4 Reasons Businesses Are Leaving Sitecore (And What to Do About It)
The numbers are speaking for themselves and businesses are feeling the strain of Sitecore as a CMS platform.
“If we have to migrate anyway, can’t we just move to something else that doesn’t cost as much?”
That’s the question that Sitecore agencies have been hearing from their customers for a few months now. Those costs aren’t just licenses either. They’re the growing complexity with multiple moving parts and the internal leadership changes that have made roadmaps feel unstable.
Frustration has been growing, and mid-market enterprises are looking at other options to catch up with competitors who seem to be running on leaner, faster stacks. From Built with
Let’s take a look at the reasons your clients are considering moving away from Sitecore and how you can help them pivot to a lean, complete DXP like Core dna instead.
Key takeaways
- Sitecore’s complexity, steep learning curve, licensing complexity, and other issues are straining the user experience and causing customers to second-guess the platform.
- For Sitecore partner agencies, this is a problem: if customers are shopping around and agencies aren’t presenting viable solutions, they will look elsewhere.
- With Core dna, agencies and customers get access to an enterprise-grade DXP that includes CMS, commerce, personalization, and more, without the high total cost of ownership that forces Sitecore customers elsewhere.
On this page:
Complexity & Learning Curve
Sitecore is synonymous with an enterprise platform that offers a wide range of features for diverse use cases. However, that also means it is highly complex and can be overwhelming for developers and marketers alike.
Developers spend weeks setting up environments and integrating APIs, while marketers can struggle with the steep learning curve to perform everyday tasks, such as editing pages or launching campaigns.
Why That’s a Problem For Your Agency
Your team spends most of its time working with a client to build complex environments, fix broken integrations, or onboard and train teams, rather than adding new features and helping them drive business value.
How Core dna Solves It
While Sitecore was built on complexity, Core dna offers a unified, cloud-native platform where content, commerce, and orchestration live together. This provides simplicity through an intuitive, easy-to-use interface that enables mid-market enterprises to quickly move from onboarding to execution. Plus, with the smooth implementation process, developers and agency support teams don’t need to spend as much time adding custom code.
Opaque Licensing and Fragmented Ecosystem
Clients review the Sitecore licensing options and wonder how much everything will cost them. If they upgrade to the latest version of Sitecore XP and pay for a new license, they have to deal with additional add-ons and integrations to access the most modern features.
Alternatively, if they migrate to XM Cloud, they have to build a DIY composable stack that includes additional Sitecore products (or those from other vendors) to replace key features such as search, personalization, and more. This eventually leads to a higher total cost of ownership, which is difficult for mid-market enterprises to maintain.
Why That’s a Problem For Your Agency
Sitecore’s fragmented ecosystem puts pressure on Sitecore agency partners to sell the dream that the grass will be greener on the other side. In reality, customers could end up spending far more than they anticipated and have little to show for it. This destroys the trust that’s been built over the years and could see your agency, rather than the platform, blamed for the challenges.
How Core dna Solves It
Core dna comes complete with a CMS, checkout, payments, search, personalization, and LMS already unified. This helps mid-market enterprises avoid the expensive, complex composable suite offered by Sitecore without burdening them with vendor sprawl that comes with a DIY composable stack.
Plus Core dna offers a transparent pricing model designed to charge customers only for what they use and scales as the business grows, resulting in a much lower total cost of ownership.
Difficult Upgrades & Maintenance Overhead
As legacy Sitecore systems approach end of life (EOL), enterprises must decide whether to upgrade to the latest version or migrate to XM Cloud and other composable suite products.
But those upgrades can take months, with further maintenance to follow, which disrupts the business and forces them to delay campaigns, all while they’re losing ground to their competitors. Meanwhile, a migration to an equally complex composable suite comes at a higher cost and an even longer timeline.
Why That’s a Problem For Your Agency
Customers are tired of having to upgrade whenever Sitecore reaches EOL. But they also aren’t excited about a long, expensive migration to XM Cloud and having to manage 3-4 additional products on top for basic features.
How Core dna Solves It
Core dna is built on a fully-managed SaaS architecture, so all hosting, updates, and security upgrades are handled by the platform. This frees up agency teams from spending forever managing implementations and maintenance, allowing them to support business decisions rather than simply managing patches.
Specialist Developers Required
Sitecore customers live in a developer-dependent world. That means that everything from simple content updates, to landing page launches, and other marketing campaigns require specialist developer intervention.
Why That’s a Problem For Your Agency
If customers have a tough time managing the platform, that means that additional resources need to be sacrificed to handle everyday tasks. This spreads your team thin if you’re managing other clients or looking to expand.
How Core dna Solves It
Core dna was built to reduce that dependency and empower both marketers and agencies. With drag-and-drop visual page builders, reusable components, and a unified admin interface, marketers can create, update, and publish without waiting. That means agency teams can handle higher-value builds, while the client manages routine updates.
Give Your Clients A Better Alternative with Core dna
Core dna already offers a lean and user-friendly alternative to Sitecore. However, agencies also get access to:
- An enterprise‑grade platform with composable architecture and flexibility delivered as a turnkey package for rapid deployment.
- Package hosting, maintenance, and any additional services are available on a monthly fee basis, making revenue predictable and hassle‑free for clients.
- Hosting, security, upgrades, and compliance are handled by Core dna, so that agencies can focus on strategy.
- A partner success team, a dev support team, and white‑glove onboarding keep you and your clients confident and satisfied.
- Pre‑built, fully customizable, and responsive themes with a ready-to-use sandbox let agencies cut weeks off every launch.
- Users can manage pages, blogs, product catalogs, multi‑store checkout, digital assets, and automated workflows from one interface.
- A transparent product roadmap and regular releases shaped by partner feedback keep you ahead of the curve.
If you’re ready to diversify your DXP partnership prospects, talk to us about joining our partner program.
Core dna team
Our team of digital and marketing experts share their practical insights on technology, digital experience, and business transformation. If you have questions or would like to learn more feel free to contact us.
