How Do You Know If You Are Overbuying or Underbuying on a CMS License?
A decade of Sitecore XP customers paid for personalization, analytics and marketing automation they never switched on. The same pattern runs through every suite. Here is how to tell which side of the line you are on.
The short answer
You have overbought when the license you renew includes personalization, customer data, marketing automation or testing that nobody configured in the last year, while your team only writes, approves and publishes pages. You have underbought when developers keep rebuilding workflow, multi-site governance or compliance that a larger platform includes. Audit the features that actually ran last quarter, then price the tier that matches them.
Key takeaways
- Most organizations on an enterprise suite use the content management system inside it and little else. The personalization engine, the visitor database and the marketing automation were part of the quote, part of the demo and, in a great many accounts, never part of the operation.
- Sitecore XP is the clearest case. Sitecore sold a content-only edition, Experience Manager, alongside the full Experience Platform for years. A large share of XP customers ran it in exactly the way XM allows, while paying for and hosting the extra services that XP adds. A whole partner practice exists for converting XP installations down to XM.
- The pattern is not a Sitecore pattern. Adobe sells Experience Manager Sites with a slice of Target and Analytics and the full products separately. Optimizely prices content management, experimentation and personalization as separate line items. Acquia and Kentico sold a content tier and a marketing tier under one brand. Every suite has a cheaper edition that most of its customers would fit.
- The audit is simple and nobody does it. List the features the license includes, then list the ones a named person used in the last ninety days. The gap between the two lists is what you are overpaying for, and it is usually the expensive half of the contract.
- Underbuying is real too, and it looks like developers. When a team on a lean headless platform keeps building approval workflow, site governance, asset management or compliance evidence by hand, it bought below its needs and is paying the difference in engineering time instead of license.
Our analysts’ take
Gartner's last survey on the subject found that marketers use about 42 percent of the capabilities in their marketing stack, down from 58 percent two years earlier. Nowhere is that number more expensive than in the content platform. An enterprise digital experience platform (DXP) is sold as one product and priced as one contract, but inside it are two different things: a content management system that every customer uses every day, and an experience layer of personalization, visitor profiles, testing and marketing automation that a minority of customers ever configure. The license pays for both. The team, as a rule, runs one.
This happened because the suites were bought on a vision and run on a backlog. The sales cycle showed behavioral personalization, customer journeys and campaign automation, and the buyer signed for the edition that contained them. Then the implementation ran long, the budget went into templates and migration, the person who was going to own personalization left, and three renewals later the organization is still paying the experience-platform price for a website that publishes pages. Meanwhile the market moved. Composable and headless platforms spent the last five to ten years doing only the content management part, doing it well, hosting it for you and publishing the price. The thing most suite customers actually use became cheap.
This editorial takes a position on how to tell which side of the line you are on. Overbuying has a signature: features in the contract that no one has touched, extra infrastructure that exists only to support them, and a cheaper edition of the same product that would cover everything you do. Underbuying has a signature too: a developer team rebuilding, one ticket at a time, the governance a bigger platform ships. The Sitecore XP story is the worked example because it is the most documented, but the test applies to every suite, and to the renewal you have coming up. This is where the Principal Analyst Group stands in October 2026.
What to look for
- 1
What ran in the last ninety days
Not what is licensed, not what was planned, but what a named person used. Pull the personalization rules, the automation campaigns, the running tests and the audience segments from the admin screens. If the screens are empty or the dates are old, you have your answer.
- 2
The cheaper edition of the same product
Almost every suite sells a content-only tier under the same brand, or did until recently. Ask the vendor for the feature difference between the tier you own and the one below it, in writing. If nothing on that list is in use, the lower tier is your real requirement.
- 3
What the extras cost outside the suite
Personalization, testing and email automation are now sold on their own, often inside tools the marketing team already pays for. Price the standalone versions of the features you might switch on next year, and compare that with the premium the suite charges to keep them on the shelf.
- 4
What the developers keep building
Underbuying shows up in the engineering backlog. Approval workflow, locale management, site templates for a second brand, asset libraries, audit logs and security evidence for procurement are all things a larger platform includes. Count the sprints spent on them.
- 5
The infrastructure the unused features need
The experience layer in a suite is not free to run even when idle. Visitor databases, processing services and reporting stores need hosting, patching and upgrades whether or not a rule has ever fired. Add that bill to the license when you compare tiers.
The Sitecore XP lesson, and where it repeats
Sitecore made the overbuying problem unusually visible because it sold the two halves under two names. Experience Manager (XM) was the content management system. Experience Platform (XP) was XM plus the experience database, personalization across visits, marketing automation, email and analytics. The vendor's own documentation describes running XP in CMS-only mode without enabling the experience database or buying its licenses. That mode is what a large share of XP customers were running all along.
What XP added, and what it cost to leave idle
The XP edition brings the xDB visitor store, the xConnect data services, marketing automation, email campaigns and the analytics reporting layer. In a typical Azure deployment that is roughly a dozen extra app services and databases to host, patch and upgrade. Partner conversion guides for taking an XP estate down to XM list every one of them, which tells you how often the exercise is done. The features marked lost in those guides, analytics, automation, email and cross-visit personalization, are precisely the ones most customers never configured.
How the pattern looks today
Sitecore has moved its roadmap to SitecoreAI, and XP 10.5 keeps mainstream support to the end of 2029 without adding capability. Organizations deciding what to migrate to are discovering, often for the first time, that their requirement is the content management they use, not the platform they bought. That discovery is the whole point of this piece, and it should happen before a renewal, not during a migration.
Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe's product description for Experience Manager Sites includes a limited slice of Analytics and a limited slice of Target, with rules-based targeting but no A/B testing, for customers who have not licensed the full products. The full Target, Analytics and Real-Time Customer Data Platform are separate contracts. Many Sites customers own several of them and run only Sites. Check which Adobe products have active users, not just active licenses.
Optimizely
Optimizely prices content management, web experimentation, feature experimentation and personalization as separate products, and most contracts bundle two or more. Procurement data puts the median contract near $78,000 a year. A customer who bought the bundle for the testing program and never staffed the testing program is paying for experimentation seats that sit empty beside a working CMS.
Acquia and Kentico
Acquia sells Drupal hosting as the base and personalization, experimentation and search as add-on subscriptions, now from partner engines. Kentico Xperience 13 was sold as a Business edition for content and an Enterprise edition that added personalization, automation, lead scoring and testing. With Xperience 13 ending support on December 31, 2026, every customer choosing a successor should start by asking which edition they really used.
The signs, in both directions
Overbuying and underbuying leave different evidence. One shows up in the admin screens and the invoice. The other shows up in the sprint board.
Overbought: the rules are empty
The personalization rule list has a handful of entries from the launch project, the automation canvas holds one abandoned workflow, and the A/B testing screen has never run a test to completion. The experience layer exists in the license and nowhere else.
Overbought: the extras have no owner
Nobody on the marketing team has personalization, journeys or campaign automation in their job description. Features without an owner do not get configured, and features that are not configured are not worth paying a premium to keep.
Overbought: a cheaper edition covers you
When the vendor's own content-only tier, or a hosted headless platform at a few hundred dollars a month, would run everything the team does, the difference between that price and your renewal is the overbuy. For a suite customer it is commonly most of the bill.
Underbought: workflow lives in email and spreadsheets
Approvals happen in Slack, legal review happens in a shared document, and the only audit trail is who clicked publish. A team doing this on a developer-first headless platform needs the governance a larger tier includes, and is paying for its absence in risk.
Underbought: the second brand is a second project
Every new site, market or language becomes a fresh build with its own templates, users and deployment. Multi-site inheritance, shared components and central user management are exactly what the enterprise tier of a platform sells. Rebuilding them is the expensive way to not buy them.
Underbought: procurement keeps asking for evidence
Security questionnaires, uptime commitments, data residency and access logs are answered by the engineering team instead of by the vendor's compliance package. If that happens every quarter, the platform is below the organization's requirement even if the editors are happy.
How to right-size before the renewal
Run the ninety-day audit
Export the configured personalization rules, segments, automations and tests with their last-modified dates. Put them beside the feature list in the contract. Do this three months before the renewal notice, not after it.
Price the content-only tier of what you own
Ask the vendor for the edition below yours, its feature difference and its price. For Sitecore that was XM; for Adobe it is Sites without the attached products; for Optimizely it is content management without the experimentation seats. Many vendors will not volunteer this, so ask directly.
Price the modern content tier against it
A hosted platform such as Storyblok, Contentstack or Sanity does the content work a suite customer actually does, with published prices and nothing to host. HubSpot Content Hub Professional includes personalization and testing at a few hundred dollars a month. Put those numbers in the same spreadsheet as the renewal.
Name an owner for every extra you keep
If you decide to keep personalization or automation in the contract, assign a person, a first campaign and a date. A feature with an owner and a deadline is a plan. A feature without one is shelfware with a renewal date.
Check the other direction too
Before moving down a tier, count the sprints the engineering team spent in the last year on workflow, multi-site, assets and compliance. If that number is large, the cheaper tier will cost more than it saves. Buy the governance; drop the personalization you do not use.
Platforms in this piece
Sitecore XP
Adobe Experience Manager
Optimizely PaaS DXP
Acquia
Kentico Xperience 13
HubSpot Content Hub
Storyblok
Contentstack
SanityFrequently asked questions
What is the difference between Sitecore XM and Sitecore XP?
XM is the content management system: authoring, workflow, multi-site and in-session personalization rules. XP adds the experience database, cross-visit personalization, marketing automation, email campaigns and analytics, plus the services and databases that run them. Sitecore's documentation describes running XP in CMS-only mode, which is how many XP customers operated in practice.
How do I know if I am overpaying for my CMS or DXP?
Compare the features in your contract with the ones a named person used in the last ninety days. If personalization, automation, testing or customer data features are licensed but unconfigured, and a content-only edition or a hosted headless platform would cover what the team does, the difference in price is what you are overpaying.
Do most companies use the personalization in their DXP?
No. Gartner found marketers use about 42 percent of their marketing technology capabilities, and personalization is the feature most often licensed and least often staffed. In the suites, the experience layer needs a customer data strategy, an owner and content variants to be worth anything, and most deployments stop at the website.
Is it cheaper to downgrade a DXP or switch to a headless CMS?
Downgrading to the vendor's content-only edition is cheaper to execute, because the content and templates stay where they are. Switching to a hosted headless platform is cheaper to run, with published prices and nothing to host, but it means a migration and a new front end. Price both over three years against the renewal.
What does underbuying a CMS look like?
Developers rebuilding what a larger platform includes: approval workflow, multi-site templates, locale management, asset libraries, audit logs and the compliance evidence procurement asks for. If those items fill the engineering backlog, the organization bought below its requirement and is paying the gap in salaries rather than license.
About this editorial
This is a position our principal analysts took on October 21, 2026. It is not updated: when the view changes, we publish a new editorial. The scorecards linked above carry the current ratings for every platform named here.
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