Your Sitecore Contract Renews in 90 Days. You're Finally Ready to Leave.

Why Teams Are Leaving Sitecore

Sitecore's been an enterprise CMS workhorse for two decades. But the economics and architecture have shifted dramatically -- and not in Sitecore's favor.

Cost is the main reason teams leave. A typical Sitecore deployment runs $300K–$500K per year in licensing alone. Add hosting, implementation partners charging $250+/hr, and the specialized .NET developers you need just to keep the lights on, and total cost of ownership dwarfs modern alternatives by 10–20x.

Sitecore's answer to the headless movement -- XM Cloud -- hasn't slowed the migration wave. It just forces existing customers into yet another expensive migration within Sitecore's own ecosystem, with new pricing tiers and a component architecture that still feels heavier than purpose-built headless CMSes.

Meanwhile, the composable architecture movement has produced tools that do individual jobs better than Sitecore's monolithic approach ever could.

The Architecture Decision Framework

Migrating from Sitecore isn't a single decision -- it's a series of interconnected architecture choices. Get one wrong and you'll feel it for years. Here's the framework we've developed across dozens of enterprise migrations.

Choosing Your Headless CMS: Sanity vs Contentful vs Payload

Your CMS choice comes down to three things: content complexity, team size, and budget.

Sanity is our default recommendation for Sitecore refugees. Here's why:

• GROQ query language gives you the flexible content querying Sitecore teams are used to, without the overhead
• Portable Text handles rich content better than any competing structured content format
• Real-time collaboration is built in -- no plugins, no add-ons
• Customizable Studio means your content team gets an editing experience tailored to their workflows, not a generic admin panel
• Pricing scales gracefully: most teams land between $0–$999/mo vs. Sitecore's $300K+/yr

Contentful makes sense when:

• Your organization already has Contentful contracts or internal expertise
• You need enterprise-grade localization workflows out of the box
• The content model is relatively flat (Contentful's reference handling is solid but less flexible than Sanity's)
• Budget allows for $300–$2,500/mo at enterprise tier

Payload CMS is the dark horse for teams that:

• Want full ownership of their CMS infrastructure (self-hosted, open source)
• Have TypeScript-proficient developers who prefer code-first content modeling
• Need to keep data on-premises or in specific regions for compliance
• Want zero recurring CMS licensing costs, ever

For most Sitecore migrations, Sanity wins on developer experience and content flexibility. For compliance-heavy or data-sovereignty-conscious teams, Payload wins on control.

Choosing Your Frontend: Next.js vs Astro

This one comes down to interactivity requirements.

Next.js is the right call when:

• You have authenticated experiences, dashboards, or heavy client-side interactivity
• Personalization logic needs to run at the edge (more on this below)
• Your team needs the React ecosystem for component libraries
• You're building a marketing site and a web application on the same codebase

Astro is the right call when:

• Performance is the absolute top priority and your site is content-heavy
• You want to ship near-zero JavaScript to the client by default
• Your interactive components are isolated islands -- forms, calculators, nav menus
• You want framework-agnostic component support: React, Svelte, Vue, whatever fits

For Sitecore migrations specifically, Next.js is the safer bet. Sitecore sites almost always have personalization, A/B testing, and dynamic content that benefit from server-side rendering and middleware. Astro's ideal for the marketing and content portions if you decide to split your architecture.

Choosing Your Hosting: Vercel vs Netlify vs Cloudflare

Vercel pairs best with Next.js. That's not just marketing -- Vercel actually builds Next.js features directly into their platform:

• Edge Middleware runs personalization logic in <1ms at 300+ global locations
• ISR (Incremental Static Regeneration) gives you static performance with dynamic content freshness
• Preview deployments give your content team instant staging environments
• Pricing: $20/user/mo for Pro, enterprise plans negotiable

Netlify is competitive for Astro deployments:

• Edge Functions handle lightweight personalization well
• Build times are fast for static-first architectures
• Pricing is straightforward and often cheaper at scale

Cloudflare Pages is the cost leader:

• Unlimited bandwidth on the free tier
• Workers for edge computation
• Best if you're already deep in the Cloudflare ecosystem
• The DX isn't quite as polished as Vercel's for Next.js-specific features

Our default stack for Sitecore migrations: Sanity + Next.js + Vercel. It replaces Sitecore's entire stack at roughly 5–10% of the annual cost.

The Strangler Fig Migration Pattern

We don't recommend big-bang migrations. Instead, we use the strangler fig pattern -- replacing Sitecore section by section while keeping the existing site live throughout.

Phase 1: Edge Routing Layer (Week 1–2)

Deploy a Vercel project with edge middleware that proxies all traffic to the existing Sitecore instance. From the outside, nothing changes. But now you control routing at the edge.

Phase 2: Static Content Migration (Week 3–6)

Migrate your lowest-risk, highest-traffic content first -- typically marketing pages, blog posts, and resource libraries. Build these in Next.js or Astro with content sourced from Sanity. Update the edge routing rules to serve these pages from the new stack.

Result: your highest-traffic pages now load in under 500ms instead of 2–4 seconds.

Phase 3: Dynamic Features (Week 7–12)

Replace Sitecore's personalization engine with Vercel Edge Middleware. This handles:

• Geo-based content personalization
• A/B testing via edge-side feature flags
• Authentication redirects
• Bot detection and rate limiting

All of it runs at the edge, executing before the page even starts rendering.

Phase 4: Content Model Migration (Ongoing)

Extract remaining content from Sitecore's SQL databases into Sanity. We build custom migration scripts that map Sitecore's template and field architecture to Sanity schemas, preserving content relationships and media assets throughout.

Phase 5: Sitecore Decommission

Once all routes are served by the new stack, shut Sitecore down. Cancel those licensing contracts. Celebrate.

SEO Preservation Strategy

Sitecore migrations carry a specific SEO risk profile. Here's how we handle it:

• Full URL audit before migration -- every indexed URL mapped to its new equivalent
• 301 redirects managed at the edge middleware level for instant resolution
• Schema markup rebuilt and validated against Google's Rich Results Test
• XML sitemaps regenerated from the CMS and auto-submitted to Search Console
• Core Web Vitals monitoring -- we track LCP, CLS, and INP throughout the migration to make sure scores improve, not degrade
• Internal link integrity -- automated crawl testing catches broken internal links before launch
• Canonical tag validation across every migrated page

Most Sitecore-to-headless migrations see a 15–40% organic traffic increase within 90 days, purely from Core Web Vitals improvements.

Timeline and Investment

A phased Sitecore migration typically runs 12–20 weeks depending on site complexity:

Scope	Timeline	Investment
Brochure site (50–200 pages)	8–12 weeks	$40K–$80K
Mid-market (200–1,000 pages, personalization)	12–16 weeks	$80K–$150K
Enterprise (1,000+ pages, multi-site, complex integrations)	16–24 weeks	$150K–$300K

Stack that one-time investment against $300K–$500K in annual Sitecore licensing and the ROI becomes obvious within the first year.

Ready to plan your exit from Sitecore? We run free migration audits -- we map your current Sitecore architecture and put together a detailed migration plan with timeline and cost estimates. You can also see how Sitecore stacks up against a modern Next.js setup in our head-to-head breakdown.