Kentico CMS: A Great CMS Solution
April 11, 2014

Kentico CMS: A Great CMS Solution

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

Software Version

7

Modules Used

  • MessageBoard

Overall Satisfaction

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.
  • It has allowed us to educate the client and allow them to have control over things like content, analytics, content deployments, etc. Which saves them money for not having to hire technical teams to handle those things.
I myself, and many others on our team are certified Kentico developers, so we already know the platform well. That, coupled with the Kentico team's willingness to listen to our thoughts/concerns/ideas for continued improvement shows they're really on-board with providing a best-of-class product.
It's well-suited for clients who want to have full control over the content on their site, have good customer support, and want to have many options for expanding the functionality of their site in the future. It is not well-suited for complex scenarios involving huge development teams and automated builds/deployment.