TrustRadius Insights for Kentico Xperience are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Intuitive User Interface: Several users have praised Kentico Xperience for its amazing and easy-to-use user interface. They have found it intuitive and user-friendly, allowing them to navigate and use the software effortlessly, even without any training.
Strong Customization and Integration Capabilities: Many reviewers have been impressed by Kentico Xperience's strong customization and integration capabilities. The built-in REST service, Integration Bus, and elegant API were particularly appreciated. This flexibility and extensibility of the software allow users to easily extend the system or connect it to any CRM, ERP, or third-party service without extensive custom coding.
Powerful HTML Control: Users have highlighted the ability to control the HTML output of websites at a very fine level in Kentico Xperience. This feature makes it easy to create HTML5 pages and implement responsive designs. The powerful HTML control features provide users with the tools they need to create and customize websites with modern design practices.
I develop Kentico 8 master pages and templates for our clients to use within their website(s). Kentico 8 allows us to create complex layouts that are still easy for non-web savvy users to edit and maintain.
Pros
Master pages and templating.
Page maintenance and updating.
Web form creation, particularly flexibility in regards to display of forms.
Cons
Not open source.
Documentation can be a little clunky to read through and understand sometimes - especially for inexperienced users.
Likelihood to Recommend
While I couldn't recommend it to many smaller businesses, Kentico 8 delivers an excellent enterprise level CMS product. It's easy to use once configured properly; secure, and fast.
We use it to provide custom websites to any kind of business. Kentico 8 offers the easy access of content on an admin and onsite level without requiring the expertise of years and training of programming that so many content management systems demand. I personally have used five of the most popular content management systems, and Kentico 8 is the only affordable option that provides the quality and ease of use that most businesses require.
Pros
Page Templates. I've never used any other CMS with the ease of use in creating and reusing the same template across multiple pages.
User management and security. This is very straightforward and simple when all you want is basic security for your content managers, but it's also granular if you need it to be. Allowing access or denying access to virtually any control or object in the site, or on the administrator side without the need of custom code
Keeping Custom code to a minimal level when using the portal engine. The Webparts that are built in cover 80% of all business needs, and customizing the rest is a breeze since it is built around .net.
The learning curve is much faster than with other systems such as Ektron, or SiteCore.
Custom modules are really cool if you want to package custom code to reuse on different sites and for the community
Global event handlers to hook into any change that is made on any document or object in the system. You can literally add any code you want and attach it to any event you want.
Automated Marketing in this system is rivaled by no other CMS
A/B variant tests are excellent for determining traffic on the site.
Cons
The Shopping Cart feature can use some work. There are excellent modules that make up for this, and I hear the next version has improved this, but nonetheless it is still lacking in the ways it can be customized
Calendar controls have to be highly customized to make it work right and look good.
The integration bus doesn't make sense for importing, and is lacking in documentation.
Likelihood to Recommend
If someone wants a quick and easy site for under $1k, it's not for them. Kentico 8 is for businesses. Someone who wants a proper website, not just a few static pages.
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.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
Are you currently using ASP.NET technology stack? If so do you need to integrate with any third party systems? If so this is the right tool for you.
Are you looking to move into the cloud, specifically the Azure cloud? If so Kentico 8 is set up extremely well to play nice with the cloud.
Do you need to have a digital marketing solution for your site? Kentico 8 provides an excellent all in one solution for this.
Kentico 8 forms the basis of our website and all marketing activity. It's used by most people in the organisation for a variety of reasons: blogging, promotional activity, reporting etc.
Pros
Easy to use.
Very flexible. It has an open API that makes data transfer and changes to the way in which it operates easier to achieve than in others we have used.
Fantastic support. Always respond relatively quickly and capable of dealing with highly technical questions.
Cons
EMS product racks up rows of data pretty quickly on busy sites, it would be great to have this in a non-relational DB format and treated as proper "big-data".
They could do with a license leasing model for sites that need to scale up and down based on traffic volumes.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you're looking to integrate your full marketing toolkit into a single solution at a reasonable cost, it excels. For genuine enterprise scenarios the CMS is brilliant, but other areas may be weaker than in specialist products. Kentico 8 probably overkill for much smaller sites.
VU
Verified User
Director in Marketing (Internet company, 11-50 employees)
---- 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.
Pros
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.
Cons
Kentico 12 SP is missing a couple small features which they (and the community) are working on filling in, such as integrated dynamic routing.
Likelihood to Recommend
The only situation I wouldn't recommend Kentico is for a small business who can't afford it. Otherwise, we have saved a ton of development time thanks to Kentico's robust feature set and ease of use. We've done everything including massive Product + Asset systems with regionalization and localization, teacher student task management modules, Event management systems with encryption, customized cart item ecommerce sites, reporting intranets, etc. There really isn't anything Kentico can't do.
We implemented Kentico 8 for a client. It is a good product with a lot of capabilities, but we did run into a few significant issues which Kentico says they plan to fix in the long term, but cannot prioritize right now. If you are using Kentico 8 Media Library with Azure integration, be careful not to store too many files in a single folder. Separate your files into many folders and keep the number of files per folder below 100. If you want to use Salesforce integration, note that custom activities are not passed into Salesforce's activity history by default, and also you cannot easily use a Salesforce sandbox with Kentico, so you will need a workaround for that. And when using the EMS Content Personalization feature, the personalization variant fly-out menus will take a long time to load, but they do load and after that you should be ok to manage variants. If we'd known these things in advance, we'd probably have made some different technical/architectural choices at the beginning of the project. But all these things aside, Kentico 8 EMS can still be an excellent way to centralize your digital marketing efforts into one system.
