Kentico 8 - a consultant's perspective
July 27, 2015

Kentico 8 - a consultant's perspective

Virgil Carroll | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review

Software Version

8.2

Overall Satisfaction with Kentico 8

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 has allowed us to provide an enterprise level content management system to customers that cannot readily afford the costs of enterprise. Its price point has been a very big win for us in many scenarios
  • Kentico has allowed our clients to better scale content owners yet have solid checks-n-balances in the content deployment process
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
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.

Kentico Xperience Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG editor
9
Code quality / cleanliness
8
Admin section
10
Page templates
9
Library of website themes
5
Mobile optimization / responsive design
8
Publishing workflow
10
Form generator
10
Content taxonomy
10
SEO support
8
Bulk management
8
Availability / breadth of extensions
10
Community / comment management
10
API
10
Internationalization / multi-language
10
Role-based user permissions
10