AEM as a Cloud Service took most of the ops pain off our plate. No more patching, upgrades are continuous, and Cloud Manager gives us a real CI/CD pipeline with quality gates across dev, stage and prod. Edge Delivery Services is the standout for me. Pages are fast out of the box, Core Web Vitals are strong without heroic tuning, and the block-based model lets us build a reusable component library that multiple brand sites theme with design tokens. Universal Editor gives authors true in-context editing, which makes adoption a lot easier. It also fits cleanly into the rest of the Adobe stack (Assets, Analytics, Target), and for a regulated industry the workflows, permissions and versioning give us the governance we need. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The learning curve is steep and the skill set is niche, so hiring and onboarding take time. Documentation lags the product, especially for newer features like EDS and Universal Editor, and you often end up piecing answers together from GitHub, Discord and Adobe support. Debugging on Cloud Service is harder than on-prem since you don't have direct access to the instance and rely on logs and the Developer Console. Pipeline runs can be slow, and there are multiple ways to build the same thing (classic Sites, headless, EDS with document authoring, EDS with Universal Editor), so teams need to make clear architecture calls up front. Licensing is expensive and hard to forecast. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.