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Kentico Xperience, a robust content management system, has been widely utilized by organizations to build and maintain a variety of …
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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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Popular Features
- Admin section (25)7.272%
- Page templates (25)7.171%
- Role-based user permissions (24)7.171%
- Code quality / cleanliness (25)7.171%
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Kentico Xperience Business
$9,999 / year
On Premise
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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
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- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Kentico Xperience - Pages Application Demo
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Editing Pages - Kentico Xperience Demo
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Kentico Xperience 13 Demo - Administration Interface | Ray Business Technologies
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Demo: Kentico Xperience 13 Refresh 7
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Demo: Kentico Xperience 13 Refresh 8
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How to use Kentico Xperience Contact management
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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
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 Integrations
Kentico Xperience Competitors
- Drupal
- Evoq Content
- Joomla!
- Plone
- Sitecore Experience Manager
- Progress Sitefinity
- Adobe Experience Manager
- WordPress
- Cascade CMS
- Tridion
- ExpressionEngine
- Microsoft SharePoint
- HubSpot Marketing Hub
- Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM
- Adobe Marketo Engage
- BigCommerce
- Volusion
- Shopify
- Salesforce Commerce Cloud
- Wix
- Ingeniux CMS
- Oracle WebCenter Content
- Umbraco CMS
- eZ Platform
- OpenText WEM
- Acquia Open Digital Experience Platform (DXP)
- Keap (formerly Infusionsoft)
- BenchmarkONE (formerly Hatchbuck)
- Bloomreach Experience Manager (formerly Hippo)
- HCL Digital Experience (formerly IBM WebSphere Portal & Web Content Manager)
- Magento Commerce Cloud (formerly Magento)
- Magnolia (V5 and later versions)
- DotNetNuke
Kentico Xperience Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows |
| Mobile Application | No |
| Supported Languages | English |
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.
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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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!
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
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 28)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
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.
October 04, 2019
Great CMS with lots of features
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.
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.
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.
September 30, 2019
Kentico is a flexible platform
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 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.
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.
December 03, 2018
Kentico for admins rules!
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.
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.
October 23, 2015
Kentico - Enterprise Value in an Inexpensive Package
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.
October 23, 2015
Kentico Rocks! Using the CMS is a breeze and E-commerce and Online Marketing are icing on top of the cake
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.
September 30, 2015
Kentico 8 is a Feature Rich Tool at a Great Price Point
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"
July 27, 2015
Kentico 8 - a consultant's perspective
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).
July 07, 2015
Less IT headache and quicker changes
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.
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
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.
July 07, 2015
Simply Put, Kentico is an Incredible Platform
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.
July 01, 2015
Kenti-CAN!
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.
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 implemented Kentico 8 for a client. It is a good product with a lot of capabilities, but we did run into a few significant issues which Kentico says they plan to fix in the long term, but cannot prioritize right now. If you are using Kentico 8 Media Library with Azure integration, be careful not to store too many files in a single folder. Separate your files into many folders and keep the number of files per folder below 100. If you want to use Salesforce integration, note that custom activities are not passed into Salesforce's activity history by default, and also you cannot easily use a Salesforce sandbox with Kentico, so you will need a workaround for that. And when using the EMS Content Personalization feature, the personalization variant fly-out menus will take a long time to load, but they do load and after that you should be ok to manage variants. If we'd known these things in advance, we'd probably have made some different technical/architectural choices at the beginning of the project. But all these things aside, Kentico 8 EMS can still be an excellent way to centralize your digital marketing efforts into one system.
- If you create custom web parts, you can make highly versatile templates that support many layouts/designs.
- The EMS capabilities, especially content personalization, can help you go from a "brochure site" to a truly user-centered website experience.
- The Kentico 8 admin interface is significantly improved over the Kentico 7 interface.
- Media Library Azure integration can't handle large numbers of files per folder.
- Content personalization variant fly-out menus take too long to load.
- Can't use Salesforce sandbox, activity history doesn't stay automatically sync'd.
December 09, 2014
Kentico Content Management System Review
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
BitWise Solutions is an Indianapolis custom web application development company. We use Kentico to provide our customers with a robust CMS that is easily customize by developers. Kentico delivers an enterprise ready content management system at a price that is hard to beat for all the functionality that it has. BitWise solutions is a Microsoft centric development shop. Kentico is built in asp.net and fully integrates with Visual Studio.
- Easy to work with and customize from a developer standpoint. This makes it possible to deliver exactly what the client wants.
