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Kentico Xperience

Kentico Xperience

Overview

What is Kentico Xperience?

Kentico is a web content management system for building websites, online stores, intranets, and Web 2.0 community sites. Kentico CMS uses ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server for development via its Portal Engine, using Visual Studio, or through Microsoft MVC.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Kentico Xperience, a robust content management system, has been widely utilized by organizations to build and maintain a variety of …
Continue reading

Kentico CAN do!

10 out of 10
December 08, 2017
Incentivized
I use Kentico for my website which includes a custom searchable product database, a custom event submission & display page, newsletter …
Continue reading
Read all reviews

Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 16 features
  • Admin section (25)
    7.2
    72%
  • Page templates (25)
    7.1
    71%
  • Role-based user permissions (24)
    7.1
    71%
  • Code quality / cleanliness (25)
    7.1
    71%
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Pricing

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Kentico Xperience Business

$9,999 / year

On Premise
Subscription license

Kentico Xperience Business

$14,999

On Premise
Perpetual license

Kentico Xperience Enterprise

$17,999 / year

On Premise
Subscription license

Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://xperience.io/pricing

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

Kentico Xperience - Pages Application Demo

YouTube

Editing Pages - Kentico Xperience Demo

YouTube

Kentico Xperience 13 Demo - Administration Interface | Ray Business Technologies

YouTube

Demo: Kentico Xperience 13 Refresh 7

YouTube

Demo: Kentico Xperience 13 Refresh 8

YouTube

How to use Kentico Xperience Contact management

YouTube
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Features

Security

This component helps a company minimize the security risks by controlling access to the software and its data, and encouraging best practices among users.

7.1
Avg 7.9

Platform & Infrastructure

Features related to platform-wide settings and structure, such as permissions, languages, integrations, customizations, etc.

7.5
Avg 7.9

Web Content Creation

Features that support the creation of website content.

7
Avg 7.5

Web Content Management

Features for managing website content

6.9
Avg 7.0
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Product Details

What is Kentico Xperience?

Kentico Xperience is a digital experience platform that combines content management, digital marketing, and commerce.

Available on-premises or in the cloud, Kentico Xperience is presented by the vendor as an easy-to-use solution for modern websites. It provides personalized experiences and integrates seamlessly into any technology stack.

Kentico Xperience is built to empower companies and brands to increase customer engagement, deliver personalized content to the right audience, and optimize performance to win more clients. Its capabilities, time to value, and ease of use are backed by Kentico support and a global network of implementation partners.

Kentico Xperience Features

Web Content Creation Features

  • Supported: WYSIWYG editor
  • Supported: Code quality / cleanliness
  • Supported: Content versioning
  • Supported: Admin section
  • Supported: Page templates
  • Supported: Library of website themes
  • Supported: Mobile optimization / responsive design
  • Supported: Publishing workflow
  • Supported: Form generator
  • Supported: Content scheduling

Web Content Management Features

  • Supported: Internal content search
  • Supported: Content taxonomy
  • Supported: SEO support
  • Supported: Browser compatibility
  • Supported: Bulk management
  • Supported: Page caching
  • Supported: Availability / breadth of extensions
  • Supported: Built-in e-commerce / shopping cart
  • Supported: E-commerce / shopping cart extension
  • Supported: Community / comment management
  • Supported: Import / export
  • Supported: Website analytics

Platform & Infrastructure Features

  • Supported: API
  • Supported: Internationalization / multi-language

Security Features

  • Supported: Role-based user permissions
  • Supported: Version history
  • Supported: Simple roll-back capabilities

Additional Features

  • Supported: Marketing Automation
  • Supported: Content Personalization
  • Supported: Lead Scoring
  • Supported: Data Protection/GDPR
  • Supported: A/B Testing
  • Supported: Campaign and Conversion Management
  • Supported: Contact Management
  • Supported: Email Marketing
  • Supported: Contact Segmentation/Personas
  • Supported: MVC Page Builder
  • Supported: Online Storefront
  • Supported: Abandoned cart recovery
  • Supported: Checkout user experience
  • Supported: eCommerce security
  • Supported: Promotions & discounts
  • Supported: Personalized recommendations

Kentico Xperience Screenshots

Screenshot of Application listScreenshot of Marketing AutomationScreenshot of Kentico DashboardScreenshot of Data ProtectionScreenshot of Persona InsightsScreenshot of Campaign ManagementScreenshot of DashboardScreenshot of Marketing AutomationScreenshot of DashboardScreenshot of Page builderScreenshot of Web analyticsScreenshot of Data protectionScreenshot of AB testing

Kentico Xperience Videos

Kentico - The All-in-one That Gets It Done
What does Kentico mean to you?
Kentico Xperience 13 - Administration interface
How to use Kentico Xperience Marketing Automation
How to use Kentico Xperience Email Marketing

Kentico Xperience Competitors

Kentico Xperience Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported LanguagesEnglish

Kentico Xperience Downloadables

Frequently Asked Questions

Kentico is a web content management system for building websites, online stores, intranets, and Web 2.0 community sites. Kentico CMS uses ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server for development via its Portal Engine, using Visual Studio, or through Microsoft MVC.

