Storyblok vs AEM: A Technical Comparison

Why choose Storyblok?

Storyblok and Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) are both powerful CMS options that differ in ease-of-use, pricing, required experience, setup, and more. Storyblok was built as a headless CMS and offers strong APIs, tooling, and some of the most bleeding-edge features within the CMS space.

• Storyblok Strata adds a layer of semantic meaning to your content, making it AI-ready and unlocking new possibilities.
• Storyblok Flowmotion, built on top of n8n, supports workflow automations with 300+ third-party integrations.
• API first CMS that allows you to choose vendor integrations.

Storyblok also offers a free tier that helps build POCs and MVPs, and different pricing plans to fit your team’s needs.

AEM, originally built as a traditional monolithic CMS, now offers hybrid and headless capabilities layered on top of its legacy foundation.

• While AEM as a Cloud Service is Adobe’s cloud-native offering, a local instance is still required for active development and testing. It also requires development and knowledge in Java.
• AEM’s headless capabilities are more limited, and projects are recommended to use the GraphQL API.
• AEM's integrations with Adobe Creative Cloud are powerful, but they come with substantial configuration overhead and technical complexity, which ultimately lead to an increase in staffing needs.
• AEM's deep integration with Adobe products (like Adobe Commerce) creates vendor lock-in, making it difficult and resource-intensive to swap out even a single component.

AEM requires more steps to get started, requires a license, which makes it difficult to test the product, and has a steep learning curve.

Storyblok Out-of-the-Box (OOTB) offerings

• Visual Editor included at all tiers, with drag-and-drop layout editing and real-time preview.
• Modular content blocks that mirror frontend components and support deep nesting.
• Built-in localization and multi-language content handling.
• Folder-based routing with slug and URL management per entry or locale.
• Role-based access control, granular permissions, editorial workflows, and content staging.
• Collaboration with field-level comments, the Concept Room, and the Ideation Room.
• GraphQL and REST APIs: Content Delivery API (CAPI), Management API (MAPI), and webhook support.
• Dedicated framework SDKs: Mature SDKs for major frameworks and a general JavaScript SDK.

AEM Out-of-the-Box (OOTB) offerings

• Page Editor: WYSIWYG Editor for AEM Cloud (not available for headless).
• Universal Editor: WYSIWYG Editor.
• Editable Templates and Core Components for structured page building within AEM.
• Supports multi-language content via Multi-Site Manager (MSM).
• Routing derived from the content tree path.
• Role-based access control, editorial workflows, and content staging.
• Integration with Adobe Experience Cloud: AEM works with Adobe Target, Adobe Analytics, and other Experience Cloud services.
• AEM Headless SDKS for Javascript and Java.
• GraphQL and AEM Content Fragment Delivery with OpenAPI.
• Webhooks and AEM events (not available for purely headless implementations)

Getting started: setup and first impressions

Getting started with Storyblok is blazing fast. At the 2025 RenderATL tech conference, a developer used the Storyblok CLI to go from sign-up to a fully functional local development environment in just 49 seconds.

Storyblok was built as a SaaS product and doesn't require local installation—you just consume Storyblok’s API’s. Storyblok’s Blueprints help you get started quickly with predefined components, layout structures, and support for your preferred framework. Choose from base or business templates, pre-integrated with the Visual Editor and deployed automatically to Netlify or Vercel.

Getting started with AEM is more complicated.

To begin developing with AEM as a Cloud Service, teams must set up a local development environment:

• Install Java (JDK)
• Download and run the AEM Cloud Service SDK (local author instance)
• Deploy code to AEM
• Configure Editable Templates, content policies, and Core Components
• Connect the frontend to AEM’s APIs or server-side rendering model

AEM does offer templates that can help speed up this process.

