A two-month DXP evaluation ended with a single sentence I couldn't immediately answer. I'm still thinking about what that means for the platforms we've trusted for twenty years.
The Engagement
A Fortune 100 industrial manufacturer. Diversified products, global distribution, the kind of business that quietly underpins half the supply chains you depend on. Market cap north of forty billion. And until recently, a corporate website running on WordPress.
That last part still raises eyebrows in our industry. It shouldn't. In thirty years of platform work I've found that the size of the company tells you almost nothing about the sophistication of the website. Manufacturers, industrials, energy companies, large parts of the consumer goods sector. Many of them treat their corporate web presence as brochureware because that is honestly what it is. Investor information, product catalogs, leadership bios, press releases, careers, ESG reporting. There is no transactional commerce. There is no logged-in personalization. There is a lot of content, in many languages, governed by legal and brand, updated on a steady cadence.
WordPress had served them for years. It was creaking. Plugins had stacked on plugins. The editorial team had built workarounds for things the platform was never meant to do. Their CIO wanted to know what a modern foundation looked like.
So we ran a proper evaluation. SitecoreAI. Adobe Experience Manager. Sanity. And WordPress VIP as the incumbent's path forward, because fairness demanded it.
What We Were Actually Comparing
The temptation in these evaluations is to treat all four platforms as equivalent options on a spreadsheet. They are not. They represent two different philosophies about what an enterprise CMS should be.
On one side sit the traditional Digital Experience Platforms. SitecoreAI and AEM are mature, integrated suites built on the assumption that a large enterprise needs personalization, segmentation, journey orchestration, multi-channel delivery, marketing automation hooks, and an opinionated content authoring environment, all under one license. They are the cathedrals of our industry. Built over decades. Designed to weather everything.
On the other side sits the newer generation. Sanity is a structured content platform with a real-time content lake, a customizable studio, and a deliberately unopinionated approach to presentation. WordPress VIP, in its modern enterprise form, has moved closer to this model too, though its plugin heritage still shows.
Comparing them feels a little like comparing a cathedral to a well-built timber frame house. Both will shelter you. They are not the same thing.
The Two-Month Exercise
We did the work. We ran proof-of-concepts on the client's actual content. We modeled their twelve content types, their seven languages, their workflow approvals, their DAM integration, their analytics stack, their search requirements. We built representative pages in each platform. We had their marketing team author in each environment. We ran their IT security and procurement teams through the certifications and the contracts.
The DXP Scorecard data, which we use as one input among many, told a familiar story for this category of buyer. AEM scored highest on raw capability at 76.6, with marketing use case fit at 79.3. SitecoreAI followed with capability at 69.6 and marketing fit at 72.5. Sanity scored 64.3 on capability and 46.8 on marketing use case fit, reflecting that it ships with fewer marketing features out of the box. WordPress VIP came in at 59.6 capability and 62.3 marketing fit. (Scorecard scores are dynamic and date-stamped; these reflect the March 2026 snapshot.)
The cost efficiency picture inverted everything. AEM scored 20.2. SitecoreAI scored 36.4. WordPress VIP scored 55.5. Sanity scored 76.2. That spread is the entire conversation, and we will come back to it.
By week eight we had a recommendation matrix that looked clean on paper. SitecoreAI was the safest enterprise narrative. AEM was the most capable if they ever wanted to expand into commerce or deep personalization. Sanity was the leanest, most modern foundation if the brochureware reality was going to remain the brochureware reality.
The Question
We presented in their boardroom. Slides, demos, vendor pricing, total cost of ownership over five years, risk register, transition plan for each scenario. The CIO let us finish. He thanked us. He looked across the table and asked, plainly:
If you just told me we can do everything we need in Sanity, feature for feature, page for page, component for component, and our end users will never know the difference between these platforms, why would we pay almost half a million dollars a year for an Enterprise DXP versus a practically free TCO with Sanity?
I had a list of answers cued up. Enterprise-grade. Integrations. Personalization roadmap. Security posture. Vendor support. Analyst quadrants. The institutional comfort of a name the board recognizes.
I started to say it. I stopped.
Because if I was sitting in his chair, with his actual requirements, looking at his actual content, knowing his actual five-year roadmap, I would have asked the same question. And none of my prepared answers would have satisfied me.
So I told him the truth. If I were CIO, and I knew I could do everything I needed in Sanity, and my marketing team's needs were genuinely met, I would be very pleased with Sanity. Hands down.
