Sitecore: who still needs the full DXP?

What Sitecore is, and why you’re probably here

Sitecore is the .NET digital experience platform that spent fifteen years as the default answer for large, multi-market web estates. Today it’s two things under one brand: Sitecore XP, the classic monolith most installed estates still run (deeply customized, years old, licensed accordingly), and XM Cloud, the SaaS, headless-first successor where the vendor’s investment now goes. Around those sit separately sold services for assets, customer data, personalization, search, and commerce, plus an AI layer marketed across the suite.

Most visitors to a page like this run XP and are asking a shortlist-shaped question: if we left, what would we move to, and what would we actually miss? The second half of that matters as much as the first, so this page answers both.

Where Sitecore still fits

Sitecore earns its complexity when the suite is genuinely in use. If personalization rules are authored and measured against real segments, if commerce runs through Sitecore rather than beside it, and if content, data, and campaigns are orchestrated as one program, the integration is doing work that a stitched-together stack would have to reproduce.

It also holds up on the requirements procurement checks: SSO, granular roles and workflow, audit trails, vendor SLAs, compliance certifications, and a partner network that can staff a program at scale. For organizations governing dozens of markets under one editorial policy, that governance layer is not a nice-to-have. XM Cloud is a credible modernization path that keeps the vendor relationship intact.

Why teams migrate away

• Total cost of ownership. License, hosting, implementation, and certified developers stack up; large XP contracts run well into six figures a year before anyone builds anything. For a modest estate with modest editorial volume, that’s out of proportion to the job.
• Most of the suite isn’t in use. The most common pattern we see: the personalization and orchestration story sold the platform, and in practice Sitecore publishes web pages at DXP prices.
• Editors wait on developers. In many XP implementations a landing page can’t ship without a developer ticket, so campaigns queue behind release cycles.
• Talent scarcity. Certified Sitecore developers are a small, expensive pool, and it isn’t growing. Keeping a legacy estate running is a staffing risk as much as a technical one.
• Upgrades are rebuilds. The move from XP to XM Cloud is not an upgrade path in any ordinary sense — it’s a re-implementation. Once you’re facing a rebuild, the destination becomes an open question.
• Content portability is poor. Getting structured content and media out of an old XP instance is real work, and the tooling to do it is thin.

That last point isn’t theoretical. On the Bennetts consolidation below, exporting anything richer than plain text meant reviving an abandoned plugin:

Treat portability as a selection criterion, not just an exit cost: being able to extract your content whenever you want is a large part of why we build on structured content.

Stay or go: the short version

Stay on Sitecore when	Move when
Personalization, customer data, and commerce genuinely run through the suite	The suite integrations were the sales pitch, but Sitecore mostly publishes web pages
A standing .NET team or partner operates the platform without drama	Delivery queues behind a small, expensive pool of certified developers
Multi-market governance and compliance are standardized on Sitecore across the organization	Marketing can't change a page without opening a developer ticket
Moving to XM Cloud is a realistic step for your implementation	You're facing a rebuild-scale re-implementation either way
The license is a rounding error next to the value the suite delivers	You're paying DXP prices and not moving any faster for it

The realistic paths off Sitecore

Stay, but modernize

Move to XM Cloud and adopt its headless delivery. This keeps the vendor relationship, the governance model, and the procurement position, and it genuinely modernizes the front end. Go in clear-eyed: it’s a re-implementation, the licensing weight stays, and so does the dependence on certified specialists.

Replatform to composable

Rebuild the estate on a headless CMS and a modern framework, and keep whichever suite services actually earn their keep as standalone tools. Going headless is what removes the licensing floor and gives editors autonomy from the development queue, while consolidating brands and markets onto one shared platform. Content model mapping, a complete redirect plan, and editorial retraining are part of the project, not afterthoughts.

What teams actually replace it with

There is no single Sitecore alternative, because Sitecore isn’t a single product. The useful question is what the DXP was actually doing for you, and then replacing each of those things at its real size.

If the CMS was the job (and for most estates it was), the replacement is a headless CMS plus a modern framework plus managed hosting. Which CMS depends on how your editors work and how your content is reused across brands and markets; we’ve written up how the main platforms differ in practice, and the framework choice follows from the shape of the site rather than fashion.

If personalization was real, it decouples. A dedicated personalization or experimentation tool points at your new front end perfectly well. It’s the same argument that makes Optimizely a partial migration rather than a total one.

If commerce was real, that’s the constraint to solve first. Pick the commerce platform, then let the content platform follow it.

If Content Hub was doing the work, a DAM is a much smaller purchase than a DXP, and it can sit alongside any CMS.

And be honest about what you give up: one vendor accountable for the whole stack, one contract, one support line, and a governance model that came pre-built. A composable stack gives you better tools and lower running costs, but the integration and the governance become yours to own. That’s exactly why teams bring in a partner to design and operate it rather than assembling it in-house.

Three sites off Sitecore: what it took

Bennetts ran three separate websites on a legacy Sitecore install that had become too rigid and too expensive to evolve. We rebuilt all three onto one shared platform (Next.js, a headless CMS, and modern hosting) so their team manages the whole estate from a single place instead of three.

The consolidation was the point; the performance improvement came with it.

Mobile performance

+44%

Desktop performance

+24%

The pattern repeats on migrations where the destination is different. Descope moved to Contentful on a site already serving tens of thousands of visitors a month, with every URL and content structure mapped before the cutover rather than reconstructed after it. The case study covers how that was sequenced.

Pricing, in plain terms

Sitecore licensing is negotiated, not listed. XP contracts for large estates typically run into six figures a year, and the implementation program frequently costs more than the license. The third layer is permanent: hosting, upgrades, and certified specialists. The growth drivers are sites and markets, environments, the number of suite products under contract, and partner day rates. Budget the three layers together: the license is rarely the biggest number, and it’s the only one that appears on the quote.

The Bejamas take

Sitecore is our most common migration source, and the fork is the same one every time: is the full DXP doing a job, or is it an expensive CMS with unused features attached? When personalization, customer data, and commerce genuinely run through the suite, the case for staying and modernizing to XM Cloud is defensible. When they don’t, a composable rebuild removes the licensing weight, the specialist bottleneck, and the developer ticket standing between marketing and a published page. The same logic applies to AEM, the other big DXP we’re most often asked to replace. In an audit we map what actually depends on Sitecore, model the cost of staying versus moving, and recommend the path honestly. Then, if it’s a migration, we run it with the redirect map, content migration, and SEO controls treated as first-class work.