If you’re running a website on SitecoreAI, there’s a good chance it’s still built on JSS. You may have heard some buzz about the Content SDK, but it’s easy to assume it’s just another technical upgrade.
It’s not.
The Content SDK unlocks a set of powerful, immediately useful features that simply aren’t available with JSS. By switching, you gain:
Design Studio
- AI-Powered Creativity
- Prompt based changes and component creation
- Code at Your Fingertips
- Inspect and tweak component code directly
- Updates sync after deployment
- Smarter Visualization:
- Admins can customize placeholder values to match your brand
- Automatically generates visualization data sources so everything renders beautifully
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Native SitecoreAI Pages integration
The Content SDK is purpose-built to integrate with SitecoreAI Pages, enabling modern visual authoring and editing workflows that JSS was never designed to support.
- Native visual editing and preview support
- Authoring experience aligns with SitecoreAI expectations
- JSS does not fully support the Pages authoring model
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Component-level A/B/n testing
Built-in support for component experimentation without custom logic, tightly integrated with SitecoreAI experimentation capabilities.
- SDK-managed variants and traffic splits
- No bespoke variant-switching code required
- JSS requires custom implementations for equivalent behavior
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SDK-level personalization
Personalization is a first-class concept in the Content SDK, driven directly by SitecoreAI decisioning services.
- Audience-based rendering handled by the SDK
- Integrated with SitecoreAI personalization services
- No SitecoreAI-native personalization abstractions in JSS
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Next.js App Router support
The Content SDK is the only supported path for adopting modern Next.js App Router architecture on SitecoreAI.
- Enables modern routing, data fetching, and rendering patterns
- JSS supports Pages Router only
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Component variant file colocation
The Content SDK allows component variants to live alongside their base component files, improving organization and developer experience.
- Variants managed as first-class files
- Cleaner component structure for experimentation
- Not supported in JSS
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Built-in preview and authoring context
Preview and draft content handling are standardized and managed at the SDK level.
- Predictable preview behavior across server and client rendering
- Reduced edge cases for authoring workflows
- JSS preview handling varies by implementation
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Wrapping it up
JSS can still render content, but it’s no longer the gateway to what SitecoreAI can really do. Features like the AI-powered Design Studio, native Pages integration, modern Next.js architecture, and SDK-level experimentation are all built on the Content SDK and simply aren’t available otherwise.
The good news? Upgrading doesn’t have to be painful.
We are excited to announce the SitecoreAI SDK Upgrade Assistant. Using AI Agents, Industry Expertise, and Automated Scripting, the toolkit reduces manual, repeatable and tedious work to create a faster easier upgrade process.