Drupal, Evoq Content, and Joomla! are common alternatives for Kentico Xperience.

Reviewers rate API and WYSIWYG editor and Mobile optimization / responsive design highest, with a score of 8.

The most common users of Kentico Xperience are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(97)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Kentico Xperience, a robust content management system, has been widely utilized by organizations to build and maintain a variety of websites. Customers have praised Kentico for its flexibility, built-in features, and positive user experience. It has empowered organizations to create and manage both intranet sites and external websites for B2B and B2C organizations.

One of the key use cases of Kentico Xperience is its ability to support multiple brand sites with content publishing and language variations for different countries and users. This allows organizations to effectively reach their target audience in different regions while maintaining consistent branding. Additionally, Kentico Xperience has been instrumental in creating websites for various organizations, improving communication and sharing information with patients, staff, and the public. The intuitive platform provided by Kentico enables both tech-savvy and non-technologically oriented individuals to easily design and maintain content on company websites.

Kentico Xperience also serves as a powerful CMS solution for ecommerce websites, job boards, learning management systems, and other web applications. Its extensive feature set and options facilitate ease and flexibility in developing websites of any kind and size. Moreover, Kentico's document model system helps in finding and indexing multimedia content such as videos.

Overall, Kentico Xperience has proven to be a valuable tool for organizations looking to efficiently manage their website content, streamline workflows, and provide engaging user experiences.

Intuitive User Interface: Several users have praised Kentico Xperience for its amazing and easy-to-use user interface. They have found it intuitive and user-friendly, allowing them to navigate and use the software effortlessly, even without any training.

Strong Customization and Integration Capabilities: Many reviewers have been impressed by Kentico Xperience's strong customization and integration capabilities. The built-in REST service, Integration Bus, and elegant API were particularly appreciated. This flexibility and extensibility of the software allow users to easily extend the system or connect it to any CRM, ERP, or third-party service without extensive custom coding.

Powerful HTML Control: Users have highlighted the ability to control the HTML output of websites at a very fine level in Kentico Xperience. This feature makes it easy to create HTML5 pages and implement responsive designs. The powerful HTML control features provide users with the tools they need to create and customize websites with modern design practices.

Outdated HTML Markup: Some users have mentioned that older modules in Kentico suffer from outdated HTML markup, making it challenging to create responsive designs. This limitation has been expressed by multiple reviewers and may impact the ability to deliver modern and mobile-friendly websites.

Weak Intranet Modules: Users have reported that the Intranet modules in Kentico are weak in terms of scalability, limiting their usefulness for larger projects. This concern has been raised by several reviewers, highlighting potential challenges in implementing robust intranet solutions on the platform.

Limited E-commerce Capabilities: Kentico's e-commerce support is considered immature compared to open-source e-commerce engines, according to user feedback. This limitation has been noted by multiple reviewers, indicating a need for enhancements in this area to meet the capabilities offered by other e-commerce platforms.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 44)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Tim Johnston | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Overall, Kentico Xperience is the product of advanced marketing and business. Kentico Xperience is a mind-blowing and helpful answer for present-day websites. Interface and settings help the client learn the product in a brief time frame. It needs some changes in the functionality and improvements in addressing feedback and errors. Kentico Xperience is best in providing big help in big organizations to have a good relationship with their clients, increase customer engagement, and deliver personalized customizable content to the right audience.
  • It combines e-commerce, marketing, and digital automation together, which is the best feature for the websites.
  • The stand-out feature is that Kentico Xperience makes users able to import the source code of multiple e-commerce projects.
  • Its simulator allows users to test the final product on it and check for any bugs and errors.
  • It helps in extracting variables in XLS format.
  • The major drawback of enabling organization on Kentico Xperience is that when a user does not have access to the laptop or PC, the user has to check the admin panel on the smartphone.
  • The smartphone admin panel is lacking major functions. It is hard to work on the admin panel on mobile devices.
  • Admin area has to be more functional and needs an upgrade to add more features.
Kentico Xperience is one of the best platforms available for digital marketing, management of different content, and digital commerce. The dashboard is fully intuitive, which allows users to pin the software and tools according to use. Media libraries, codes, and automatic sequences can easily be stored, sorted, and made easily accessible. Integration with other software is amazing--it’s easy to set up a marketing application with Kentico Xperience, as it gives one marketing task and automates it.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Kentico is our website CMS system. We use it to run a non-e-commerce website serving both our B2B and B2C customers, as well as to enable advanced marketing and business intelligence. All of our websites are run on the Kentico platform.
  • Website Content Management
  • Ease of Use for Non-Technical Staff
  • Better tools for custom widget development by end-users
  • Better Documentation/Help Files
Kentico is well suited for an enterprise-level CMS solution for major websites, but would not be suitable for smaller businesses due to the high cost of purchase and implementation as well as the need for customized development. It's adept at handling large amounts of content in an organized and efficient manner.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Kentico for an ecommerce website and portal for external users. It is used by our external users as well as content contributors to manage the content. Kentico addressed the need to get onto a supported platform for our portal and get a more modern tool to manage this website going forward.
  • User management - all user management is within one location and can be integrated with SSO.
  • Reusable content - being able to link content allowed for users to not have to recreate the wheel everytime.
  • Working with good partners. We worked with a partner to set up Kentico and they really brought good insight.
  • Learning curve for content contributors. When a user is used to a home grown, Kentico can be a large change.
  • Roles: Managing users by role can be challenging because you cannot export.
  • Media libraries - Could use more metadata management at the media library level.
Kentico is well suited to websites that are very straight forward in their security. The built in modules are strong and easy for a contributor to manage. More secured sites can cause struggles if you need to go beyond the built in security features and will need development intervention to get to that level.
Courtney Reyers | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We deployed Kentico to stand up our flagship website, asm.org. It is the hub where members consume content and complete conversions. We also built content models and had our developer customize the tool to fit our needs and be more flexible for our members. This will allow for multi-use of content and better staff management.
  • We were able to implement tags and categories in a very modern and flexible way.
  • Related content and aggregation is very easy and works well.
  • Fantastic WYSIWYG that even less tech-savvy staff can function well in.
  • Responsive image resizing is terrible. It crops funky and the images are all over the place.
  • Moving/reusing content in the tree is poor--you can only drag and drop from folders. When you have a long tree, this becomes clunky for users.
  • Staging environment can be confusing and often introduces errors to our prod.
Kentico is great for our smaller organization that has very nuanced needs, both in products and services and our members themselves. We find the content management is pretty straightforward and, outside of the clunky tree, is great for staff use.
Fayas J | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
---- Updated 2019 Review
Kentico has come a long way over the years. With it's Kentico 12 move to MVC, Kentico is now much more developer friendly, while also keeping very user friendly thanks to it's Page Builder. Making Sections, Widgets, Page Templates in MVC Is very easy, and as with other things in Kentico, is very uniform in how things operate, making development simple. Lastly Kentico 2020 is coming with .Net Core support, which is amazing.