The room went quiet for a moment. Then we moved on to next steps.
What I Thought About on the Flight Home
For most of my career, the answer to why pay for Enterprise DXP was self-evident. The platforms could do things nothing else could do. Personalization at scale. True multi-site governance. Integrated analytics and testing. Deep commerce. Marketing automation. The capability gap between an enterprise DXP and any open-source or lightweight alternative was a chasm.
That gap has been closing for years. For a meaningful slice of enterprise buyers, it has effectively closed.
If your corporate website is brochureware. If your personalization needs are modest. If your marketing team does not actually use most of the orchestration features your last DXP shipped with. If your IT team would prefer fewer moving parts. If your developers want a real-time, API-first content layer they can wire into anything. Then the value proposition of a traditional Enterprise DXP becomes harder to defend on its merits.
Notice what I am not saying. I am not saying SitecoreAI is bad. I am not saying AEM is obsolete. I am not saying every Fortune 100 company should be on Sanity. AEM still scores 76.6 on raw capability for good reason. SitecoreAI's compliance and trust score of 79 reflects two decades of enterprise hardening. There are organizations that genuinely need what those platforms uniquely offer, and for them the investment makes sense.
What I am saying is this. The segment of buyers who uniquely need those capabilities is smaller than the segment that historically purchased those capabilities. The market got sold a cathedral, and a meaningful portion of the market actually needed a timber frame.
How Do the Cathedrals Compete Now
This is the question I keep returning to. The old guard cannot win on name recognition forever. Procurement teams are getting more sophisticated. CIOs are tired of paying for features their organizations do not use. CFOs are asking harder questions about software run-rate.
The honest answer, I think, comes in three parts.
First, the cathedrals compete by being honest about who they are for. Sitecore, Adobe, and Optimizely will not win the brochureware-heavy Fortune 100 manufacturer the way they used to. They will win the global retailer who genuinely needs personalization at scale, the multi-brand consumer company running coordinated campaigns across forty markets, the financial services firm with regulated content workflows that justify the compliance overhead. Trying to be everything to everyone is the path of slow decline.
Second, they compete by lowering the floor. The composable era forced these vendors to unbundle. SitecoreAI's evolution, with Agentic Studio and the new AI-first positioning, is a recognition that the old monolithic delivery model is finished. AEM's move toward Edge Delivery Services is a similar recognition. The cathedrals that survive will be the ones that can sell components, not just the whole building.
Third, they compete by genuinely delivering capabilities the new generation cannot match. Not on paper. In production. With references. Adaptive personalization that actually moves the needle. Content supply chain workflows that scale to thousands of authors. Integrated experimentation platforms that marketing teams can actually operate without four consultants in the room. If they can deliver that, the price tag is defensible. If they cannot, the question my CIO asked is going to be asked in every boardroom from here forward.
What This Means If You Are Evaluating Platforms
A few things to take with you, drawn from the work, not from a vendor deck.
Start with what you actually need to do, not with what the platform can theoretically do. Walk through your real content, your real authors, your real publication cadence, your real integration points. The features that show up in your top-quartile workflows are the ones that matter. The rest is sales surface area.
Pressure-test the total cost honestly. Licensing is the visible number. Implementation, integration, training, ongoing development, version upgrades, and the partner ecosystem you will be locked into are the invisible numbers. Run a five-year TCO that includes all of them. Then run a ten-year scenario where your needs evolve.
Ask the uncomfortable question. If a leaner platform could meet your requirements, why would you choose the heavier one? The answer might be excellent. It might be defensible. It might also reveal that institutional preference is doing more of the work than technical evaluation.
And give weight to the trajectory of the platforms, not just their current state. SitecoreAI three years from now will be different from SitecoreAI today. Sanity three years from now will be different too. The DXP Scorecard platform velocity dimension exists precisely to capture this. Sanity scored 75.1. SitecoreAI scored 64.5. WordPress VIP scored 80. AEM scored 73.9. That tells you something about where the energy is.
Closing
The CIO has not made a final decision as of this writing. I do not know which way they will go, and honestly, I would be comfortable with any of the three modern options for their needs.
What I know is that the question they asked is going to be asked more often. The platforms that thrive in the next decade will be the ones that have a clear, honest answer for it. The ones that do not will keep selling cathedrals to people who needed a house, until eventually the buyers stop showing up.
Thirty years in, I find that clarifying rather than discouraging. The work of choosing the right foundation has always been the most important work. It is just becoming harder to hide behind a name.
