powerful, all-in-one digital experience platform — and for some organizations, that complexity was part of the appeal. But for many teams, especially marketers, the reality has been far less empowering.

Using Sitecore means navigating an interface with terminology and structure that often feels closer to enterprise software than a content platform. Editors face a steep learning curve which results in spending time and energy to figure out how to use the tool, instead of doing actual marketing work.

And it’s not just the interface. Sitecore’s use of proprietary development frameworks adds another layer of complexity, requiring organizations to hire certified Sitecore developers just to keep things running. That slows down internal teams and creates long-term dependency on external support.

Compare that with what happened at Descope, when we helped their team move to a modern Contentful setup:

That’s what a well-structured, intuitive CMS looks like. No training. No certifications. Just a system that works the way content teams expect it to.

4. Slow time-to-market

While complexity is one side of the coin, the other is what that complexity causes: a broken publishing experience that slows teams to a crawl.

The pain point we hear most often is that there are Sitecore implementations where editors can’t publish a landing page without opening a dev ticket. Teams rely on external parties to help them perform the most basic operations and have to wait days or weeks just to launch a simple campaign.

When we helped Descope transition to a Contentful setup, the internal team gained real autonomy. The CMS was intuitive, fast, and structured in a way that empowered non-technical users to work without bottlenecks.

Modern CMS platforms like Contentful are built for speed. With the right implementation, content teams can move from idea to published page in minutes — not days.

Poor performance as a hidden killer

It’s easy to underestimate how much performance impacts your bottom line—until you’re losing traffic or search rankings because your pages are too slow.

Many legacy Sitecore websites suffer from outdated infrastructure, unoptimized rendering, and heavy backend logic that kills performance, especially on mobile.

In the case of Bennetts, moving to a modern frontend framework and headless CMS gave them an instant boost:

No more frustrating load times. No more performance bottlenecks. Just fast, clean delivery that works across devices.

Migration & lock-in headaches

Sitecore migrations aren’t just painful — they often feel impossible. Major upgrades (like XP to XM Cloud) can require full rebuilds, and content portability is minimal.

What makes that worse is how locked-in everything is. You can’t simply export your content or move your setup to a new platform. We’ve had developers deal with scenarios where even backups were impossible without unsupported tools.

The Bennetts project involved dealing with a Sitecore instance so rigid that even exporting rich content required an outdated plugin:

That’s why we work with CMS platforms that prioritize portability. With Sanity, for example, you can back up and extract your structured content at any time. We’ve written about that in detail in this blog post, but the point is this: you should never feel stuck with your CMS.

Sitecore’s security has shown cracks

Security is one of the top reasons companies stick with Sitecore — and to be fair, it’s long had a reputation for enterprise-grade protections.

But recent research has exposed a pretty alarming vulnerability in Sitecore Experience Platform (10.4.1). A team of security researchers discovered a pre-authentication remote code execution (RCE) chain — meaning attackers could potentially take over a Sitecore instance without logging in at all.

This wasn’t just a theoretical exploit. It affected the latest version at the time (10.4.1) and relied on a chain of smaller vulnerabilities that many systems in the wild were likely still using. You can read the full technical breakdown here.

To Sitecore’s credit, the issue was patched. But it’s a reminder that legacy systems often have hidden, risky corners — and that even trusted enterprise platforms aren’t immune to serious breaches.

Shortage of Sitecore developers

Another reality is that Sitecore development talent is becoming harder to find and more expensive to hire. Modern stacks offer much better velocity. Developers are easier to hire. Frameworks like Next.js or Astro are familiar. Headless CMSs are increasingly intuitive. Your team can do more with less — and faster.

That means even maintaining a legacy Sitecore setup becomes a risk. You’re relying on increasingly scarce resources to keep the lights on. With a composable stack, you get access to a broader, more modern talent pool—and your hiring becomes future-friendly.

What companies like yours actually want

Not every company is trying to do the same thing, but across dozens of projects, the goals we hear are surprisingly consistent:

The teams we work with aren’t chasing buzzwords. They just want something that makes sense — something leaner, faster, and easier to evolve.

What a modern, composable stack looks like

If Sitecore has started to feel more like a burden than a benefit, the obvious next question is: What’s better?

The answer isn’t a single vendor — it’s a modern, composable approach. That means choosing best-in-class tools for each part of your website, and stitching them together in a way that works for your team. Here’s what that typically looks like:

This isn’t theoretical. It’s the setup we’ve used for many companies. It powers their entire marketing site. It’s how they scale content to multiple global markets with ease.

And it’s all modular. You keep what works, change what doesn’t, and avoid vendor lock-in. That flexibility pays off in ways monolithic DXPs simply can’t match.

How we help companies make the switch

We’ve helped multiple companies transition away from legacy platforms — each one with different goals, different timelines, and different levels of complexity. But the concerns are often the same:

Our job is to remove that fear from the process. We have a repeatable process designed to minimize disruption and maximize clarity.

Here’s how it works:

No disruption to KPIs and business

One of the biggest concerns companies have when it comes to a website redesign or replatforming is the potential disruption to their business. Content migration can feel like a daunting task, with fears of downtime, data loss, or SEO impacts looming large. Descope was no exception — they were understandably cautious about making changes to a site that was already active and visited by thousands of users each month.

We approached the migration process with care, ensuring that every piece of data, every URL, and every structure stayed intact. SEO was preserved, data was seamlessly transitioned, and the site was prepared to go live without interruptions.

Still on Sitecore? Here's what to consider

If you’re still not sure whether it’s time to move on, here’s a simple way to think about it.

You might be fine staying with Sitecore if:

But you’re probably ready to switch if:

If that sounds like you, we’d be happy to talk. Whether you need a full migration partner or just want a second opinion, we’ve helped companies just like yours make the transition with confidence.