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

[Shashi_Mulugu]

Hey Adobe community,

With AEM 6.5 heading towards End of Life (core support ends Feb 2027, extended support Feb 2028), a lot of us are asking: What’s next? Should we stick with Long-Term Support (LTS) or take the leap to AEM Cloud?

Let’s dig into the real questions:

• Why Upgrade?
  Is it just about staying supported, or are there real benefits to moving forward?
  
  

• LTS vs. Cloud: Pros and Cons
  What’s working for you with LTS? What’s tempting about Cloud? Any pain points or unexpected wins?
  
  

• Who Should Go Where?
  Are there certain teams, industries, or use cases that make more sense for LTS or Cloud? How do you decide?
  
  

• End-State Business Value
  What does success look like after the upgrade or migration? How do you measure the impact on your business or clients?

Share your experiences, opinions, and advice—whether you’re deep in migration planning or just starting to think about it. Let’s help each other figure out the smartest path forward!

[daniel-strmecki]

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

[Shashi_Mulugu]

Thank you @daniel-strmecki . This is insightful.

[arunpatidar]

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... 

[Shashi_Mulugu]

Thanks for sharing it here @arunpatidar . It consists of great discussions on why upgrade to AEM 6.5 LTS. But if a org is doesnt have any on-prem restrictions what should be there motivation behind choosing LTS vs AEM cloud? To play safe goto AEM LTS or To get new GEnAI features goto AEM cloud?

[mlaraadobe]

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!

[Shashi_Mulugu]

thanks for your input and opinion here @mlaraadobe .

[EstebanBustamante]

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!