AEM (Traditional / Cloud Service)

AEM was designed as a monolithic Java CMS. Even in its Cloud Service form, the development workflow remains tied to running a local AEM SDK instance. Developers must:

• Run a local instance
• Create dialogs, Sling models, templates, and component policies
• Manage JCR structures and content trees
• Use the Page Editor or Universal Editor to assemble pages

Although Cloud Service removes the need to manage infrastructure, the developer workflow still reflects legacy AEM architecture.

AEM Headless

AEM Headless offers structured data through Content Fragments that can be defined within the web app.

• While you can nest models, doing so often becomes cumbersome for authors, so teams typically keep models relatively flat and rigid.

There is a disconnect between content fragment entries and their definitions:

• Content Fragment definitions are defined within Tools > General > Content Fragment Models.
• Actual Content Fragment entries are stored in Assets > Files > …

The GraphQL API is recommended for headless development. Routing is then path-based, meaning that developers have to define and control the routing structure within the code. A new path requires a developer’s involvement.

AEM Hybrid

AEM Hybrid mixes Page Editor-based pages (traditional) with Content Fragment-driven experiences (headless). This adds flexibility while increasing architectural complexity:

• Developers must maintain two authoring models.
• Templates, policies, dialogs, and core components still require Java/HTL development.
• Frontend teams must support both server-rendered and client-rendered patterns (Java and JavaScript).
• Page Editor and Universal Editor support varies, depending on implementation.

Hybrid mode is powerful but typically harder to maintain compared to a native headless CMS approach.

Visual Editor

Storyblok and AEM both have WYSIWYG editors.

Storyblok’s Visual Editor lets you

• Easily edit and arrange components
• Edit content inline
• View and edit translated content
• Edit images
• Preview a visual representation of draft changes
• Manage plugin integrations within the page: personalization, ecommerce, A/B testing, and more

AEM offers

• The legacy Page Editor for non-headless projects
  • Provides a complex workflow for editing content, where each click opens a modal, followed by nested subelements, and requires numerous clicks for the editor.
• The new Universal Editor, which aims to bring visual page building to headless models. It supports inline content editing and a visual preview of draft changes.

Collaboration

Storyblok includes field-level commenting and content workflows as standard features across all plans. Editors can collaborate directly within the Visual Editor without extra setup or upgrades.

AEM includes page- and component-level commenting and content workflows.

Rich text editor

While both Storyblok and AEM support basic formatting (headings, links, lists, inline styles, embedded entries/components), Storyblok’s rich text editor goes a step further by including additional features out of the box—no custom implementation required.

In addition to the basics, you get:

• Structured rich text, where HTML nodes are represented by key-value pairs in a JSON object, instead of as an HTML string. This makes it easier to target and manipulate nodes and blocks.
• Ability to add custom resolvers within the frontend code to manipulate the response.
• A dedicated rich-text package to render the structured rich text to HTML.
• AI-powered actions: summarize, rephrase, or improve content with AI suggestions.
• Document import/export: convert Markdown, ODT, or DOCX to rich text or vice versa.
• Inline Markdown: write Markdown directly in the editor.

Meanwhile, with AEM, you get:

• Structured JSON output that’s only available via the GraphQL API for Content Fragments, otherwise it outputs HTML.
• Support for custom plugins for advanced features.

AEM offers no built-in AI editing tools and lacks a package or official method for rendering the JSON response to HTML: developers must implement their own mapping or resolvers for frontend rendering.

Frontend integration

One of the most immediate benefits developers notice when working with Storyblok is how smooth the integration process is. Instead of manually resolving linked entries or building mapping logic between content types and frontend components, Storyblok provides tools that streamline the process with dedicated SDKs for major frameworks as well as core JavaScript and PHP SDKs.

