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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 monthly releases and 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

06 February 2025

6 minute read

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

🗓️ This post was last updated in February 2025.

For more info on Xperience by Kentico itself and why it's considered 'next-gen' and not just Kentico 14, please see my more details 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:

  • Huge feature releases in December 2024 and January 2025 that delivered fully on some long-awaited roadmap features
  • Significant feature releases in Q4 of 2024
  • Significant roadmap updates for the remainder of 2025
  • Addition of native e-commerce functionality to the official roadmap for 2025.

This last point resulted in my final 'notable absence' (commerce) from the roadmap being covered off. 

The only potential blocker for potential projects that remains in my view (advanced headless scenarios), is not really specific to Kentico, but rather any modern DXP (see more detail below).

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:

  • Top-tier content management features, including content modelling and reusable field schemas
  • Granular permission management across website
  • Full visual Page Builder experience with sections and widgets
  • Unlimited multi-channel support (single tenant/client, with multiple distinct websites/channels) and multi-lingual support
  • Image/asset management with automatic image transformation and optimisation
  • Advanced marketing automation workflows with support for custom activities and cross-channel tracking
  • Contact/activity tracking and dynamic rule-based segmentation
  • Dynamic personalisation based on segments or rules
  • Bulk and scheduled publishing and unpublishing
  • Advanced search, either natively or via first-class integrations with Agolia and Azure
  • Headless GraphQL API, supported as a distinct headless channel (not just API access to web content)
  • Fully integrated email marketing
  • Migration tools for Sitefinity and Sitecore (in addition to legacy Kentico versions).

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

  • A full turn-key SaaS platform, but retaining the ability to deploy custom code and customisations
  • Artificial Intelligence as part of their AIRA feature set
  • A centralised Content Hub for reusable, channel-agnostic content
  • 'Smart Folders' for marketer-controlled organisation and delivery of content.

Released recently

Some of the notable recent feature releases include:

  • Granular permission management across website and omni-channel Content Hub
  • Huge improvements to image management, including
    • Bulk asset upload
    • AI-powered image/asset optimisation and transformation in the content hub
    • Configurable asset transformation profiles per content type
    • Support for more types such as SVG and AVIF
  • Improved alerts and monitoring for the SaaS platform
  • Huge upgrades to Marketing Automation, bringing it back to more of the fully featured advanced workflows you were used to in K13
  • Custom activity tracking for marketing automation (including multi-channel, e.g. tracking app activity and triggering workflows in the CMS)
  • Advanced scheduled task management
  • Support for .NET 9
  • Automatic redirects for removed pages.

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:

  • Visual email builder (like the current Page Builder)
  • Customer journey tracking and orchestration
  • Full version history and rollback 
  • AI-powered content tagging and metadata generation.

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
  • Content Sync (similar to K13's Content Staging module for transfer of content between environments)
  • Enhanced/guaranteed zero downtime SaaS deployments
  • Automated AI translations.

Notable absences from the roadmap

None! 😲

Previously, I'd listed native e-commerce here, however that's now under active development! There's nothing major missing from the roadmap now, making the platform ready to compete head-to-head with other leading DXPs for the vast majority of projects.

So is Xperience by Kentico ready for me?

🟢 Absolutely yes, particularly 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, marketing automation, 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).

🟠 Yes, but 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.

🔴 Perhaps 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. But if you're looking to consolidate into a single, easy-to-use, modern platform with a very strong roadmap, take a good hard look at Kentico.

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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