Surge Migrate vs your own team with Adobe's free tools
Adobe's free tools each fix or report individual patterns, and a strong in-house AEM team can migrate a small estate with them. Surge Migrate uses the same tools and adds estate-wide fact collection, a reviewed plan, pull requests per pattern and an audit trail.
| Your own team with Adobe's free tools | Surge Migrate | |
|---|---|---|
| Who does the work | Your developers | Agents for repetitive changes, senior AEM engineers for review; your team merges |
| Price | Your team's time | Scan free; portal free for 3 months, then server actions at our cost; Readiness Audit US$2,500 (first 2), then US$4,900 |
| Fact collection | Manual, tool by tool | One scan over code and the BPA report, with fix and effort per finding |
| Plan | You write it | Migration Blueprint: phases, effort, risks, decisions |
| Repetitive refactoring | By hand | 5 deterministic codemods plus private AI refactoring, as pull requests |
| Audit trail | None by default | Hash-chained, exportable |
When to pick them instead
Do it in-house if the estate is small (a few sites and a modest number of custom components) and your team already has AEM as a Cloud Service experience.
When to pick Surge Migrate
Use Surge Migrate if you want the blockers counted exactly, a plan you can take to budget holders, and the repetitive changes delivered as pull requests your team only reviews and merges.
Questions
Does Surge Migrate replace Best Practices Analyzer?
No. Export your BPA CSV and drop it on the readiness scan; we read its 31 pattern codes alongside your code.
Can our team do part of the work?
Yes. Choose 'Done with you' or 'Self-serve' when you start a project, and your developers review, adjust or take over any pull request.
What do Adobe's AI migration tools do?
They automate individual patterns. Our guide on Adobe's free AI migration tools explains what each does and where it stops.
See your own blockers first
The readiness scan is free and runs in your browser. The portal is free for 3 months.
Other comparisons: vs a large systems integrator · vs a specialist AEM agency · Pricing · All approaches compared
Last updated 1 November 2026 · by Venu Gopal Reddy Muvva, founder