• The @storyblok/react, @storyblok/vue, @storyblok/nuxt, @storyblok/svelte, @storyblok/astro, and @storyblok/symfony-bundle help render your components dynamically based on the structure defined in your CMS, either through a simple mapping of block IDs and component names or automatic resolution, depending on the SDK.
• You can define custom SDKs or implementations based on Storyblok’s core JavaScript and PHP SDKs. Alternatively, you can fetch data straight from the CAPI endpoints.
• Because Storyblok returns content in a consistent JSON-based structure, you can render nested or duplicated blocks the same way you render top-level ones, using regular component composition. There’s no need for complex traversal logic. If a block includes other components, you can render them as children inside the parent component. And since you define these relationships in your schema, you have complete control over how deep things go: whether you allow recursive nesting, keep it shallow, or limit it to a specific depth.

AEM supports frontend integration in multiple modes depending on the project architecture.

AEM (Traditional)

AEM components are rendered via HTL and Sling Models, and frontend assets are delivered via its client library framework without the need for separate API fetch logic.

AEM Headless

AEM supports headless content delivery via its GraphQL API, which generates schemas based on Content Fragment Models and returns structured JSON that client applications can query. AEM doesn’t provide built‑in component resolver libraries or automatic mapping within its SDK, so developers must write their own mapping logic to interpret and render UI components.

AEM Hybrid

AEM’s hybrid model blends headless delivery with in‑context authoring. This approach allows editors to view and edit content in a UI that resembles traditional AEM Sites editing while still relying on headless JSON delivery under the hood. Official Adobe documentation defines hybrid integration as a set of levels that range from basic headless content delivery to fully embedded SPA editing within AEM’s authoring environment.

Component modeling

Storyblok uses a modular, schema-driven system of blocks: reusable, nestable components that map directly to frontend UI elements. This allows for a 1:1 relationship between the content model and the frontend code.

Beyond modularity, Storyblok also provides built-in content model types:

• Content Types: represent full pages typically composed of nested components.
• Nestable: reusable building blocks that can be nested or duplicated within content types (for example, Hero, Feature, Grid, CTA).
• Universal: can act as both. These are ideal for flexible content that might be reused across contexts or nested within other content.

AEM’s content modeling is also modular, but it becomes a lot more restrictive and complicated when it comes to leveraging its headless offering.

AEM (Traditional)

• Components are built using HTL (Sightly) templates and Sling Models.
• Developers define reusable components (e.g., Hero, Banner, Carousel) with dialogs for editor input.
• Editable Templates and Template Policies define which components can be used on which pages, and their allowed configurations.

AEM Headless

• Content Fragments: represent content entries within AEM.
• While you can nest models, this method often becomes cumbersome for authors. Additionally, GraphQL schemas grow more complex to query and maintain, leading teams to keep models relatively flat and rigid.

Routing and localization

With Storyblok, your content organization and routing structure are one and the same.

Storyblok

• Declarative routing via folder structure and slugs.
• Nested routes and dynamic pages are straightforward to model and resolve.
• Localization is first-class: language variants, translated slugs, and alternate paths are part of the CMS architecture.
• Folder-level localization uses separate, dedicated folders for each language. This structure duplicates some content, but lets you customize each locale independently, based on the structure and order of the story's components. Storyblok also offers the Dimensions app to make this multi-tree structure for locales even easier.

AEM

• In non-headless scenarios, routing is defined by AEM’s content tree (JCR paths).
• In headless scenarios, dynamic routes require custom logic.
• Localization is handled via language copies and the Multi-Site Manager (MSM). MSM is yet another powerful but complex solution that requires ongoing configuration and maintenance.

Development environments and deployment

Storyblok's headless-first infrastructure seamlessly integrates with modern CI/CD pipelines, enabling teams to deploy new versions in minutes. Multiple concurrent development environments can run simultaneously, allowing developers to test and preview different feature branches independently.

AEM's deployment and publishing workflows typically take considerably longer. The architecture relies on a publishing node system that restricts the number of simultaneously viewable releases. This limitation constrains parallel development and testing workflows, often forcing teams to batch multiple features into a single release cycle, which extends the time to production for individual features.

