Kentico Rocks! Using the CMS is a breeze and E-commerce and Online Marketing are icing on top of the cake
October 23, 2015
Kentico Rocks! Using the CMS is a breeze and E-commerce and Online Marketing are icing on top of the cake
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Overall Satisfaction with Kentico 8
Kentico 8 is our preferred tool of choice when it comes to building enterprise class websites. My company, BizStream, has built over 100 web sites and applications with the platform. The sites that we create with Kentico 8 service B2B and B2C focused organizations that are looking to take their web sites to the next level. We use Kentico 8 because we feel it is the best ASP.NET CMS that fully integrates CMS, E-commerce, Online Marketing, and Intranet all in one. The platform also allows us to deliver our sites on time and on budget because it is leaps and bounds faster to develop in than other similar products in the space. Delivering a high quality web site is the main business problem that Kentico 8 solves for us.
- Ease of use for the developer, content authors, and internet marketers that use it. The user interface in Kentico 8 truly is amazing and easy to pick up with no training.
- Strong customization and integration capabilities, including the built in REST service, Integration Bus, and elegant API. I love the fact that if there is anything not in the box we can use the system to extend it or connect it to any CRM, ERP, or other third party service very easily.
- Large out of the box functionality. There is an extremely high level of value that the platform provides. Instead of having to build extra modules for things like Event Booking, Forums, Polls, or E-commerce, they are already there for us to use.
- Ability to control the HTML output of the site at a very fine level. Creating HTML5 is very easy in Kentico and implementing any design, as responsive, is totally possible in the system.
- The ability to get a very high level of insight into the visitors journey through the website and market back to them with the Contact management, Lead Scoring, and Marketing Automation modules is very impressive.
- The scalablity of the system is impressive. Running a very highly trafficked web site is totally possible with Kentico and its strong caching and web farm capabilities.
- The support that Kentico provides is top notch, 24/7 global support is included with any purchase, 7 day bug fix policy, and excellent documentation
- The development community is engaged and ready to help if you are a developer learning Kentico, and the Kentico partner community is very strong as well.
- NET MVC has a way to go still in Kentico.
- Some of the older modules that have existed in previous versions of Kentico have some dated HTML markup that makes responsive a challenge.
- Some of the intranet modules are fairly week in terms of scalability. The document library, projects, and tasks functionality are not that great and ill suited for large uses.
- Kentico has positively impacted my business objectives. It has allowed me to deliver solutions that my customers truly love. They have commented over and over how easy it is to manage their web sites with the admin interface.
- Using Kentico has allowed me finish projects on time and under budget which is good for my company's bottom line.
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?
Kentico Xperience Feature Ratings
Kentico 8 Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
No - We don't need premium support when the support level is so high already.
Yes - Yes it was, and they even planted a tree in my name! They have a pretty cool Trees for Bugs program.
We had an issue with the Smart Search capabilities of Kentico. After submitting the issue to support it took 2 tries but they eventually came back with the fact that we had the wrong search files selected for the content type that we were trying to search, plus the wrong type of smart search indexer. Once we changed the built in settings to more accurately reflect the type of searching that we wanted to perform, the search worked great.
Using Kentico 8
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- The main navigation of the admin interface, it is easy to get around the system and find exactly what I need.
- The multi lingual aspect of the system is well represented in the UI. You can see what culture you are on in the Pages application and quickly compare other cultures as needed. I love the split screen comparison feature in the UI as well.
- The Pages application is the main application inside of Kentico. It is extremely well setup to show your web sites' content hierarchy. The big edit, preview, live site buttons allow you to easily switch between editing content, and seeing the final result.
- The custom table interface is well done and combine that with the Forms engine it is very quick and easy to generate forms and tables to store data and customize the fields and form controls however I want.
- Moderating blog comments is a little tough.
- Creating email templates could be better, they are a big difficult for marketers to create without a developer.
Yes, but I don't use it - It works ok in on-site editing mode, but your website needs to be created in a responsive way. Honestly we don't use it that much. Who edits their website on a mobile phone anyway?
Relationship with Kentico
I have been able to negotiate on total price, training services, and consulting services.
Share with them your whole story, and let them know the goal for your implementation right up front. They will be able to easily tell you which license you should purchase and why.