Kentico Xperience

Kentico provided us with a far more robust and customizable platform than lower-cost alternatives such as Wix or Squarespace, and was available at a much lower cost of entry than ektron. It required a lot fewer fiddly uses of extensions than WordPress, though some custom development was required for our business needs.

We selected Kentico for our particular project to match up with another site we had and it was more financial wise for us than other solutions we looked into. A big thing for us was that we needed to have language management and Kentico being an international country was a good fit for that future goal.

It was much more fairly priced.

Out of these CMS systems I've worked in, Kentico is still hands down the easiest to build and manage.

Ingeniux was a failed project, it was too cumbersome to work in (MVC based), it was a nightmare to do any custom dev work in it, couldn't debug, and their own staff couldn't get functionality going.

Drupal and WordPress are pretty nice systems, but require pretty vigilant awareness of vulnerabilities. You often need 3rd party tools to do what you want it to, and those are not always kept up to date.

Sitecore I've only worked a little in, and it seemed overly complex and again required you to build everything yourself. I prefer to only touch code when I want to add custom functionality, not to do basic items.

Sitefinity is behind Kentico in feature maturity. It lacks the level of tech support that Kentico has. Sitefinity can also be harder to upgrade.

Previously we used Microsoft SharePoint as a content management system and it was very limited, required a ton of support, and we encountered bugs on a weekly/monthly basis.

All of the negatives that we had associated with SharePoint went away when we switched to Kentico. It was really night and day and Kentico has really helped us move forward and become much more efficient.

I recently started learning Sitecore which resembles Kentico in some aspects, and I find Kentico to be more user-friendly and intuitive. Sitecore is a more robust system, but in my opinion it gives content administrators too many options, and has a way steeper learning curve. So, I prefer Kentico.

wordpress, joomla, drupal.

Kentico is a lot easier, more fluent and slicker than these products. It is easy to setup, use and teach others, so content can be managed by multiple users without any special training or skills i.e coding. It is definitely a lot more expensive so you are paying for a premium service but if you are a large organization it is worth it.

We researched .asp and .net platforms and for our company's needs (we do not do e-commerce) Kentico was the best overall fit and value.

Kentico 8 really is a drastic improvement over previous versions of Kentico - the whole system is light years faster, much more intuitive to use and nicer for all users involved.

When discussing Kentico with clients, I find myself uttering the same phrase repeatedly. "Kentico provides 95% of the functionality of high-dollar CMSs at a fifth of the price." This allows clients to use the dollars they would have previously put towards licencing into feature development -- the true measure of your website. After using Sitecore and AEM extensively, I do not see those systems providing value equal to their licensing costs.

I've used Sitecore, Ektron, Joomla!, WordPress, and SharePoint (if you want to count that as a competitor for CMS). Kentico 8 blows them all out of the water. Nothing is more intuitive in the way that content is created, the way the site is setup, and how efficient rollouts can be with Content Staging.

When compared to the above solutions the value that Kentico offers is much higher when compared to the price of these other solutions. Kentico will do 90% of what Sitecore and Ektron and Adobe do, and those other solutions will do 90% of what Kentico does. In my opinion they basically do all of the same thing these days. So when it comes down to paying for that functionality why would you pay up to 2, 4, or 10x more?

It seems to have better organization and better extendability. In comparison to WordPress, the support that is offered by Kentico is incredible. When comparing to Sitecore, the price point makes it much more affordable for smaller to mid-size organizations that need a great CMS or EMS tool. Overall Kentico definitely holds its own when compared to many of the other solutions out there that I have reviewed.

Better than all of the above on almost every level. SiteFinity comes closest from a developer tool perspective and Umbraco from a flexibility perspective.

Where all of these systems have their strengths and weaknesses, one of the reasons we tend to go to Kentico more than other systems is because of the:

• The reasonable price point for clients
• Constant innovation and partner communications with Kentico (letting the community really influence future versions)
• Top-notch support
• Ease of use from a content owner perspective

The competitive toolset and streamlined development process that Kentico provides allows for it to be a viable option at a fraction of the cost of other solutions.

When deciding on Kentico we compared 2 other products, all vendors provided either provided 1 to 2 demos. Compared to the other vendors, the Kentico product worked as expected when demonstrating compared to the other two vendors that had a range of problems in their product when attempting to demonstrate their functionality. This caused many of our stakeholders to dismiss the others for the simple fact that if a demo product is unstable how can a purchased product be better. Additionally, compared to the other two, Kentico was easier to use and would require less training for end users and developers.

We used to use Ektron but that was a mess and it was their way or the highway. Their support was not there and their API was horrible. SiteFinity was our other CMS and it was good for many features but it just did not have the modules and support for document creation like we have with Kentico. Also, it got too expensive too fast. I evaluated SiteCore while I was looking for a new CMS but it was too limited with modules and was too expensive for our needs. Kentico was discovered while attending a SiteCore training for the purpose of evaluating SiteCore. A Kentico partner recommended it to us and after training on it as well for evaluation, it was the clear winner. It provided great modules, an easy way for our content authors to author content, and a great API and tools for migrating our content over from our other CMS solutions.

Ultimately Kentico is easier to work with both as a developer and an end user. The solution is well built and supported. Both Ektron and Sitecore have their places, but Kentico's price, performance, and flexibility make it a better fit for most of our clients.

WordPress - I do like WordPress, and we propose this CMS as an option to Kentico, but I firmly believe that unless everything happens to work perfectly, WordPress will cost more money to develop in the long run. Aside from that, WordPress has intrusive updates very regularly, which can break the already frail compatibility with its plugins.
Ektron - I have never seen the Ektron dashboard, I have only ever designed and developed through the .aspx files. This can't be good for end-users.
Sitefinity - This CMS has a very different approach to the dashboard. You can either see the tree-view of your files or pages, or you can edit that file or page - you cannot do both. I think this makes it easy for users to get lost. I find it very frustrating.

Kentico is great when you need an MS / .NET based tool, but you don't want to pay so much for Sitecore.

Ektron is a great content management system in it's own right but Kentico delivers a lot of the same functionality for a much smaller price. The license fees for Kentico are very reasonable especially when compared to solutions such as Ektron. Kentico is an enterprise ready CMS with a small business price.

We chose Kentico over the above due to Kentico having all the innate functionality that we wanted in the CMS and as well in innate web parts/abilities built into Kentico and not having to depend on a 3rd party developer to update these specific applications.