Sitecore's annual licence renewal is one of those calendar events that makes technology leaders quietly anxious. Not because the platform doesn't work - it probably does, more or less - but because every year, the number gets harder to justify to the board. And every year, the gap between what you're paying for and what you're actually using seems to widen a little further.
I was sat in a boardroom in Birmingham last autumn with the CTO of a mid-sized financial services firm. She'd just opened the renewal quote. Not the final invoice - the quote. She slid it across the table without saying anything. The number was 40% higher than the previous year, with a covering note that essentially said: move to our cloud stack, or this is what on-premise looks like going forward. She'd been on the platform for six years. Her team used it to publish blog posts and update service pages. That was it. No personalisation. No marketing automation. No experience analytics. Just a very expensive way to change some text on a website.
We spent the next two hours working out what she actually needed. The answer wasn't Sitecore.
If you're running Sitecore at a mid-market firm - let's say 200 to 2,000 employees, professional services, financial services, SaaS, that sort of territory - there's a decent chance you've had a version of this conversation internally at least twice in the last 18 months. Someone in IT raises it. Someone in finance raises it. A partner or director mentions that their mate's firm just moved to something else and it was "painless." Then the conversation stalls because nobody wants to own the decision, and the renewal goes through on autopilot.
We've invested heavily in Sitecore. Migrating would mean throwing all that away.
I understand that instinct. But "we've invested heavily" is a statement about the past. The question that actually matters is whether the investment makes sense going forward. Sunk cost is a powerful psychological anchor, and a terrible basis for a technology decision.
So let me try to lay this out as honestly as I can. We've worked with Sitecore for years at Distinction - we know the platform well, we've built on it, we've migrated firms off it, and we've occasionally told clients to stay on it. This isn't a hit piece. It's an attempt at a clear-eyed look at a decision a lot of firms are quietly wrestling with.
Three things have changed in the last couple of years that make this conversation more urgent.
The licensing model has shifted. Sitecore has been pushing customers towards its composable DXP cloud offering - XM Cloud, Content Hub, the broader SaaS suite. That's a reasonable strategic bet on their part. But for mid-market firms running XP or XM on-premise or in their own cloud environment, the transition path isn't straightforward. The pricing has changed, the architecture is different, and in many cases the features you relied on don't map neatly onto the new model. Several CTOs I've spoken to in the last six months received renewal quotes 30-50% higher than expected, with the implicit message: move to our cloud stack, or pay a premium to stay where you are. That's not a partnership. That's a shove.
The talent market has got harder too. Finding experienced Sitecore developers has always cost more than finding a strong .NET developer or a React specialist. But it's noticeably worse now. The ecosystem is smaller than it was, the best developers have diversified their skills, and if your internal team doesn't include Sitecore expertise - which at mid-market scale it often doesn't - you're reliant on a shrinking pool of specialist agencies whose day rates reflect that scarcity.
Then there's the AI-readiness question. This is the one that catches people off guard. Legacy Sitecore implementations - particularly anything running XP 9.x or earlier - were built when content was tightly coupled to presentation. The content model wasn't designed to serve multiple channels, let alone feed AI agents, personalisation engines, or the kind of structured data layer that modern AI tooling requires. If AI is anywhere on your 12-month roadmap (and it should be), your current Sitecore setup may be architecturally incompatible with where you need to go. I've written about the broader implications of this in a separate piece on what legacy platforms hide from your P&L - worth reading alongside this one.
Not every Sitecore installation needs replacing. But here are the patterns I see most often in firms where migration turns out to be the right call.
You're paying for capability you don't use. This is the big one. Sitecore is an enterprise-grade platform with enterprise-grade pricing. Its personalisation engine, marketing automation features, and analytics suite are genuinely powerful. But if you're being honest - and this is between you and your platform usage data - are you actually using them? In my experience, most mid-market Sitecore clients use somewhere around 15-20% of what the platform offers. You're paying for a Formula 1 car and driving it to Tesco. Nothing wrong with Tesco, but a Golf would get you there just as well and cost a fraction of the running expenses.
Your total cost of ownership has crept up. Licensing is only part of it. Add hosting costs (especially if you're running on Azure with Sitecore's recommended topology), specialist development for even routine changes, ongoing patching and upgrades, and the cost of integrating Sitecore with the rest of your stack. I've seen mid-market firms spending £150k-£250k a year on a Sitecore installation that, functionally, is serving as a content management system. That's a lot of money for a CMS.
Your content team is at the end of their tether. This is the signal that gets ignored most often because it comes from marketing rather than IT. If your editors need to raise a ticket or wait for a developer to make changes that should take minutes, something is wrong. Sitecore's editing experience can be good - but many mid-market implementations weren't built with editorial autonomy in mind. They were built by developers, for developers, with the content team's needs treated as secondary. After a few years of this, the marketing team either gives up and works around the website entirely, or starts building pressure for a change. Both outcomes are bad.
Integration is getting harder, not easier. If connecting Sitecore to your CRM, your marketing automation platform, your analytics, or your customer portal feels like a custom development project every time - rather than a configuration exercise - the platform's architecture isn't aligned with your ecosystem. Modern platforms are built API-first. Older Sitecore implementations weren't.
Here's where I need to be honest in the other direction, because migrating off Sitecore isn't always the smart move.
You're genuinely using the advanced features. If your team is running personalisation campaigns, using Sitecore's experience analytics to drive decisions, and the marketing automation capabilities are producing measurable commercial results - you have a platform that's earning its keep. Don't migrate away from value. Some firms genuinely need what Sitecore offers, and the alternatives can't always replicate it without significant custom work.