----------- Older Review

Kentico started out as our CMS of choice for small to medium sized businesses, but it is now starting to replace even large projects that normally would warrant a 'heavy duty' CMS like SiteCore. Having worked in many different CMS systems, I find Kentico lightyears beyond SiteCore and other CMS systems because some systems will give you features, but it's a pain to build custom functionality. Others will make it easy to build custom functionality, but don't have the base items there (so you have to build everything from scratch). Kentico has both ease of use, ease of customization, and has been able to tackle every problem we've thrown at it. And since it's SQL based, all the information in the system is available so it's extremely flexible.
  • Ease of use for Customers to manage. Kentico 12 Page Builder is very user friendly to add Sections and Widgets. Kentico's UI for managing page content also is very intuitive and overall has been easy for our customers to maintain.
  • For Developer, the MVC Modeling for Kentico's Page Builder is very slick with allowing developers to define Sections, Widgets, and Page Templates as either a very simple View (Or Model + View), to allowing a more complex setup of Controller + View + Model, meaning we can create simple things fast but still have the capability to create more complex components.
  • Kentico's Feature set is expansive, and really has become an enterprise solution with full wysiwyg workflow configuration, automation, and other tools that empower Editors to maintain and leverage their web sites.
  • Open Documentation / Support. I've worked in some CMS systems where everything is hidden, you have limited API, and when you want to figure something out there's no documentation. Kentico has an extensive Developer Network, open to the public, with very in depth documentation, API examples, and even an entire "demo" site that anyone can set up that shows you how to use all the great functionality. Tech support is top notch as well, super friendly.
  • Kentico 12 SP is missing a couple small features which they (and the community) are working on filling in, such as integrated dynamic routing.
The only situation I wouldn't recommend Kentico is for a small business who can't afford it. Otherwise, we have saved a ton of development time thanks to Kentico's robust feature set and ease of use. We've done everything including massive Product + Asset systems with regionalization and localization, teacher student task management modules, Event management systems with encryption, customized cart item ecommerce sites, reporting intranets, etc. There really isn't anything Kentico can't do.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
We are a Kentico implementer and have used it for many years. It is a fantastic platform to build on. We choose it because we get so much out of the box and we can extend it when needed. Its flexible and stable.
  • Flexible.
  • Reliable.
  • Stable.
  • It lacks a few levels of enterprise-level features within the online marketing module.
  • It lacks a few levels of enterprise-level features within the e-commerce module.
Kentico is a bit of work to design and build to make sure it's easy for content editors. You can take the 'wrong' path and make it hard on editors. Upfront planning and on-going support are needed to get and keep a good implementation.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Kentico is being used in our organization as our primary Content Management System for our websites. It is being used across the whole organization including content management being done by the marketing department.