Pros
If you create custom web parts, you can make highly versatile templates that support many layouts/designs.
The EMS capabilities, especially content personalization, can help you go from a "brochure site" to a truly user-centered website experience.
The Kentico 8 admin interface is significantly improved over the Kentico 7 interface.
Cons
Media Library Azure integration can't handle large numbers of files per folder.
Content personalization variant fly-out menus take too long to load.
Can't use Salesforce sandbox, activity history doesn't stay automatically sync'd.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you require a MS / .NET stack, Kentico is a cost effective option that offers nearly all the same features and capabilities as its competitors (the major competitor being Sitecore). As just a CMS, it's robust and has a lot of bells and whistles, but when architected well, you can create some pretty slick design templates. The EMS takes it to a whole other level though. If you're just starting out in digital marketing, or you want to consolidate your digital marketing efforts, the EMS offers tons of basic capabilities: content personalization, AB testing, email marketing, marketing automation, etc. If you've never tried things like Salesforce, Optimisely, Google Analytics, etc., using the EMS would be a great way to start out, and then add on these more robust 3rd party services as your needs for additional features grow. Meanwhile all your stuff stays consolidated in one place until you're ready to branch out.
Kentico is being used presently across my entire organization. We opted to implement the Enterprise Marketing Solution of Kentico because of its ability to support A/B and MVT Testing in email marketing. We also opted for this edition because we now have the ability to create and track campaigns along with personalizing content and having an all-in-one marketing automation platform and CMS in one.
Pros
Excellent Customer Support
Easy to use WYSIWYG editor
Excellent online marketing tool
Simple integration with online communities and social media
Easy to interpret web analytics
Cons
Kentico addressed the areas I felt it needed to improve with its most recent update to Version 8.
Likelihood to Recommend
If implemented correctly, Kentico can be adaptable to any company within any industry.
BitWise Solutions is an Indianapolis custom web application development company. We use Kentico to provide our customers with a robust CMS that is easily customize by developers. Kentico delivers an enterprise ready content management system at a price that is hard to beat for all the functionality that it has. BitWise solutions is a Microsoft centric development shop. Kentico is built in asp.net and fully integrates with Visual Studio.
Pros
Easy to work with and customize from a developer standpoint. This makes it possible to deliver exactly what the client wants.
Built in asp.net and fully integrates with Visual Studio. Any asp.net developer should have no problems with Kentico
Tons of built-in modules and it's very easy to add custom modules and functionality
Great support and helpful community of developers
Enterprise level product at a reasonable price
Cons
It seems that pure aspx templates sometimes take a backseat to portal functionality but this is understandable from a big picture perspective.
The number of files in the solution is still an issue but this is improving with each version.
As Kentico matures it seems there might be a trend to make customization harder for developers. Hopefully is stays developer friendly.
Likelihood to Recommend
Any company looking for a robust content management system that is built on the .net platform should look at Kentico for a solution. Kentico might not have the marketing budget of the other well known CMS solutions out there but it is a mature application and you will get a lot of value for your money when choosing it.
Kentico is being used for our external marketing website(s) and an internal portal for the marketing department. Our purpose of switching to Kentico originally, 4 years ago, was to alleviate and reduce "Time to Production" and reduce cumbersome processes. Little did we know how much Kentico was going to help with that. Automatic publishing, workflow and the overall ease of the API has alone paid for our license with Kentico.
Pros
Content Publishing is one of the most important features when looking at a CMS and Kentico supplies this with ease. One of our major pain points and reasons to drive looking for a CMS, is that our process prior to Kentico was very developer heavy: needed someone to make the changes in HTML/ASP or write a SQL script to plug them into our database and management of this was in several different spots to correspond with our chaotic Workflow. Kentico's document types make everything very easy as you really only have to set them up then non-technical people can come in and input the content, save and let it follow the workflow steps then finally publish in your page template.
Workflow and Versioning has been another area where Kentico just "clicked" with us. With a website that is constantly being updated like ours, it has been very nice to have a process that not only guides itself (based on rules we set up) but also provides versioning. This comes in handy on a daily basis.
Of course being a developer, the API. I have enjoyed my time working with the Kentico API. Unlike many other APIs, Kentico has done a great job setting it up plus providing documentation of a lot of the main focus that you can stem almost anything you want to do off of. Plus their technical support is phenomenal.
Cons
There are some confusing pieces and naming conventions to first time users in the admin/management desk but as you get used to it and know where things are (like any software), you are more than comfortable.
There are some aspects and features within the workflow that we would like to add to make it a little more automatic and enable publishing between staged severs but in its current state is more than applicable to our workflow.
Likelihood to Recommend
Kentico is certainly one of the best software packages that I have worked with. From their free license to their paid licenses, I have worked with and implemented them all. You just need to make sure that it will fit your needs. If you're a .NET developer this is definitely the CMS to work with!
We use this system for a large scale healthcare organization as well as for medium and large scale clients. This CMS allows for full customization and allows us to create a solution of any kind for our users.
Pros
Full API to create custom controls
User management, roles, AD access, custom UI personalization
Rock solid security
Maintain unlimited sites with one installation
Cons
The back-end can be confusing to users
The system is large in size and can use quite a bit of memory.
