Adobe Experience Cloud is Adobe’s family of marketing, content and customer-data products, including Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target and Real-Time Customer Data Platform (Real-Time CDP). Unlike Creative Cloud and Acrobat, these products are not licensed mainly per named user. Most are On-demand Services licensed on a volume metric: requests, server calls, page views or profiles. Each product has a product description that defines the metric and its limits, and each customer’s Sales Order states the licensed quantity.[7] Product descriptions sit alongside the enterprise General Terms and Product Specific Licensing Terms (PSLTs). For AEM, the On-premise Software and Managed Services PSLTs are version 2025v1, effective 3 November 2025.[6]
Several of these metrics are measured over a 12-month period, and exceeding the licensed quantity at any point in that period requires buying more. Some require the customer to send Adobe usage reports. An effective license position for Experience Cloud therefore compares measured usage with the Sales Order quantity, rather than counting installations.
Editions
| Product | Edition or package | License metric | Catalog SKU |
|---|---|---|---|
| AEM Sites: Cloud Service | Base | Content Requests per month | AEM Sites: Cloud Service |
| AEM Assets: Cloud Service | Ultimate, Prime | Per Each base package (user allowances included) | Ultimate, Prime |
| AEM Forms: Cloud Service | Submissions, Renditions | Form Submissions per year; Document Renditions per year | Submissions |
| AEM Sites 6.5 (on-premise) | Base Package | Per AEM Sites Base Package; Users per User | |
| Adobe Analytics | Select, Prime, Ultimate; Foundation Pack for Experience Cloud | Primary and/or Secondary Server Call | Foundation Pack |
| Adobe Target | Standard; Premium | Annual Page View Traffic; Annual Page View Traffic or Server Call | Standard, Premium |
| Real-Time CDP (B2C Edition) | Prime, Ultimate | Per 1,000 Person Profiles | Prime, Ultimate |
Sources: the product descriptions for AEM as a Cloud Service, AEM on-premise, Analytics, Target and Real-Time CDP.[1][2][3][4][5] Since 1 December 2024, new AEM Assets customers may license only AEM Assets Ultimate or Prime. In Sales Orders, the SKU name “AEM Assets: Cloud Service” refers to the older AEM Assets Enterprise.[1]
Metrics
The catalog records each metric under Adobe’s name:
- AEM as a Cloud Service: Content Request, Concurrent User, Power User, Collaborator User, Limited User, Form Submission and Document Rendition.[1]
- AEM on-premise: Instance and Brand Portal User.[2]
- Adobe Analytics: Primary Server Call and Secondary Server Call.[3]
- Adobe Target: Page View, counted as Annual Page View Traffic.[4]
- Real-Time CDP: Person Profile.[5]
Counting / floors
AEM Sites: Content Requests
A Content Request is a request into AEM Sites, or into a customer-provided caching system, that delivers content as HTML through Page Views or as JSON through API Calls. It is “counted either as a Page View or 5 API Calls, measured at the ingress of the first caching system to receive a Content Request”.[1] The licensed quantity is monthly, but compliance is tested over a year. If the customer exceeds the sum of Content Requests licensed for a 12-month period at any time, it must license more (rule).
Adobe includes a content delivery network (CDN) with AEM Sites, which lets Adobe see Content Request usage directly. A customer that uses its own CDN instead must provide an auditable measurement report every six months, or within 30 days of Adobe’s request (rule). The report must count both edge and origin requests. Reports that depend on end-user consent, such as client-side web analytics, cannot be used. Without reports, Adobe may calculate monthly Content Requests from origin logs “and an assumed 95% cache rate”. Where the average payload of licensed Content Requests exceeds 10 MB per request, additional network capacity must be licensed.[1]
AEM Author Tier: Concurrent Users
Authoring capacity is scoped, not sold separately. The AEM Sites Author Tier includes up to 20 Concurrent Users with up to 5 million licensed Content Requests, and up to 40 with 5 million or more (rule). AEM Forms Submissions uses the same 20 and 40 levels, with a threshold of 750,000 Form Submissions a year. Concurrent Users are the users logged in and active in the production Author Tier within the same thirty-minute period. According to the definition, exceeding the scoped number may cause performance limitations during authoring.[1] Each AEM Sites program includes one Production, one Stage, one Development and one Rapid Development Environment, with 1 TB of storage each for Production and Stage.[1]
AEM Assets: user types
AEM Assets Ultimate and Prime are sold per base package, and each package includes a quota of three named user types:[1]
| User type | Access | Ultimate base package | Prime base package |
|---|---|---|---|
| Power User | Direct or through integrations | 10 | 5 |
| Collaborator User | Only through integrations with other licensed Adobe products (for example, Asset Selector in Creative Cloud or Workfront) | 15 | 5 |
| Limited User | Search and download in Content Hub only | 250 | 50 |
User licenses of each type may not be used concurrently by more than one person. If usage exceeds the licensed quantities, more must be licensed. If a Collaborator User directly accesses the AEM Assets Ultimate interface, that user is automatically reassigned as a Power User and another Power User must be licensed (rule). Customers moving from AEM Assets Enterprise who do not reassign their users to the new types have all users counted as Power Users.[1]