The Kentico CMS has helped us transition away from a limited and clunky CMS to a robust, flexible, and configurable platform that lets us focus on and achieve our goals instead of fighting with the platform and only being able to do the most basic tasks.
  • Extremely flexible content management system that makes content creation and management easy.
  • Includes a 'staging' module that allows content managers to sync content across dev or test environments to a production environment in a very controlled way.
  • Kentico provides an interface for creating page templates and 'transformations' which allow even non-technical users to get in there and make adjustments to these things without necessarily needing a developer or IT resource involved.
  • Kentico makes it easy to sync content between environments, but it does have some room for improvement here. If you have many sites in the same instance of Kentico, there can be some messy synchronization tasks that show and it does make it a bit more confusing and hard to keep track of what's what.
  • Kentico doesn't really provide much in the way of out-of-the-box page layouts or website themes. It would be an improvement if it had an easier to access a library of themes.
  • Implementation would benefit from a team or agency that specializes in Kentico since it isn't the most widely known platform and having a team that really understands the platform would make the setup and transition much easier.
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.
December 03, 2018

Kentico for admins rules!

Irina Danilova | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Kentico is used across all branches of our organization. Our websites (river and ocean cruises-based travel) is based on it. We build landing pages, create offers, provide brochures through it, and much more. Some of the visitors actions are tracked, so it is possible to measure site's effectivenes for marketing needs.
  • It has a very intuitive module-based way to create page layout.
  • It is mobile friendly.
  • It is customizable.
  • You will build skills to use modules and build pages quickly.
  • You can add Bootstrap an HTML to you existing widgets and achieve a wide variety.
  • It uses a folder structure to organize content, so unless you watch out, your file tree can get hard to search.
  • Form builder is good, but may be improved.
  • More options for WYSIWIG editor would help non-technical people to style their content in rich text module more efficiently.
  • Sometimes it gets hard to find a wanted item in a media library.
If a simple site with static pages is needed, then Kentico maybe a bit of overkill. But if you have a lot of dynamic data feed like our company has, than it is a wise choice. Although not widely used, the system is still respectable, and there are digital agencies that offer good support for it.
Billy Rivet | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I have used several CMSs in the past and decided on Kentico 8 for a large website project in early 2015. The stability of the software, the usability of the software, and the expansive options are all phenomenal. It is as user friendly for developers as it is for the end-user maintaining the site. The dynamic display abilities of the software are amazing. In this implementation, we have two regions in a state updating content and both marketing departments learned quickly and caught on quickly due to the ease of use of the Kentico backend management interface. The departments aren't very computer savvy but Kentico is quite comfortable to them, allowing for management of a very large site with no knowledge of web code needed quite easy.
  • The ability to create various user levels and access for large organizations is quite impressive.
  • The user interface and WYSIWYG interface is very easy to learn and gain a comfort level for those not very computer savvy.
  • The dynamic display of content is quite easy to achieve from a developers perspective.
  • I may be wrong, but there are so many options that it can be overwhelming to the end user making updates. I may need to investigate user access better.
  • Draft modes of pages or content is not as user friendly as I would like it to be.
  • A review module of new content added would be wonderful.
I think Kentico 8 is wonderful, but it for larger websites with true dynamic display of content needed. It is over board for smaller sites.
Alex Kimber | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It was being used for the Southern Haemophilia Network; an NHS England commissioned network across multiple NHS Trusts. Kentico helped to create a new website for the Network which was essential for communication across the Network to patients, staff and the public on all of the work we were doing as a network.
  • Easy to use
  • Intuitive
  • Adaptable
  • Price
  • More 'drag and drop'
  • Better analytics
It is well suited for any department or organization that wants to create a website using a proper CMS tool. We used it across our department and it was easy to train users and have multiple updates all at once. Less suited to single users or small businesses who want to save money. In that scenario, I would use something free, like WordPress.
December 08, 2017

Kentico CAN do!

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Kentico for my website which includes a custom searchable product database, a custom event submission & display page, newsletter sign-up forms, a blog, and various templates. It enables me to easily create and edit website content without requiring a web designer or web programmer.
  • 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
  • Perhaps upgrade the dashboard's user interface to make it feel more like an app environment which is more modern and expected these days.
  • The standard You-Tube widget doesn't always render correctly on mobile or desktop. not sure if this is the tool itself or the way the people who built out my site for me configured it
  • Make it easier to add anchors to a page (i.e. when clicking a certain link it "jumps" to a specific part of a page) for a user that is not a programmer.
Well suited for marketers that do not have in-house web programming or web designing resources available. Less appropriate for people that aren't computer savvy (i.e. don't know how to use basic programs like email, Excel, PowerPoint) or for those who are not detail-oriented because if you skip certain steps when adding/editing content, your webpage won't render correctly and/or create negative impact for search engine optimization without you knowing it.
December 05, 2017