You've built heavy customisation that would be expensive to replicate. Some Sitecore implementations have years of bespoke development baked in - custom modules, complex workflows, deep integrations with line-of-business systems. If that customisation is genuinely load-bearing (not just legacy code nobody's touched in three years), rebuilding it on a new platform could cost as much as staying. The key word there is "genuinely" - I've seen firms assume their customisation is critical when, on closer inspection, half of it was built to work around problems the old platform created in the first place.
You're mid-contract and the exit penalty is punitive. Obvious, but worth stating. If you're 18 months into a three-year agreement and the exit clause would cost you more than riding it out, the maths might not work yet. Use the remaining contract period to plan properly. Don't let it expire and then panic.
You don't have a clear picture of what you'd move to. Migration for migration's sake is a terrible idea. If the only reason to move is "Sitecore is expensive," you'll likely end up on another platform that's expensive in different ways. The decision needs to be anchored to a clear view of what you actually need.
When migration does make sense, a few platforms come up consistently. Each has trade-offs, and the right choice depends on your situation - but here's my honest take.
Kentico / Xperience by Kentico is where I'd point most mid-market firms that want a similar level of integrated capability to Sitecore without the price tag. Marketing automation, personalisation, and content management in one stack - and the conceptual model is familiar enough that the transition is usually smoother than clients expect. We've delivered a number of Sitecore-to-Kentico migrations and the pattern holds. It's not glamorous, but it works.
Payload CMS is where firms end up when they want maximum flexibility and genuinely lower long-term costs. Open-source, headless, built for developers who want a modern stack without vendor lock-in. If editorial independence, API-first architecture, and keeping your options open for AI integration are the priorities, Payload is worth serious consideration. It's the one I'd probably choose if I were starting from scratch at a mid-market B2B firm today. There's a companion piece on Contentful vs. Payload that goes deeper on this if you're weighing up headless options.
Optimizely picks up some of the Sitecore audience, particularly firms that were actually using Sitecore's A/B testing and experimentation features. Strong experimentation pedigree, a DXP offering that overlaps with Sitecore's feature set, and a more predictable licensing model - though it's not cheap. If experimentation is genuinely central to how you work, it's worth a look.
Umbraco is a good fit for firms that want a capable, developer-friendly CMS without the complexity or cost of a full DXP. It's .NET-based, so if your development team is already in that ecosystem, the transition is relatively natural. It won't give you Sitecore's marketing automation capabilities out of the box, but most mid-market firms don't need those from their CMS anyway - they're using HubSpot or Salesforce for that.
Before you commit to any of these, I'd strongly recommend reading our piece on how to choose a digital platform when everyone has an opinion. Platform selection is one of those decisions where everyone in the room has a favourite and the loudest voice often wins. That's not how you should make a decision that'll shape your digital capability for the next five to seven years.
Rather than leaving you with a vague "it depends," let me give you the way we actually work through this with clients. It's not complicated, but most firms skip at least two of these steps and then wonder why the decision keeps getting deferred.
Start with a utilisation audit. Map every Sitecore feature you're licensed for against actual usage. Be ruthless - if nobody's touched the personalisation engine in 12 months, it doesn't count as "we use it." This exercise alone usually reveals the gap between what you're paying for and what you're getting. It also tends to end the internal debate fairly quickly, because suddenly you're arguing about data rather than opinions.
Then do a proper total cost of ownership calculation. Licensing, hosting, specialist development (internal and external), integration maintenance, and the opportunity cost of things you can't do because the platform won't support them without custom work. Compare this to a realistic estimate of what you'd spend on an alternative over three years - not just year one, because year one always looks cheap.
Run a content and integration inventory. How much content are you actually migrating? How many integrations need to be rebuilt? Most firms overestimate both. A proper audit usually reveals that 30-50% of content is outdated, redundant, or unused, and some integrations are with systems you're planning to replace anyway. This is where a lot of the fear about migration cost evaporates.
Ask honestly whether your current team can support a new platform, or whether you'd need to hire or retrain. It's a hidden cost that doesn't always make it into the business case but absolutely should.
And finally - does your current platform support where the business is heading in the next three years? If AI, composable architecture, or multi-channel delivery are on the roadmap, does Sitecore get you there or get in the way?
If you're scoring poorly across most of those dimensions, the case for migration is strong. If it's one or two, it might be worth addressing those specific issues before committing to a full migration. And if you're genuinely performing well across all of them - well, maybe Sitecore is the right platform for you, and the renewal is worth signing.
The firms that have the smoothest, most cost-effective migrations are the ones that plan them 12-18 months in advance. They audit their content properly, run a structured platform selection process, and negotiate their exit from Sitecore while they still have leverage - meaning before the contract auto-renews.
The firms that have the most painful, expensive migrations are the ones that wait until something forces their hand. A security vulnerability. A sudden price hike. A developer leaving who was the only person who understood the implementation. Emergency migrations cost 2-3x more than planned ones. That's not a guess; it's a pattern we've seen repeatedly.
We've been meaning to sort this out for ages, but there's never a good time.
There isn't a good time. There's just a better time and a worse time. Right now, before your next renewal, is the better time.
If you want a clear-eyed assessment of whether to stay or go, we can run a platform health check in two weeks. No sales pitch, no predetermined answer - just an honest look at your Sitecore installation, your usage patterns, your costs, and your options. Sometimes the answer is "stay and optimise." Sometimes it's "go, and here's the most sensible way to do it." Either way, you'll have a decision based on evidence rather than anxiety.
The worst outcome here isn't choosing the wrong platform. It's not choosing at all - and paying the premium of indecision every quarter until something forces your hand.