AEM 6.5 EOL: Upgrade, Migrate, or Wait—What’s the Smart Move?

Hi @shashi_mulugu,

I don't see any point in waiting if AEM is your long-term CMS choice. I've been using AEMaaCS for 5+ years now, and I would never like to work with on-prem again, unless I really need to.🙂 Let's dig into your questions:

• Why Upgrade?
  Besides missing out on Adobe innovation, there are several real benefits of moving to AEMaaCS. There is almost no DevOps effort, and we manage it fully in the Dev team. Integration with GitHub is great, and all you need are a few GitHub Actions. We had zero downtime for 5 years on AEMaaCS. There is a straightforward process for moving content between instances, as well as restoring production content. The OOTB CDN is much better now and more configurable. Basically, AEMaaCS is a very mature product; I see no reason to wait.

• LTS vs. Cloud: Pros and Cons
  Besides the migration effort, I see no other cons with moving to the Cloud. Remember that after that initial migration effort, there will never by any migration, you are constantly up-to-date. 

• Who Should Go Where?
  The only reason I would recommend on-prem is for industries with regulatory requirements like banking, healthcare, and government, which may have data residency or compliance mandates that prohibit storing content in Adobe’s cloud.

• End-State Business Value
  You can measure many things, like downtime, backend performance, the number of support tickets, costs for the DevOps team and infrastructure, and costs for the upgrade efforts... Remember that author tier also scales on AEMaaCS.

Check out my blog where I share my thought on this and related topics: https://meticulous.digital/blog/f/what-aem-upgrades-to-prioritise-in-2025 

Good luck,

Daniel

Hi @shashi_mulugu 
Here we have similar thread but for 6.6 https://experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com/t5/adobe-experience-manager/why-upgrade-to-aem-6-6/m-p/759702 

AEMaaCS today is a mature, cloud-native enterprise CMS. With Edge Delivery, extension points, and constant innovation, waiting will only put you behind. For anyone not strictly bound to compliance requirements forcing an on-prem model, Cloud is the clear path forward.

If anyone wants more migration tooling info, check out Cloud Acceleration Manager for a guided planning and migration process.

Has anyone migrated recently or been using new features? Want to share your story? happy to dig deeper!

I completely agree with @daniel-strmecki — if an upgrade is already on your roadmap, moving to the Cloud is the best path forward. That’s where Adobe is investing most of its effort, and the platform has matured significantly. Even for sensitive data, AEMaaCS is now well equipped (for example, it already offers HIPAA certifications) and will continue to evolve. Like with any trade-off, my recommendation would be to prioritize Cloud over on-prem whenever possible.

That said, I’d like to comment on the idea of “End-State Business Value.” This is a tricky one because it really depends on what your client considers valuable. For some, zero downtime is already a major win; for others, reducing DevOps overhead is the key driver. In many cases though, these benefits may feel less relevant because “it’s managed anyway.” Instead, factors like performance, SEO, or integration with MarTech products often take precedence. AEMaaCS supports all of these, but the actual value depends on the implementation approach — whether EDS, headless, or traditional. So while Cloud is always the right foundation, the way you architect within the Cloud ultimately determines the real business value for your customers IMHO.

Cheers!

Really good points raised here! I’d also call out the license costs. Since pricing isn’t public and can vary by org usage, availability, and other factors, I often wonder if the move to Cloud Service truly justifies the spend — especially for organizations not leveraging MarTech integrations, GenUI, or managing large volumes of marketing content, where an on-prem LTS upgrade might make more sense. Curious how others see this — do you find the ROI in those cases?

@santoshsai @aanchal-sikka @rohan_garg @joerghoh @briankasingli @vaibhav_mathur Request you to post your opinion here.

Upgrade might be suitable for most of the customers who does not have specific requirement for the server/data to be hosted in house,but that does not mean everyone should be choosing it, there would be good number of customers who would still choose LTS for variety of reasons such as data residency , blue/green server for new product launches or protected content , complex architecture which is not supported by cloud.

Good thing that Adobe maintains LTS as they foresee lot of customer using it. 

For most of the business cases jumping to AEM Cloud makes sense. If your use case is the standard WCM + DAM where you want elasticity, zero downtime upgrades, built-in CDN and no low-level tweaks, Cloud is usually the better bet.

Other than our government clients who use on-prem to meet security certification requirements most of the other domains such as retail, aviation, software services have long migrated to AEM Cloud.

We heavily rely on Adobe support with most of the bugs and enhancements at product level and trying to fix them creates lots of customisation to OOTB functionalities.

Cloud version automated upgrades and ownership of Infrastructure at Adobe end kind of shifts lot of responsibilities. So, if End of support is coming and Cloud versions have been doing well from many years ‐ Its high time to plan roadmaps for cloud Migration if not already done. 

Thanks,

Jatan

@tad_reeves @brettbirschbach 

@brianli6 @ravisurampudi can you comment your opinion here?