Kentico User Review

Kate Wright | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Kentico is being used to manage our main company marketing website, as well as the website for our subsidiary. It gives us an intuitive platform for designing and maintaining content on our products, services and general company information for members and prospective members alike. It is easy to use and allows both tech-savvy and non-technologically oriented people to perform website maintenance.
  • User friendly for tech and non-tech people.
  • Good workflow for approvals to ensure accuracy.
  • Easy calendar option allowing for managing events.
  • Every aspect that I use to perform my job for Kentico is pretty user-friendly. I believe those that dive a little deeper may see some areas for improvement, but it is up to par for my needs.
Kentico is well suited for corporate websites needing flexibility for design and a fairly easy-to-navigate platform for frequent content/design updates. I imagine it would be less appropriate for a small business that does not have a significant technology budget.
Dimitris Rakopoulos | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
We use Kentico as the main CMS for our website as well as the websites of all our customers. Kentico CMS is a robust CMS solution that can be used to develop and kind and size of websites. The feature set and options available can help anyone develop website with ease and flexibility.
  • Ease of use. The out-of-the-box feature set of 450 web parts alone will help anyone create almost any type of website without writing code.
  • Performance. Based on core Microsoft .NET technologies Kentico can handle any amount of traffic and users. If a single server is not enough the web farm support helps scaling of the required infrastructure.
  • Extensibility. The Kentico API offers a wide range of programming interfaces for developers. If something is not there it can be easily developed using standard development tools such as Visual Studio.
  • Because of it's vast feature set the documentation could be a bit more robust and thorough.
  • The support for standard html5 elements would be a good point to add when developing.
Kentico is ideal for any type of website. That might be a portal, an e-commerce website or even an intranet. Kentico has build in template websites for all those cases. Kentico would be an overkill for small website. It can surely be used but the entire feature set is so extensive that it would be a waste.
October 30, 2015

Kentico 8 is cool beans.

Brendon Lamb | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I develop Kentico 8 master pages and templates for our clients to use within their website(s). Kentico 8 allows us to create complex layouts that are still easy for non-web savvy users to edit and maintain.
  • Master pages and templating.
  • Page maintenance and updating.
  • Web form creation, particularly flexibility in regards to display of forms.
  • Not open source.
  • Documentation can be a little clunky to read through and understand sometimes - especially for inexperienced users.
While I couldn't recommend it to many smaller businesses, Kentico 8 delivers an excellent enterprise level CMS product. It's easy to use once configured properly; secure, and fast.
Eric Wiley | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Rockfish is a digital agency. As such we build all manner of websites for large and fortune 1000 clients. The technology department at Rockfish has specialized in several CMS platforms -- Kentico is one of our featured platforms for CMS-style site development. Many other departments across have aligned across the use of Kentico as a development platform.
  • The primary selling point of Kentico is its tremendous value for the licensing dollar. When compared to high-dollar CMSs, Kentico provides a 95% of the functionality of a system like Sitecore or AEM at a fifth of the price.
  • The development model for Kentico allows for quick entry for developers and a relatively low learning curve. Setup and install is also extremely easy.
  • The CMS admin tool itself is quite intuitive and capable for easy ramp-up by non-technical staff members.
  • Among top-tier CMS vendors, Kentico has far and away the best support and documentation available in the marketplace.
  • 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.
Kentico 8 scales extremely well from project budgets targeted under 50,000 to projects well over 1 million dollars. I've successfully applied the system to both internal business applications as well as high-volume B2C applications. I would avoid using Kentico 8 in situations where the client has extremely specific administration needs.
Albert Hovingh | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it to provide custom websites to any kind of business. Kentico 8 offers the easy access of content on an admin and onsite level without requiring the expertise of years and training of programming that so many content management systems demand. I personally have used five of the most popular content management systems, and Kentico 8 is the only affordable option that provides the quality and ease of use that most businesses require.
  • Page Templates. I've never used any other CMS with the ease of use in creating and reusing the same template across multiple pages.
  • User management and security. This is very straightforward and simple when all you want is basic security for your content managers, but it's also granular if you need it to be. Allowing access or denying access to virtually any control or object in the site, or on the administrator side without the need of custom code
