Kentico

Vorteile

Kentico is extremely flexible, with a ton of options to edit your website, manage customers through the built-in CRM, send out e-mail campaigns, automate messages, implement personalized content, etc. It takes some training but remains a solid experience once you learn the basics. Website speed has drastically increased, as has our total number of monthly users, session duration, etc.

Nachteile

The cost can prohibit a lot of small businesses from benefiting with Kentico. There is also a learning curve meaning very few people can drop into the backend and expect to understand what they're seeing initially. A minor issue is occasionally tools such as the scheduler will malfunction and not publish or unpublish content correctly.

Vorteile

Installation Xperience on Microsoft Azure Cloud is pretty easy. It has a compact and professional administration dashboard where everything is available at a glance because it's customizable with my favorite pinned tools, also I've personalized marketing automation with my preferred content and settings. I also like the web analytics features with clean design and useful information about visitors and users' activities. Xperience is more than a CMS and its Digital Experience Platform (DXP) means all you need for your website management, business marketing, and e-commerce are all in one platform.

Nachteile

We have been working with Xperience DXP for many years, Yes, there is nothing I can write about missing features. They've very good support and if you have a problem with any part, the support team will respond immediately and if there is a bug, it will be fixed before you know it.

Vorteile

The CMS was due to be easy for non technical employee to use.

Nachteile

Their commercial practice. We started with Kentico 12, 5 years ago and they are already not supporting it.They are increasing prices by more than 20% a year and are pushing to sign long term contract when their product works for a couple of years.

Vorteile

- Mid-market priced CMS which can deliver the capabilties which most business need
- Good WYSIWYG editing interface when correctly delivered by the chosen development team
- Great security
- Based on an open framework which can be enhanced to most requirements
- Marketing features enhance the overall value of the system
- Administration interface is really friendly and users love the ease of use in comparison to other content management systems

Nachteile

- Two development models - PortalEngine and MVC - mean that to move from one to the other requires a re-build of the site
- PortalEngine model has a limited support lifetime
- Pricing increases have been badly communicated to the development community

Vorteile

Kentico is unparalleled at its price point as a comprehensive customer experience platform. With EMS, it has the power of an enterprise-class CMS, marketing automation and nurturing, personalization, e-commerce, and an incredibly deep bag of tricks through its API and integration options. It is not unfair to compare it to higher-end solutions such as Sitecore, which is bests in overall value and ease of use, if not in scalability. (Although Kentico, properly managed, can meet the needs of highly demanding websites.) The system is fairly easy to use once you learn your way around - all the components work similarly within a unified interface, so after training, it's not hard for a proficient user to execute more complex tasks without significant additional support. It is also one of the few solutions running on the Microsoft technical stack, which is an advantage if you are already standardized on Microsoft servers or Azure. Kentico is best if you are looking for a comprehensive marketing suite and want to avoid the headache of tying together your marketing and web stack.

Nachteile

Kentico doesn't work like a lot of systems. It is well thought out, but if you are coming from Wordpress, Drupal, or even Sitecore, it's going to feel pretty alien.

The system also suffers from jack-of-all-trades/master-of-none. I consider its CMS top-rate, but the marketing features are not quite up to par with the likes of Marketo or Pardot, and its e-commerce is very rudimentary (but getting better). That said, the integration out-of-the-box is where it wins, and having a less-than-leading-class marketing system that is truly integrated with your e-commerce is a substantial benefit and represents the real value of this system.

You should expect to lean on an integrator or build in-house development expertise (full disclosure: I used to work at an integrator - I no longer do). While a lot can be done without actual C# code, building out the CMS is still a highly technical task, on par with development on other platforms.

Kentico's underlying system has been around for many years, and has received some significant upgrades every year, but the core technology is showing its age. Kentico is taking some drastic measures to modernize the system and keep it supportable and relevant. But that may mean a bumpy road as you go through upgrades. Again, you will need some proper technical talent to keep the system running smoothly.