- Built in asp.net and fully integrates with Visual Studio. Any asp.net developer should have no problems with Kentico
- Tons of built-in modules and it's very easy to add custom modules and functionality
- Great support and helpful community of developers
- Enterprise level product at a reasonable price
- It seems that pure aspx templates sometimes take a backseat to portal functionality but this is understandable from a big picture perspective.
- The number of files in the solution is still an issue but this is improving with each version.
- As Kentico matures it seems there might be a trend to make customization harder for developers. Hopefully is stays developer friendly.
December 04, 2014
Couldn't be happier!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Kentico is being used for our external marketing website(s) and an internal portal for the marketing department. Our purpose of switching to Kentico originally, 4 years ago, was to alleviate and reduce "Time to Production" and reduce cumbersome processes. Little did we know how much Kentico was going to help with that. Automatic publishing, workflow and the overall ease of the API has alone paid for our license with Kentico.
- Content Publishing is one of the most important features when looking at a CMS and Kentico supplies this with ease. One of our major pain points and reasons to drive looking for a CMS, is that our process prior to Kentico was very developer heavy: needed someone to make the changes in HTML/ASP or write a SQL script to plug them into our database and management of this was in several different spots to correspond with our chaotic Workflow. Kentico's document types make everything very easy as you really only have to set them up then non-technical people can come in and input the content, save and let it follow the workflow steps then finally publish in your page template.
- Workflow and Versioning has been another area where Kentico just "clicked" with us. With a website that is constantly being updated like ours, it has been very nice to have a process that not only guides itself (based on rules we set up) but also provides versioning. This comes in handy on a daily basis.
- Of course being a developer, the API. I have enjoyed my time working with the Kentico API. Unlike many other APIs, Kentico has done a great job setting it up plus providing documentation of a lot of the main focus that you can stem almost anything you want to do off of. Plus their technical support is phenomenal.
- There are some confusing pieces and naming conventions to first time users in the admin/management desk but as you get used to it and know where things are (like any software), you are more than comfortable.
- There are some aspects and features within the workflow that we would like to add to make it a little more automatic and enable publishing between staged severs but in its current state is more than applicable to our workflow.
May 01, 2014
Kentico - The CMS for Multiple Languages
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Kentico to manage two brand sites. One site is available in 23 language variations with the other being translated currently. It's used by the Marketing and IT departments for content publishing. It easily manages all the language variations we have for the different countries and users.
- Translations and Language Management - with UI Culture Strings you can specify anything you want to be easily replaced with a language variation
- User Management - Roles and Rights management is deep, but once you learn it's a powerful tool.
- Search index is fantastic out of the box
- UI is too busy but seems to be addressed in v8
- Ability to define a global site and not have language unique pages show up for translation would be helpful for a large global company
- Better blog and tagging
April 12, 2014
CMS of Choice
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Kentico is the platform chosen by Bit-Wizards as our exclusive CMS and Enterprise Marketing solution. Our organization chose Kentico for the breadth of features and functionality for enterprise level custom solutions and the ease of use for our clients. We appreciate the level of support that Kentico's development and support teams have to offer our engineers and designers as well as our clients content managers.
- Marketing Automation is the hot topic for marketers. Everyone wants to be able to automate the lead generation process because consumers want to discover the answer to their problems by searching your website. With Kentico EMS we can make better decisions regarding content to educate our consumers and automate the nurturing process.
- The Kentico platform is tightly integrated with the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. When our clients do not have the infrastructure to support a highly available and load balanced environment we are able to deploy those solutions quickly with no capital expenses for our customers.
- Kentico's 24/7 support is critical to our clients. Although we always want to respond to our customers we also know that calling the Kentico support team can save them on our hourly rate when it is a content issue that they need assistance with. Open source solutions do not offer the same benefit.
- At Bit-Wizards we do a lot of custom integration to third party systems. Although Kentico makes it easy to provide these integration points having a more tightly integrated solution for Dynamics CRM would help our Microsoft Dynamics clients.
April 12, 2014
Kentico CMS
Kentico is being used presently across my entire organization. We opted to implement the Enterprise Marketing Solution of Kentico because of its ability to support A/B and MVT Testing in email marketing. We also opted for this edition because we now have the ability to create and track campaigns along with personalizing content and having an all-in-one marketing automation platform and CMS in one.
- Excellent Customer Support
- Easy to use WYSIWYG editor
- Excellent online marketing tool
- Simple integration with online communities and social media
- Easy to interpret web analytics
- Kentico addressed the areas I felt it needed to improve with its most recent update to Version 8.