  • Keeping Custom code to a minimal level when using the portal engine. The Webparts that are built in cover 80% of all business needs, and customizing the rest is a breeze since it is built around .net.
  • The learning curve is much faster than with other systems such as Ektron, or Sitecore.
  • Custom modules are really cool if you want to package custom code to reuse on different sites and for the community
  • Global event handlers to hook into any change that is made on any document or object in the system. You can literally add any code you want and attach it to any event you want.
  • Automated Marketing in this system is rivaled by no other CMS
  • A/B variant tests are excellent for determining traffic on the site.
  • The Shopping Cart feature can use some work. There are excellent modules that make up for this, and I hear the next version has improved this, but nonetheless it is still lacking in the ways it can be customized
  • Calendar controls have to be highly customized to make it work right and look good.
  • The integration bus doesn't make sense for importing, and is lacking in documentation.
If someone wants a quick and easy site for under $1k, it's not for them. Kentico 8 is for businesses. Someone who wants a proper website, not just a few static pages.
Brian McKeiver | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
Kentico 8 is our preferred tool of choice when it comes to building enterprise class websites. My company, BizStream, has built over 100 web sites and applications with the platform. The sites that we create with Kentico 8 service B2B and B2C focused organizations that are looking to take their web sites to the next level. We use Kentico 8 because we feel it is the best ASP.NET CMS that fully integrates CMS, E-commerce, Online Marketing, and Intranet all in one. The platform also allows us to deliver our sites on time and on budget because it is leaps and bounds faster to develop in than other similar products in the space. Delivering a high quality web site is the main business problem that Kentico 8 solves for us.
  • Ease of use for the developer, content authors, and internet marketers that use it. The user interface in Kentico 8 truly is amazing and easy to pick up with no training.
  • Strong customization and integration capabilities, including the built in REST service, Integration Bus, and elegant API. I love the fact that if there is anything not in the box we can use the system to extend it or connect it to any CRM, ERP, or other third party service very easily.
  • Large out of the box functionality. There is an extremely high level of value that the platform provides. Instead of having to build extra modules for things like Event Booking, Forums, Polls, or E-commerce, they are already there for us to use.
  • Ability to control the HTML output of the site at a very fine level. Creating HTML5 is very easy in Kentico and implementing any design, as responsive, is totally possible in the system.
  • The ability to get a very high level of insight into the visitors journey through the website and market back to them with the Contact management, Lead Scoring, and Marketing Automation modules is very impressive.
  • The scalablity of the system is impressive. Running a very highly trafficked web site is totally possible with Kentico and its strong caching and web farm capabilities.
  • The support that Kentico provides is top notch, 24/7 global support is included with any purchase, 7 day bug fix policy, and excellent documentation
  • The development community is engaged and ready to help if you are a developer learning Kentico, and the Kentico partner community is very strong as well.
  • NET MVC has a way to go still in Kentico.
  • Some of the older modules that have existed in previous versions of Kentico have some dated HTML markup that makes responsive a challenge.
  • Some of the intranet modules are fairly week in terms of scalability. The document library, projects, and tasks functionality are not that great and ill suited for large uses.
Are you currently using ASP.NET technology stack? If so do you need to integrate with any third party systems? If so this is the right tool for you. Are you looking to move into the cloud, specifically the Azure cloud? If so Kentico 8 is set up extremely well to play nice with the cloud. Do you need to have a digital marketing solution for your site? Kentico 8 provides an excellent all in one solution for this.
Gabriel Fuller | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
We currently use Kentico 8 for our corporate external website and for reselling to our customers. It provides an easy way for us to be able to provide a custom website to our clients that they can easily control, update and enhance. Overall, it addresses a lot of our requirements when it comes to building a custom solution.
  • User and Role Management/ACL: With Kentico 8's built in ACL features, we can get as granular or high level with access and permissions as we want. The ACL features allow tuning to the exact customer specific levels that are needed.
  • It would be nice to have something built in that supports reusing widget content across multiple pages. For instance, if I have a widget with a link that sends someone to a page, I would like an easy, built-in way to say: "I want this widget on these pages and in this order and to hide it on this page, and change the order on this page"
I would love to make it our standard product across all applications. Basically, I think this is a great starting point for any application that can then be enhanced through custom code development and extendible modules. The templates, editors, ACL features, security features, logging, debugging tools, and many of the other items make it a great starting point for most scenarios, in my opinion.
September 21, 2015

