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Is Xperience by Kentico ready?

Xperience by Kentico, Kentico's next-generation flagship DXP, is still relatively new on the scene, with a rapidly evolving roadmap. This regularly-updated post attempts to cut through the noise and help you determine whether you and the product are ready for each other yet.

Andy Thompson

09 December 2024

5 minute read

Xperience by Kentico is Kentico's brand-new, next-generation DXP, and will gradually replace the legacy Kentico Xperience 13 as its flagship product.

This post was last updated in December 2024.

For more info on Xperience by Kentico itself and why it's considered 'next-gen' and not just Kentico 14, please see my other post here: Xperience: Kentico's next-generation DXP.

This post is intended purely to help answer the question many customers evaluating Xperience by Kentico in this early stage of its life are asking: is it ready yet? Of course, that answer is going to be 'it depends'. So I will shortcut that and go directly into why XbyK (for short), in its current state, is ready or not, based on your requirements.

Latest updates!

Xperience by Kentico is progressing extremely rapidly at the moment, with its monthly feature releases. The biggest recent updates that affect the 'is it ready' question/answer are:

  • Significant feature releases in Q4 of 2024
  • Significant roadmap updates for Q1 2025
  • Announcement of native e-commerce functionality in the platform

This has resulted in the final 'notable absence' from the roadmap being covered off. The only major red flag remaining in our view, is if you have 'complex headless API requirements' - or in other words, if what you're really looking for is a pure headless CMS rather than a cloud-native DXP. See below for more details.

Current state

Kentico's current roadmap for Xperience by Kentico is extremely active. It has already delivered the majority of core features you'd expect in a modern DXP or competitor products, such as:

  • Strong content management features, including content modelling and reusable field schemas
  • Full visual Page Builder experience with sections and widgets
  • Multi-channel support (single tenant/client, with multiple distinct websites/channels)
  • Multi-lingual support
  • Bulk and scheduled publishing and unpublishing
  • Search, natively or via integrations with Agolia and Azure
  • Contact/activity tracking and dynamic rule-based segmentation
  • Dynamic personalisation based on segments or rules
  • Headless GraphQL API, supported as a distinct headless channel (not just API access to web content)
  • Email marketing
  • Marketing automation workflows

They've also released more advanced functionality that stands out from some of the competition, such as:

  • A full SaaS platform, but retaining the ability to deploy custom code and customisations
  • Artificial Intelligence as part of their AIRA feature set
  • Centralised Content Hub for reusable, channel-agnostic content
  • 'Smart Folders' for marketer-controlled organisation and delivery of content
  • Commerce via two first-party integrations (legacy K13 bridge, or Shopify)

Released recently

Some of the notable recent feature releases include:

  • Native support for 2FA with authenticator tools
  • Smart bulk asset uploading into the Content Hub
  • Tracking email marketing user activity
  • Marketing automation workflows triggered by email activity or form submissions
  • Granular permissions management for website channels
  • Migration tools for Sitefinity and Sitecore (in addition to legacy Kentico versions)

Coming soon

These features are currently in design and development and will be released very soon, i.e. in the next month or two. Without listing them all here, these are some of the more notable ones coming up:

  • Dynamic asset transformations powered by AIRA
  • Workspaces (granular permissions in the Content Hub)
  • Scheduled task management in the admin UI
  • Visual Email Builder
  • Dynamic visibility of form fields (i.e. based on other fields)

Coming next/later

These features are definitely on the roadmap, but not currently in development and still need to be prioritised by the team. Typically these means they're at least several months away but the team knows they're important. They could also be seen by some as recognised omissions from the current product.

Some of the bigger items:

  • Native e-commerce functionality - this was announced at Partner Days in Q4 2024, to be released in 2025
  • Version history for pages/content items - coming very soon in Q1 2025
  • Content Sync (similar to K13's Content Staging module)
  • AI tagging of content and metadata generation
  • Customer journeys
  • Enhanced/guaranteed zero downtime SaaS deployments
  • Automated AI translations

Notable absences from the roadmap

Previously, I'd listed native e-commerce here, however that has now been announced! There's nothing major missing from the roadmap now, making the platform generally competitive with other DXPs.

So is Xperience by Kentico ready for me?

🟢 Yes, if:

  • You're looking to consolidate multiple websites into a single platform.
  • You want shared content and audience/visitor data across multiple channels, such as website, microsites, mobile app, and email lists.
  • You value combining DXP features in a single unified platform, including website management, additional microchannels, image/asset management, email marketing, visitor tracking, and personalisation.
  • You're looking for a cost-effective managed SaaS CMS platform that allows for extension and customisation.
  • You are web-first, but also have fairly standard headless integration requirements that are satisfied by a modern GraphQL delivery API with its own dedicated content channel (e.g. Next.js microsites or a mobile app).

🟠 Tread carefully, if:

  • You have complex optimisation requirements such as A/B or multivariate testing - these will be coming later to the platform. For now, personalisation is largely limited to rule-based segmentation and personalisation of widgets in the Page Builder.
  • You are migrating from Kentico 13 and require everything to work exactly like it used to - this is a complete rebuild of the DXP, so features have been added, while some features have been changed, reimagined, and in some cases, simply removed.
  • Your project is 'commerce-first', or you have very complex e-commerce requirements and a requirement for advanced commerce in the same platform as your CMS. The reality is that none of the competing CMS platforms have best-in-class commerce within their platform either. Platforms tend to be either CMS-first or commerce-first, and DXPs such as Kentico are the former. Just like with competing platforms, if you required content+commerce, you're likely to be looking at a core CMS platform and integrating tightly with a complementary commerce platform.

🔴 Reconsider, if:

  • You have complex headless API requirements, such as requiring high-performance content-management (write) APIs, true omni-channel delivery, or other advanced headless integration scenarios. As a 'hybrid headless' CMS platform, Kentico includes excellent APIs for headless content delivery to websites and other channels such as mobile apps, but does not have the depth of functionality to match some of the very mature, pure-play headless CMS platforms on the market. Again, this is also true of Kentico's direct  competitors in the hybrid headless space, such as Optimizely and Umbraco.

One of the key value propositions for Xperience by Kentico is that it's a cost-effective, unified platform. If you have important core requirements that require that you purchase and integrate another major platform to fill feature gaps, you're losing some of that benefit.

Xperience: Kentico's next-generation DXP

Kentico's next-generation DXP, 'Xperience by Kentico', is their new flagship platform in 2024. But Kentico has been an established product for two decades. What makes this the 'next generation' rather than simply the 'next version'?

Read the post

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