April 11, 2014
Kentico CMS: A Great CMS Solution
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We have been using Kentico CMS for the last few years as a solution for clients who wish to manage their own content on their website. There is a cost to the licensing, so not every client chooses to use it, however, those who do have been very happy with the level of control they have. Clients will generally choose a CMS (in this case Kentico) when they want to have non-technical people have control over the content on their website. This saves their company time and money by not having to involve technical people to make updates for them.
- Flexible framework and API. Thus far there hasn't been anything we haven't been able to do with Kentico, either out-of-the-box, or via custom code that we can easily integrate with Kentico itself. If you are or have .NET developers, it should be pretty easy to customize and extend Kentico if it doesn't have what you need. There is also a Marketplace full of paid and free add-ons available (http://devnet.kentico.com/marketplace).
- Very responsive, helpful customer support team. On many occasions I have emailed support@kentico.com, and have received a response within a few hours.
- Kentico, as a company, listens to its customers. They really does want to hear what developers have to say about its product so they can make it better. I have personally been in meetings with the Kentico team and they have been ready to listen to my thoughts and ideas.
- Content Staging/Deployment Automation. You can "stage" content updates from one site to another (e.g. review/production sites) from the Kentico CMSDesk, but there currently isn't a way to include non-MediaLibrary files in the deployment. So to deal with that, we have to sync up manual pushes of files along with Content Staging deployements.
- In terms of HTML5 standards from a Front-End development perspective, the default controls and templates aren't responsive out-of-the-box, and have some hard-coded values that appear to be editable from CMSDesk interface, but actually are not. We have had to create our own "starting point" for Kentico sites to solve this problem.
- I've had some frustration with using JQuery on Kentico sites, purely due to how Kentico itself uses JQuery in its CMSDesk interface, but changes the default JQuery global hook from "$" to "$j". So for your templates that use JQuery to work properly, you will need to call "var $ = jQuery.noConflict()" before you write your JQuery code. Kentico also doesn't use the latest version of JQuery, so if you need specific support for a JQuery feature or plugin that uses a different version, you'll have to include that as well.
April 11, 2014
KenticoCMS is VERY ROBUST but not so simple to learn.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use the software to manage 8 websites for all our affiliates. This product allows us to share information between the domains and gives us great control over how that information is managed and displayed.
- Repeaters - This allows for us to programmatically build webpages without the need to build each page multiple times for multiple offices/products
- Templates - With the use of templates, we can assign it to a page or site uniformly to provide perfectly spaced pages every time.
- Support - Like Johnny on the Spot, the support team is quick to reply and always provides links for learning more.
- UI - We are on 7.0 which has just about reached end of life, however v8 is out and am looking forward to seeing the UI made more intuitive
- Terminology - Without reading the entire HUGE manual, the widgets and web parts available in the software are not self explanatory.
- Steep Learning Curve - It takes months to become familiar enough with the system to diagnose minor issues.
April 08, 2014
Kentico CMS is a must-have system for anyone with a lot of content and targeted users.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We are using Kentico for several client website CMS set ups. It is being used by several departments across our whole organization. It is also being used by our clients for reviewing and updating certain elements.
- Centralized updates - make one update that shows up in several places throughout a site
- Staging to production synchronization - The ability to choose what files, objects, etc. to push to production makes simultaneous site updates a breeze
- Users and Roles for updates - Allowing users access to specific areas of the site, and approving their updates streamlines the whole development process
- Doc type versioning - We may not have this set up correctly. If we do, then there needs to be a way to rollback edits to modules on a doctype
- Microsoft Silverlight dependency - Several of the UI features require Silverlight. Most of our development team is on Chrome, which causes rendering issues
- UI - the user interface is better than other the ones I have used in other CMS. However, there are several areas for improvement, including the cut and paste functionality into text boxes
April 08, 2014
Kentico CMS: Web Development Platform for all Occasions
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Kentico is being leveraged across the organization as the underlying Content Management System that provides a platform to develop custom websites for our clients. The solution empowers our clients to manage key aspects of the site directly and enables our development team to deploy new sites quickly and efficiently without developing a lot of custom code. The solution also provides tools to support in-browser development, code libraries, reusable modules, etc. that help streamline the development process.
- Ease of use and thin-browser version works on all major platforms
- Advanced functionality for power users including only marketing campaign management, in-browser development, etc
- Customizable and extensible to support our clients unique needs
- Scalable, high performance, and reliable
- Excellent technical support
- User interface can be overwhelming for novices
- Feature set can be so large at times it is difficult to determine what you need for smaller projects
- Some features could be more streamlined or templated