Kentico Review 2022: All You Need to Know

Kentico Review 2022: All You Need to Know

What is Kentico?

Kentico has rebranded from just a content management system to a global company offering a comprehensive set of solutions, including collaboration features and digital optimization for multiple channels.

What used to be Kentico CMS is now split into two digital products:

• Xperience, a digital experience platform (DXP), previously known as Kentico CMS

• Kontent, a headless CMS for enterprise, previously known as Kentico Cloud

Kentico markets itself as an all-inclusive solution to content management. Everything you need, from headless CMS to unified DXP, it claims to offer it all.

However, is a complex all-in-one solution what you need right now, or would you do better with a simpler CMS?

We bring you a comprehensive Kentico review, discussing its notable features, pros and cons to help you decide.

How Does Kentico Work?

Kentico allows you to build websites using web parts, also known as modules or portlets. These web parts enable you to create and edit content and integrate features such as newsletters, and you are free to use your custom code. This is unlike WordPress and other traditional CMSs.

However, everything about Kentico is technical. If you're not tech-savvy, something as simple as editing or creating content can be an uphill task. Editors manage content on the Kentico administration interface by entering values into fields on content-only pages.

Nonetheless, one of the benefits of this technicality is the wide range of customization options you get to enjoy.

Who is Kentico Best suited for?

If you're designing an enterprise website requiring extensive functionality and you have a team of developers behind you, Kentico might be the right CMS. That's because Kentico is quite a handful. It's highly sophisticated, and moving around the platform isn't your typical walk in the park. Kentico does so much and is pretty good at what it does, but that also means it can be quite excessive -- an overkill -- for small businesses and bloggers.

And giving its high pricing, Kentico is one CMS that literally screams "am way out of your league" to most small businesses.

In summary, Kentico is best for large-scale organizations requiring robust functionality.

Pricing

Kontent by Kentico (the headless CMS)  costs $2,499/month. Just not for small businesses, if you think about it. Aside from the custom enterprise plan, there's also a free plan for developers to handle non-commercial projects.

Xperience by Kentico (the DXP) starts at $10,500 a year. This product unifies digital experience, content management, and digital marketing and ecommerce tools.

Kentico's Features

Capability is where Kentico really scores one over many of its competitors. It's feature-packed, but never forget that oversophistication often comes with a price: an overwhelm.

Lead Scoring

A crucial part of sales and marketing is lead scoring. This is the ability to identify the quality of leads by their behaviour and demographics, such as age, location, form fills, and page visits. Such data tells you which lead will likely convert into a customer, so you know where to focus your marketing effort.

Interestingly, the Kentico module offers a lead scoring feature, making it super easy for marketing teams to obtain insight into their audience's behaviour and boost sales.

Hotfixes and Debugging

You can quickly do some basic debugging on the dashboard if you're a bit tech-savvy. But what's most interesting is Kentico's hotfixes. These are fast and comprehensive bug fixes developed by Kentico's coders as installable updates.

Once a bug is reported, within a week, you'll receive a new hotfix version that contains a fix for the reported bug and all other bug fixes of previous versions. All you have to do is install it.

Customizable and Highly Detailed Templates

Browsing through Kentico's templates, you'll immediately notice they're worlds apart from what you're used to on WordPress, Shopify, or Wix. There are so many details, giving you more freedom for customization. You'll completely own the template at the end of the day.

Rather than visual appeal, Kentico's templates are more about UI. However, working on it may be daunting at first as there's some major learning curve here.

Headless CMS

Kentico Kontent, formerly called Kontent Cloud, is a headless CMS that allows you to organize and spread content across multiple channels from a single hub. This is a dream for large organizations having many digital channels such as an app, website, and IoT where the same content needs to be transmitted and accessed.

Multiple User Access

Kentico allows multiple users to access the backend with varying authority levels and access permissions. This is beneficial to large teams where several inputs are required for different tasks simultaneously.

Page Editing

Although page editing comes with many features, they aren't very different from your typical word processor. The drop-down menu and left toolbar allow easy page navigation, and the workspace looks pretty uncluttered.

Scheduling

Scheduling is an essential feature of many content management systems, but Kentico takes it up a notch. With this feature, you can program repetitive tasks to auto-execute, such as sending reminder emails, data syncing, running daily reports, etc. However, you'll make the most of this feature if you can do some coding.

Integration with Social Media

One of the sweetest spots of Kentico is how it integrates seamlessly with social media, allowing you to keep up with your website and social media marketing in one place. With its inbuilt URL shortener, you can trim links to post on platforms supporting limited characters.

The Ease of Use

Apart from pricing, ease of use is one area where Kentico scares off users. The features are right out of the box -- not what you'll find on most CMS -- so there's a major learning curve here.

If you're not a web developer, it will help if you at least have some basic coding knowledge. That will help you maximize the unique features.

Nonetheless, once you've gotten the hang of it, it becomes just like any other tool in your hands. Additionally, you can customize the interface to your taste.

Kentico Pros

• An all-in-one CMS

• Manage social media, e-commerce, and multiple digital channels from a single hub

• Fast bug fixes

• Extensive customization options

• A plethora of features

Cons

• High price point

• Not suitable for regular SMBs as it's pretty overwhelming and an overkill

• Steep learning curve.

Verdict

Kentico is an amazing, feature-packed CMS platform. Its multi-functional capability will work exceedingly well for big organizations requiring sophisticated solutions.

However, Kentico isn't something you want to dabble into if all you require is regular content management. Its capabilities will exceed what you need, leaving you overwhelmed—and probably cash-strapped. In that case, WordPress, BigCommerce, or Stroyblok may be a more suitable alternative.