AEM Forms: Submissions and Renditions
A Form Submission is the submission of data from a form authored in AEM Forms to a database or other repository. A multi-page form counts once, and partially completed forms do not count. A Document Rendition is the rendering, signing, certifying or conversion of a Document, “regardless of the length or final format”. Both are licensed per year, with add-on packs of 50,000 Form Submissions or 500,000 Document Renditions. The Submissions base package does not include Document Rendition features.[1] Customers must license more if they exceed the annual quantity at any time. They must also send Adobe a measurement report two months before the end of each 12-month period (rule).[1]
AEM on-premise: Instances and Users
AEM 6.5 on-premise is licensed by deployment topology and by user. An AEM Sites Base Package is one Author Instance, one Publish Instance and any number of Dispatcher Instances. A separate Base Package is required for each AEM Deployment, meaning each independent author cluster with its connected Publish Instances. Users are licensed separately (rule).[2] The AEM Assets add-on is counted in Instances. Where the Asset Share Feature is used, the number of AEM Assets Instances must equal the total Author and Publish Instances on the deployment. Otherwise it must equal the Author Instances. The count includes deployments where Assets “was previously activated (even if not continuously in use)” (rule). Each Brand Portal User who logs on during a 12-month period counts once.[2]
Adobe Analytics: Server Calls
A Primary Server Call is each tagged page view, exit link, download, custom link or other event. Each row of data imported from offline sources also counts as one. Secondary Server Calls are the duplicates created by multi-suite tagging or VISTA rules.[3] Committed monthly quantities are totalled over an Overusage Cycle. In Adobe’s example, an annual cycle with a committed 10 million a month is consumed at 120 million, and further use is billed at the Overusage Rate, monthly in arrears. A customer with no Secondary Server Call commitment pays 100% of the Primary Server Call Overusage Rate for any secondary calls (rule). The Foundation Pack for Experience Cloud is limited to 120 million Server Calls a year and 500,000 Report Requests a month per IMS Organization.[3]
Adobe Target: Page Views
Target Standard is licensed on Annual Page View Traffic, the sum of Page Views in a 12-month period. Target Premium is licensed on Annual Page View Traffic or on Server Calls. A Page View occurs each time a page is loaded or refreshed, an application loads, targeted content renders, or an opened e-mail shows content.[4] The product description also sets Performance Guardrails, such as 50 Activities per Actual Call. These are scoping limits: exceeding them may degrade performance, but they are not license quantities.[4]
Real-Time CDP: Person Profiles
Real-Time CDP (B2C Edition) Prime and Ultimate are licensed per 1,000 Person Profiles. A Person Profile is a record representing an individual, whether directly identifiable or pseudonymous, and volumes are determined using the default deterministic Identity Graph. The licensed Consumer Audience is the number of Person Profiles licensed. Several entitlements scale with it: up to 500 Real-Time CDP Connections Outgoing Calls per Person Profile per year (rule) and an Average Profile Richness of no more than 75 kilobytes per Person Profile. Entitlements are defined as usage limits that Adobe monitors and enforces, and exceeding one may lead to overage fees or a requirement to license more capacity.[5]
Virtualization & partitioning
For AEM on-premise, an Instance is “one copy of the On-premise Software instantiated and running within a java virtual machine process on one physical Computer or virtual environment”. Author and Publish Instances each count separately.[2] The count therefore follows running JVM processes, not processors or cores, and the documents cited here set no hard or soft partitioning rules. The Cloud Service products run on Adobe infrastructure, so virtualization does not affect their metrics.
Cloud / BYOL
AEM is offered in three deployment forms, each with its own terms: as a Cloud Service, as Managed Services (hosted by Adobe) and as On-premise Software.[6][7] No public Adobe document cited here describes moving on-premise AEM licenses to a public cloud under a bring-your-own-license policy.
Programs
Experience Cloud products are bought under enterprise Sales Orders. They are not sold through VIP or VIP Marketplace, whose product lists cover Creative Cloud, Acrobat, Stock, Acrobat Sign, Substance, Captivate, Presenter and Firefly. See Adobe VIP and VIP Marketplace. No public Adobe program document for Experience Cloud was found.
Out of scope
- Other Experience Cloud products, including Adobe Journey Optimizer, Customer Journey Analytics, Marketo Engage, Workfront, Adobe Commerce and Real-Time CDP B2B and B2P editions, each of which has its own product description.[7]
- Experience Cloud generative AI features and their “Generation” counts. The definitions appear in the Target product description.[4] For Creative Cloud generative AI, see Adobe generative credits.
- Content of the AEM Managed Services and On-premise PSLTs (2025v1). Only the index was relied on here.
- Prices and Overusage Rates. These are set in each Sales Order.