Kentico Xperience vs. Progress Sitefinity vs. WordPress

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.

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Progress Sitefinity remains a little heavyweight for sites that require basic text content, or a limited number of pages. However, its flexibility (including the range of different content types if supports) make it a good choice for any organization requiring advanced content management capabilities at an affordable price.

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Wordpress is a great solution for a website of nearly any type. It may not be as suitable if a fully custom solution or app is needed, and it does have some limitations when it comes to connecting it to external products (especially if the product doesn't have any support from a native system), and it does require a lot of testing. Multiple plugins in one install are common but also increase the risk of conflicts, and when those do occur, it can be exceptionally time-consuming and tedious to identify what is causing the issue. As third parties create many plugins, you're also at risk with each potential security breach, which needs to be kept in mind. I would be cautious to use WordPress to store any sort of sensitive PPI. That said, it's a wonderful, easily customizable solution for many, many different types of websites and can allow even inexperienced client users with low-tech knowledge to update basics.

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• 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

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• 'Low-code structured content' (dynamic content types) is one of Sitefinity's most powerful features that allows you to structure content according to business needs, while at the same time dampening editorial freedom to ensure accessibility, meta enhancement, SEO and API consumption can be achieved.
• Sitefinity's content provider model allows us to flexibly (by means of admin interface) easily aggregate or separate content sharing within a multi-site instance.
• This proofs particularly powerful in emerging situations where there suddenly is a demand for content sharing across countries or regions.
• Adaptability at its core.
• While there's never a perfect fit for everything, it allows for easy code customization and extension being a .NET application at heart. Giving it a corporate edge over other custom solutions, whether it is on the development side or deployment side (on premise, IaaS or Azure DevOps Paas). And it has enabled us to put the system to use in its core feature - which is to manage content, where on other occasions we were able to take full advantage of its features such as A/B testing and personalization.

• Easy to use User Interface
• Coding / Plugin Implementation is awesome
• There's always a solution available for the platform
• Security is easy to use and robust
• Implementation with 3rd party platforms, such as Google's variety of tools
• Can download and host on your own server or use their hosted servers

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• 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.

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• Diagram or illustrate more use cases for server setups, and managing of upgrades.
• I'd like to see the ability to synchronize from one server to multiple others at once.
• Implementation assistance as part of the purchase rather than farming out to 3rd party, although they did answer every question we asked in order to determine our best architecture setup.

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• WordPress breaks often so you need to have someone who understands how to troubleshoot, which can take time and money.
• Some plugins are easier to customize than others, for example, some don't require any coding knowledge while others do. This can limit your project if you are not a coder.
• WordPress can be easily hacked, so you also need someone who can ensure your sites are secure.

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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.

Pricing makes this a no brainer. Not the best CMS, but with work arounds and some fumbling around we are able to make it do what we want it to do

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The complications we have and the lack of support. Every plugin has a differente team of support in charge and make one plugin work with the other one always affects the website performance. It's a thousand times better to have only one provider with all functionalities included unless you are an expert web developer or have a team dedicated to it

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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.

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Very big fan of this CMS, as it allows scalability, performance, and everything else. The support is great whenever we need it. As a marketer, the digital/marketing side of things is very easy to use and we've seen strong results from an SEO and marketing perspective. I can't speak to the developer/creative side too much, but in talking with these teams, they do recommend the tool as well.

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Extremely easy to use and train users. It took very little time to get everyone trained and onboarded to start using WordPress. Anytime we had any issues, we were able to find an article or video to help out or we were able to contact support. The menu options are well laid out so it is easy to find what you are looking for.

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Has been solid for us on availability

Anyone can visit WordPress.org and download a fully functional copy of WordPress free of charge. Additionally, WordPress is offered to users as open-source software, which means that anyone can customize the code to create new applications and make these available to other WordPress users.

A bit sluggish sometimes as the compiler works.

Mostly, any performance issues have to do with using too many plugins and these can sometimes slow down the overall performance of your site. It is very tempting to start adding lots of plugins to your WordPress site, however, as there are thousands of great plugins to choose from and so many of them help you do amazing things on your site. If you begin to notice performance issues with your WordPress site (e.g. pages being slow to load), there are ways to optimize the performance of your site, but this requires learning the process. WordPress users can learn how to optimize their WordPress sites by downloading the WPTrainMe WordPress training plugin (WPTrainMe.com) and going through the detailed step-by-step WordPress optimization tutorials.

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.

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Support can be pretty good, even though, depending on the level of licensing, it can take longer to hear back from their team. They do have a phone option, which works well. Overall, they are knowledgeable, and helpful when needed. At times, support is able to access the system directly and troubleshoot critical items when needed.

I give this rating, which I believe to be a great rating for a community based support system that's surrounding it. Most platforms and products have their own, and as WordPress does have their own team that help here and there, a lot of it's handled by community involvement with dedicated users who are experts with the system who love to help people.

Varies by the person providing training. High marks as it's incredibly easy to find experienced individuals in your community to provide training on any aspect of WordPress from content marketing, SEO, plugin development, theme design, etc. Less than 10 though as the training is community based and expectations for a session you find may fall short.

It is very easy to find online resources to learn how to do just about anything with WordPress.

The system provides many opportunities to integrate and enhance the platform and makes it easy to do so.

N/A - I was not part of the implementation team. We have had this internally for over 5 years. Based on my experience, ensure that you have documentation on the initial implementation and subsequent upgrades. I would also recommend to have all the documentation on how and why the system was implemented the way it was

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WordPress is not a great solution if you have: 1) A larger site with performance / availability requirements. 2) Multiple types of content you want to share - each with its own underlying data structure. 3) Multiple sites you need to manage. For very small sites where these needs are not paramount, WordPress is a decent solution

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.

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It is hands down just easier for our customers to use. The interface and the page builder experience is much better than what we have used in the past and has many enterprise features even in the lower price-point

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WordPress isn't as pretty or easy to use as certain competitors like Jimdo, Squarespace or HubSpot, but it makes up for it with its affordability, familiarity and the ability to find quality outside help easily. The same can't be said for certain competitors, as you might need to find an expert and it could get costly.

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Seems pretty scalable.

WordPress is completely scalable. You can get started immediately with a very simple "out-of-the box" WordPress installation and then add whatever functionality you need as and when you need it, and continue expanding. Often we will create various WordPress sites on the same domain to handle different aspects of our strategy (e.g. one site for the sales pages, product information and/or a marketing blog, another for delivering products securely through a private membership site, and another for running an affiliate program or other application), and then ties all of these sites together using a common theme and links on each of the site's menus. Additionally, WordPress offers a multisite function that allows organizations and institutions to manage networks of sites managed by separate individual site owners, but centrally administered by the parent organization. You can also expand WordPress into a social networking or community site, forums, etc. The same scalability applies to web design. You can start with a simple design and then scale things up to display sites with amazing visual features, including animations and video effects, sliding images and animated product image galleries, elements that appear and fade from visitor browsers, etc. The scaling possibilities of WordPress are truly endless.

• 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.

• Sitefinity has reduced the amount of time it takes to edit and publish content, which has enabled us to get information out more quickly.
• Sitefinity allowed us to establish a consistent and modern brand identity and apply it across multiple websites.

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• Allowed us to being all websites under a single umbrella, saving costs on similar products.
• It's increased our website turn time and made us faster and more efficient at launching websites.
• Edits and tweaks happen much faster as we have a customized environment.

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