All the Power, None of the Hassle, from Small to Large Kentico is a Miracle CMS
Updated October 03, 2019
All the Power, None of the Hassle, from Small to Large Kentico is a Miracle CMS
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
8
Modules Used
- All
Overall Satisfaction with Kentico
---- 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.
- Kentico's Custom Modules and generation of code classes, coupled with it's Events and other developer focused systems makes building new systems very quick and easy, which can greatly reduce how long it takes to develop new customer specific features.
- Better customer service. Since everything is on the website, we can help customers out easily. On some systems if you want to make an adjustment, you have to pull down the code, adjust, and push it up. Pain in the butt! Kentico we can do pretty much everything right on the website, fast and easy. Plus it's never really a case of "We can't do that..." with customers and features they want, it's more a case of "there's 2-3 ways, here's the pros and cons of each, pick!"
- Kentico is starting to price more towards the Medium to Large/Enterprise level customers, so for customers who either are a smaller operation or shop, it may take longer to see a return on investment.
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.
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.