Likelihood to Recommend Kentico is a robust and flexible CMS platform that is great for managing multiple websites and multiple environments (dev, stage, and production for instance). It makes content management very easy and makes it easy to keep the environments synced with the same content. However, the Kentico CMS does require a bit more technical understanding to get it set up properly and requires a bit more effort and support than, say, free open-source options.
Read full review The larger your organization, the more appropriate Plone will be. This is not to say that Plone is a worse choice for small websites, only that the minimum investment for a Plone site is certainly higher than for other platforms. If you already use Plone for your site and are looking for a redesign or an overhaul, I would only advise switching to a different platform such as WordPress or Drupal if your organization is downsizing. For any other situation, Plone is the natural choice for your growth.
Read full review Pros I love the intuitive top and left navigation within the content management platform. I can easily find what section, sub-section, and page I'm looking to edit For creating content, the WYSIWYG editor is so intuitive; it feels like you're working on an MS Word doc! The tab for adding metadata in simple fields takes away the headache of having to hunt and peck through code to add H1 tag, page description etc. The image library is easy to edit and manage Read full review Plone is a folder-based system, organising content in a similar way desktop-users are doing for the last two decades. No need to teach non-tech customers some relational-database like paradigm for content management. Plone is secure. It is the most secure CMS you can get your hands on. Plone is flexible, and makes fast development easy. Read full review Cons Kentico needs to invest in more enterprise class environment management utilities -- example: global CDN support via the CMS is sorely lacking. There are work-arounds, but it should be more elegant. The Kentico staging module could be improved to support the concept of bundled releases. Current staging module functionality is good, but could be improved. Kentico ecommerce support is a touch immature. While content management is superb, Kentico lags in this area when compared to many open source ecommerce engines. Kentico is lacking MVC support. 99% of the time this isn't an issue for the end-user or business user, but can be a hurdle for technology teams depending on the team's makeup. Read full review Not everything is configurable or editable by Plone, and when you need to adjust or add custom pieces in, you need to deal with Zope. Zope has an ugly, confusing and difficult UI and structure as a backend. Using 3rd party products is difficult to do - there are a few different ways to get them installed, all of which take a bit of luck to get right. Building custom products for Plone is not fun. You've got to deal with an archaic framework to tie in that is not well documented (there is documentation about many things, but not great documentation and there are a lot of holes in the documentation). Read full review Likelihood to Renew We are locked into Kentico for the long haul. It provides us with an easy and flexible solution for a very non technical company to create a site and have the features they want, especially with the inclusion of EMS into our license. Now we have a true platform to build and grow our solutions.
Read full review I no longer use Plone because I got an internship in the web development field and my current place of employment uses their own content management system that they created. After getting to know other CMS's and similar software and comparing them to Plone, I would enjoy using Plone again in the future, but there are more complicated software that I'd like to learn as I progress in my field of study.
Read full review Usability It seriously is one of the best interfaces I have ever used. I also love the fact that I can use UI personalization to secure any functionality by user or role that I don't want that role to have access to. The best part is the customization of the UI, I can add in any button, tab, or menu item I want through it, no code required.
Read full review Compared to the amount of Plone sites, users and customizations we have in our organization, the amount of support requests and training needed is really small
Read full review Performance Plone is very intensive in its operations, and if not configured well it can be slow. However it is designed and built with speed in mind and with proper use of coding, templates and caching can perform extremely well under high loads. It is capable of scaling to very high load availability environments with no specific coding requirements.
Read full review Support Rating Their support staff is friendly, knowledgeable, and will work with you until your issue is fixed. This could take a few phone calls back and forth, but they are very diligent in helping you.
Read full review Implementation Rating The system provides many opportunities to integrate and enhance the platform and makes it easy to do so.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I've used
Sitecore , Ektron,
Joomla !,
WordPress , and SharePoint (if you want to count that as a competitor for CMS). Kentico 8 blows them all out of the water. Nothing is more intuitive in the way that content is created, the way the site is setup, and how efficient rollouts can be with Content Staging.
Read full review Drupal : Plone is cheaper, so with
Drupal is more complex to reach the required ROI. However,
Drupal has a lower learning curve
WordPress : For our necessities it has a more expensive learning curve than plone.
Joomla , is easier to use. However, it have some issues on security and web content where Plone is much better
Read full review Return on Investment Kentico has enabled faster speed to market for SMEs. They are empowered to enter content them selves while still having that content go through editorial review to ensure tone of voice and brand are maintained. Deploying Kentico has freed up web developer resources from manual content entry enabling them to build more useful solutions to support the business efforts Tapping into the Kentico event pipelne allows us to trigger external system events when product content is published. Read full review As a development company Plone allows us to provide complex web applications in a short amount of time. Plone is quite robust and reliable so when you customize some parts you do not risk to damage other parts. This is quite positive for a web development framework, Plone allows our clients to spread their activities among different employees improving the efficiency of content generation and management. Read full review ScreenShots Kentico Xperience Screenshots