Content Management Made Easy
April 07, 2014

Content Management Made Easy

Zach Werden | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

7

Modules Used

  • Web Content Management

Overall Satisfaction

Our department is using Kentico for Content Management of all 7 of our external-facing websites. This allows our Marketing team to make updates to the sites' content without having to go through IT. Before implementing Kentico, our department was spending hours each week making small content changes that would then require code review and a republish of the project. By using Kentico, we have cut that time out.
  • Kentico handles templates very well. If you have a good plan for your design, you can create a few main templates and re-use them across many different pages.
  • When building templates, Kentico gives you the option to use .NET or Portal templates. You can also mix them and use both template types in the same website. This gives you the ability to add some logic and use .NET templates when needed.
  • Kentico has a good versioning system. The CMS makes it easy to roll back to a previous version if someone logs in and makes a mistake.
  • Kentico support is very good. Their forums are very helpful and response time is usually within 24 hours.
  • For users who are new to Content Management Systems, it may be difficult to get used to the structure. It's not always easy to realize the difference between a template, a page-layout, and a page.
  • The Kentico API seems to change a lot with every version release. This makes it difficult to maintain custom web parts and modules if you have written any that use the API. Many times, Kentico will simply change the naming of something and they don't seem to show everything in their change log.
  • The online API documentation is a little spotty. Kentico is still fairly small and as a result there is not documentation for everything, especially if you're doing a lot of custom work with their API.
  • We cut out a lot of IT's weekly tasks to make small updates to our external websites which saved IT developers up to 10 hours per week. It was key to train our Marketing team on the CMS so they could make the changes themselves.
  • Kentico seems to update once a year and, if you have custom work using the API, the update can take quite a bit of time.
Kentico is more geared towards professional websites than WordPress. As far along as WordPress has come, it's still mostly geared towards personal blogs. Kentico offers more features that are easily integrated such as e-commerce, newsletters, and marketing campaigns. Kentico also allows more freedom when adding custom web parts and features to your site.
At the time I was using Kentico, it was perfect for our business needs. It catered to small web sites that are mostly focused on Content Management. Since we had no plans to use Kentico as an online store or as an internal employee portal, we had no reason to look for an alternative, more robust product that focused on those areas.
Very well suited for simple external websites. It also seemed to be geared towards e-commerce. During selection process, I would ask how much customization work would be needed to fit your goal. Kentico experts are hard to find, so expect a bit of a learning curve in the beginning if you're doing custom web parts or modules.