Best Mid-Tier CMS

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Kentico 8 forms the basis of our website and all marketing activity. It's used by most people in the organisation for a variety of reasons: blogging, promotional activity, reporting etc.
  • Easy to use.
  • Very flexible. It has an open API that makes data transfer and changes to the way in which it operates easier to achieve than in others we have used.
  • Fantastic support. Always respond relatively quickly and capable of dealing with highly technical questions.
  • EMS product racks up rows of data pretty quickly on busy sites, it would be great to have this in a non-relational DB format and treated as proper "big-data".
  • They could do with a license leasing model for sites that need to scale up and down based on traffic volumes.
If you're looking to integrate your full marketing toolkit into a single solution at a reasonable cost, it excels. For genuine enterprise scenarios the CMS is brilliant, but other areas may be weaker than in specialist products. Kentico 8 probably overkill for much smaller sites.
Virgil Carroll | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
High Monkey is a web consultancy that has used many web content management systems in the past for both its own web presence (and blog) and its clients. We are started working with Kentico back in 2005. We use Kentico to enable complex content management for large public websites. Its strengths allow us to develop sophisticated web strategies for our clients yet enable ease-of-management for their administrators and SMEs. Kentico has been one of the best solutions we've worked with to provide clients with a substantial, easy-to-use (and learn) Web CMS.
  • Kentico's page interface gives SMEs and content administrators a simple way to update content, review changes and create a streamlined content development workflow.
  • Utilizing the Kentico widget framework, we are able to create components for content administrators to use yet force the adherence to style / functional guidelines established during the user experience / design phase of the project. This greatly increases the content owner's 'perceived' flexibility of the system, while still keeping the consistency of user experience in mind.
  • From a programmer aspect, Kentico has one of the strongest, easiest-to-use, APIs in the business. This allows for developer-centric solutions to highly complex problems, but also allows for the maintainability of custom code through the software upgrade lifecycle. Not having to re-compile and test all the time on version to version has been a significant time saver.
  • For those sites that are looking for a robust Web CMS solution and are in need of eCommerce, Kentico offers one of the stronger OOTB eCommerce platforms. We've gotten customers up and running in a short amount of time.
  • The Kentico community continues to grow and a number of experts participate in the Kentico Question & Answer area of their support site, which is really helping build confidence in the brand and provides better assistance than just always relying on Kentico Support.
  • As with most software companies, documentation can sometimes be a bit cryptic to read through. There is a certain level of knowledge that is expected when reading through it to understand how best to utilize it.
  • Though Kentico has been working these out over the past few versions of the product, I would like to see more emphasis on OOTB webparts being rendered according to responsive design best practices. There are a few that require re-work to get them to work well in a responsive design.
  • I would like to see more training offered targeted towards Kentico power users or administrators. Right now most training is geared towards the developer space (with some end user).
Kentico 8 is a very scalable web content management system. Many of the sites we built have thousands of pages; much re-used across the site. It has been very good at providing a solid interface to scale up content and content owners.
Mark Krolikowski | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
Kentico 8 has empowered our clients to take their marketing initiatives to a whole new level - with great results! Plus, the ease of use and friendliness of the new tools and functionality allowed them to achieve this with minimal ramp-up time. Website administrators love the new UX of the Kentico dashboard and can now more easily optimize UI and brand messaging with reporting from tools like A/B testing. From a developer’s technical standpoint, Kentico 8’s improved IA, test automation, and enhanced API functionality allow us to more easily accommodate our clients’ business challenges to help streamline their online operations.
  • The easy to use dashboard.
  • The powerful automated marketing tools.
  • The great integrated developer tools.
  • SharePoint bi-directional synchronization.
  • CRM and ERP integration improvements.
  • Lack of asset management functionality throughout multi-site platform.
  • Form builder tool can improve.
If a client is looking for an easy to use WCM platform that integrates well with internal systems and provides "90%" of an enterprise solution toolset at a fraction of the price, then Kentico 8 is strongly recommended. Plus the Kentico EMS offering will truly allow you maximize your marketing initiatives.
Paul Colborn | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Kentico 8 is used to maintain 8 public facing websites. Easy content changes can now easily be made by the multiple stakeholders. From the marketing team to branch managers, content editing is enabled. The content editing can vary by each users role and responsibilities. For example marketing can edit a majority of pages while, branch managers can only edit a few pages. This broad level of access and roles has really benefited the organization by allowing IT development resources to significantly reduce the amount of time spent on updates to webpages. It has also cut down on the last minute Friday afternoon fire drills requesting changes. From IT risks standpoint, it has reduced the need to do a production deployment of code based pages for simple content changes. All of the changes are still captured in the database and documented for IT risk with a date and time stamp. Oops changes can easily be rolled back to a previous version.

