Addressing The Lack of Kentico Content

I spoke to one of my developer friends a while back and as conversations go with someone tech-minded, it's a mixture of talking about code, frameworks, and platforms entwined with the more life-centric catch-up.

Both having been in the tech industry for over 15 years, we discussed the "old ways" and what we did back then that we don't do now, which led to Kentico - a platform that we used to talk about all the time, where we'd try and push the boundaries to create awesome websites in the hopes of winning the coveted site of the month or year award. It occurred to us that it's not something we talk much about anymore. Almost as if overnight it vanished from our consciousness.

Looking through the archive of postings, it's evident I haven't published anything Kentico-related in a long time, with my most recent being in September 2020. Despite the lack of Kentico content on my site, it remains a key player in the list of CMS platforms that I work with. The only difference is the share of Kentico projects are smaller when compared to the pre-2020 era.

In this post, I discuss my thoughts as to the reason behind my lack of Kentico-related output.

NOTE: This post consists of my view points alone.

Licensing Cause and Effect

A contributing factor was the substantial shift in their licensing model sometime in 2020. Moving to an annual subscription at an increased cost and ditching the base license created somewhat of a barrier to entry for small to mid-sized clients who just needed a reliable CMS platform with customisability. So for someone like myself who could provide Kentico solutions in a freelance capacity was instantly priced out.

I understand why Kentico needed to reassess its price structure. They offer one of the best .NET CMSs and to stay at the top, an increase in revenue is required to drive the business forward. In all honesty, I believe we had a good run on the old licensing model for over ten years, and it was only a matter of time until a pricing review was required.

It's just a hard sell when trying to sell a CMS with a £10,000 price tag before any development has even started.

In light of this, it's only natural to look for alternatives that align with your own business strategy and development needs. The time originally spent developing Kentico has now been reallocated to alternative CMS platforms.

A Stable Well-Rounded Platform

Kentico is a mature product with many out-of-the-box capabilities (that get better with every release), which indirectly contributed to my lack of blogging on the subject. I usually only blog about a platform when I find useful workarounds or discover an issue that I was able to resolve.

This is truly a compliment and testament to Kentico's build quality. There is no need to write about something that is already well-documented and written by active users of the community.

Reassessing The Kentico Offering

Kentico is still offered whenever possible. Both clients and developers alike have confidence in the platform. Clients enjoy the interface and security. Developers appreciate the customisability, clear architecture, quick hot fixing, and consistency between editions.

The only question we now have to ask ourselves is whether Kentico is the right platform for the client's requirements. Prior to the change in licensing, you would be scoffed at for asking such a question. Kentico would be the front-runner before considering anything else.

Nowadays, Kentico would only be put forward to a client if they had large-scale requirements where cheaper CMS offerings fall short for the licensing costs to be justified.

I was recently involved in an e-commerce project that ticked all the boxes in line with the client's priorities, which made for an ideal use-case to carry out the build in Kentico, such as:

• Enterprise-level security
• Industry-standard compliance
• All in one solution consisting of content management, e-commerce, and marketing automation
• Scalability
• Ability to handle large sets of data
• Advanced customisability

In my view, if a client is not too concerned about the above, then alternatives will be used and additional development will be carried out to fill in any gaps.

The Alternatives

The CMS sphere is ripe with offerings where we are spoilt for choice. I have whittled these down to:

1. Umbraco
2. Kentico
3. Prismic
4. Dato
5. HubSpot

In my view, those variety of CMSs covers all pricing points, technologies and customisability.

Conclusion

I would always jump at the chance in developing in Kentico as I know a large complex website can be developed with almost infinite customisation. But we can't help but notice there is a lot of competition out there, each providing a range of features across different architectures and price ranges.

Based on my own experience, the demand for fully featured CMS platforms that have a large hosting footprint are reducing in popularity in the advent of more API driven (also known as headless) content delivery that works alongside other microservices.

Investing in the Kentico eco-system (including its headless variant, Kontent) is always worth considering. It may just not be something I will be writing about consistently here as it requires a more corporate-level type of clientele.