Additional Storyblok features

Storyblok includes several unique features designed to enhance the entire content lifecycle:

Flowmotion

Storyblok FlowMotion is a workflow-automation layer built on top of n8n’s engine, tailored for content teams and composable architectures. FlowMotion lets you automate approvals, translations, asset processing, CRM/PIM updates, notifications, and other actions, all triggered by content events (save, publish, translate). This transforms Storyblok into an intelligent content operation hub, letting you orchestrate content, tools, and team workflows as part of your digital experience pipeline.

Strata

Storyblok Strata is a next-generation content layer built for the AI era. Rather than treating content as text stored in entries, Strata vectorizes your content from the start, enabling semantic understanding (keywords vs. meaning) of texts, images, audio, and video. It enables smarter content discovery, deeper personalization, and intelligent content operations at scale.

Ideation Room

The Ideation Room in Storyblok introduces the idea of “sandboxes” for content editors. Editors can draft and collaborate on ideas directly within Storyblok. No need for third-party text editors like Google Docs or Word. This ensures that all content is stored in a centralized location and remains versioned with consistent formatting. Once ready, editors can move content from the Ideation Room into a live entry and publish it without copy-paste headaches or formatting issues.

Concept Room

The Concept Room in Storyblok helps bridge the gap between developers and content teams by offering a collaborative space to visually map out a site’s structure before implementation begins. With its intuitive drag-and-drop interface, teams can align on layout, hierarchy, and reusable components without needing to dive into code. Editors and marketers can leave comments directly on nodes and sections to streamline feedback and approvals, eliminating back-and-forth across tools. It’s also a powerful way to scope new feature requests: content teams can visually explain what’s needed, where it fits, and how it connects to existing structures. This clarity helps developers quickly understand requirements and accelerates implementation by visually organizing components. The Concept Room makes it easier to spot patterns, identify opportunities for reuse, and define a more modular and maintainable content structure from the start.

Side-by-side Comparison

	Storyblok	AEM
Headless	✅	❌
Native Headless	✅	❌
Vectorized Content	✅	❌
n8n integration/automation	✅	❌
SaaS	✅	✅ - non-headless projects require a local instance for development
Composable Content	✅	✅ - only AEM Headless
Rich Text Returned as JSON	✅	✅ - only from Content Fragments via the GraphQL API
AI Translation	✅	❌
AI Content Generation	✅	✅
AI SEO	✅	❌
Role based access control	✅	✅
WSYWIG Editor	✅	✅
Easy to use, modern editing tool	✅	❌
Page Builder	❌	✅ - only for non-headless projects
Content API	✅	✅
Management API	✅	✅
Personalization	✅ - bring your own	✅ - requires Adobe Target license
A/B testing	✅ - bring your own	✅ - requires Adobe Target license
Search	✅ - bring your own	✅ - native
Multisite Support	✅ - bring your own	✅ - Multi-Site Manager (MSM)
eCommerce	✅ - bring your own	✅ - requires Commerce Integration Framework (CIF) license
Portability (avoiding Vendor Lock-in)	✅	❌
Joyful CMS	😁	🫤

Conclusion

Both Storyblok and AEM are powerful CMS platforms, each takes a different approach to content management and development. Storyblok’s headless-first architecture, modular content blocks, and developer-friendly SDKs make it fast to integrate, flexible to scale, and intuitive for editors. Its AI-ready Strata layer and workflow automation via Flowmotion further enhance composability and operational efficiency.

AEM, on the other hand, offers a robust enterprise ecosystem with hybrid and headless capabilities, extensive integrations with Adobe Experience Cloud, and a mature authoring experience for traditional Sites projects. However, its complexity, reliance on Java for custom development, vendor lock-in, and layered architecture make setup, customization, and headless integration more resource-intensive.

For teams prioritizing rapid iteration, schema-driven content, scalability, and seamless frontend integration, Storyblok provides a lightweight, flexible, and modern approach.

Further resources

Moving from AEM to Storyblok? Check out our latest Migrating AEM Content Structures to a Flexible Content Model in Storyblok tutorial.