My overall opinion is very thankful that we implemented this system.
  • Enabling content changes to be made quickly by stakeholders outside of IT.
  • Adding seach engine optimization information
  • Geomapping
  • Continue improving the Sharepoint connector adding more functionality
  • Certified add-on modules, I think it would be helpful to have modules produced outside of Kentico that have been throughly tested and certified and supported by Kentico.
  • Better migration wizard
Kentio 8 is great for an organization that has an IT deparment, but wants to enable other folks to make simple updates. It works well for multiple URLs and provides access to multiple roles including development, marketing and very basic users. The editor was very helpful for end users to make changes without having to learn HTML.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Kentico is currently being used in my organization for two separate websites. One is our main web site and that is used for providing knowledge that our nonprofit consulting team produces after working with clients to share and disseminate knowledge gained. The main web site is also used as a nonprofit executive job board which has been running since before we used Kentico. The other website we use Kentico for, currently, is a philanthropy site that supports our book and endeavor on great givers in philanthropy. Kentico has allowed our organization to worry less about how to get the site built and displaying their content and more about providing it through the Forms interface for articles. Its great API has allowed seamless migration of our job board into the CMS and integrated features for mailing our users that was not present before. It also provides a great document model system that allows us to define a video as a document. This helps in finding videos because videos are not files but documents that can be found and indexed by the search engine.
  • First and foremost, Kentico provides many ways to create solutions for your web site reasons. Many other CMS products lock you into their way of handling site solutions. Kentico ALWAYS has more than one and it gives you a great feeling of flexibility.
  • Their document model system, page template engine for displaying documents, and form method of creating these documents, removes the need for our content providers from doing the ground work of creating pages and lets them focus on the actual content. Makes it easier to focus development resources on other aspects of the site and not content support.
  • Their API's are very easy to understand, their support web site provides great examples of using the API to solve real world problems, and their forums are actively supported by users and support so you are not waiting for long for answers.
  • In addition to their web site support for the product, their support team provides outstanding support for the product and go the extra mile to help you. They will go on your site and help provide solutions you might not have thought of. They don't give up on you unlike a lot of other companies in my many years of experience with other CMS solutions and .NET libraries.
  • I would like to see more balance in their support. Sometimes their US support does not provide nearly the level of support their Czech team does. Sometimes I wait until I know that the Euro team is awake before posting an issue or question with the hope that they jump in.
  • More clearer documentation and more examples of using their API. It is such a good API but it could use more tactical examples and help. Sometimes they don't provide enough details and figure that you know about the API's before hand. They are so rich, its hard to know them all much less proper usage.
  • Their new website for Kentico 8 shows a great and fresh way of using Kentico 8 for creating a website, it would be great if they provided a step by step demo of how they did it so the users of Kentico can see how to navigate it.
  • Rebuild their WebParts and Widgets to use HTML5 instead of tables in many cases. And more documentation on how to style them instead of having to guess via Firebug or browser development tools on how to style the web parts.
I can always recommend Kentico to a team that has money to spend on a CMS and whom have need for many of the features that Kentico provides out of the box. Even if they don't have a developer resource but have a person knowledgeable about HTML, I would recommend it since once it is setup, it is very easy to maintain. If they want a solution that needs a bit more mobile support than Kentico already provides I might suggest some other CMS solutions but those are for people who have far more money to spend. Kentico right now is a great solution for people who need a CMS and don't have a ton of cash to spend. Key questions I would ask would be their marketing needs, who their developer resources are or are not, what is their mobile needs, such as a supporting app. I would also ask if they even needs a CMS as that is a good question to ask anyone who thinks they need a CMS to ensure that a handcrafted solution might work better.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Our company leverages Kentico for most of our client projects. We have found that it is a comprehensive solution that is easy to to use out of the box, while being very powerful and flexible for developers. Kentico makes adding custom functionality easy and enables developers to make that custom functionality appear seamless with the out of the box functionality.
  • One of the most powerful aspects of Kentico is the portal template and webpart model. This model allows developers to create highly custom functionality for a site, while making the components accessible and easily re-usable, even for less technical users.
  • Another excellent feature is the form creation tools. They call this functionality "bizforms", but essentially it is a wizard interface which allow you to create fairly advanced forms without needing to be technical. Version 8 of the product, which was recently released, seems to have improved on this already incredible feature.
  • The provided APIs are excellent, and enable developers to work faster.
  • Kentico makes workflow and versioning very easy. They enable simple or complex workflows that can be applied across the site or to specific areas. Most of the critical object in the system are versioned so you can easily go back or review older versions of most changes
  • Kentico's transformations make is easy to re-use a single piece of content in a variety of ways throughout the site. For example if you create a single news article , you can push the set of HTML and data to the home page, another to the news summary page, and another for the details page.
  • Kentico's support team is highly responsive and typically fixes issues quickly.
  • The biggest drawback to Kentico is that it is a relatively unknown product and as such you have to fully educate most customers on the solution when trying to sell it.
  • The ecommerce functionality is definitely lacking. However, they have been making great strides and have indicated that this is a primary focus for them.
  • Non-technical users will need training to become familiar with the interface. Nothing advanced or formal, but it does require some handholding at first.
Kentico is well suited for the type of websites that deal with a lot of content that is one directional. By this I mean that it is less suited for community-type interaction where users submit content and converse with one another. This is technically possible, but not easy to accomplish.
July 01, 2015

Kenti-CAN!

Jessica Hester | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My group created and designed PMC's intranet with Kentico 8 as soon as it was available. We also converted our external website to Kentico 8 not long after.

We set up a company newsletter that automatically gathers information from the current month's articles and formats it into an email template that we can send directly through Kentico.

Aside from our company's usage, we also develop Kentico websites for clients. We always propose Kentico if there is sufficient budget, because we prefer Kentico's flexibility and built-in features over any other CMS that we have tried.
  • Full-feature CMS - Kentico is the whole shebang; it includes analytics, social media, email marketing, and doesn't require plugins.
  • User Interface - Kentico's user interface was redesigned in version 8, and was a vast improvement over version 7. Things are easy to find, and you can customize your dashboard.
  • Flexibility - my group feels that we can build anything a client would want or need within Kentico, if for some reason it wasn't there already.
  • Their slogan - "Right First Time Technology" - I get what they mean, but some things may be lost in translation. This is a sentence fragment in English, and some clients may be turned off by it.
  • Easier to understand documentation - their official documentation could use an overhaul. All of the information is there, but most of their code examples need to be fleshed out a bit. This aspect of their product can be very hard to navigate for first-time Kentico developers.
  • Email Queue - this should be in the same section as Email Marketing; currently this is under Configuration
We base this on budget mainly, because we tend to believe that Kentico will out-perform any other CMS (including free, open-source options like WordPress). We've determined that Kentico saves our clients money, despite its up-front cost, due to time saved during development. We don't have to wrestle with compatibility issues or customize any plugins, which saves everyone hours of work.
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