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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'?

Andy Thompson

23 October 2024

4 minute read

Kentico Software is one of the established players in the CMS/DXP industry, having been founded by owner Petr Palas in the early days of ASP.NET way back in 2004, and having celebrated its 20th anniversary this year in 2024!

Constant evolution

Over the years Kentico has understandably gone through some major underlying technology changes, considering it started on the very first version of Microsoft's .NET 1.

There have been some significant technology jumps that Kentico has been right on top and at the forefront of, for example being the first to support Microsoft Azure cloud hosting, the switch from using WebForms (aka Portal Engine) for front-end websites to MVC, and the more recent move from the legacy .NET Framework to .NET Core (most recently .NET 8). Incredibly, it is still technically possible to upgrade a project all the way from the earliest versions of Kentico to the latest that are still supported today, even if a couple of those upgrades were significant undertakings!

Unfortunately what this means for some of these long-maintained projects, and the Kentico CMS itself, is that the existing Kentico Xperience 13 contained a LOT of legacy code to provide backward compatibility. For example, even though the administration user interface has been updated consistently of the years, it (and any customisations or extensions you'd created for it) was still built on the legacy .NET Framework and WebForms.

Time for a revolution

Faced with the prospect of rebuilding every single piece of the DXP just to get on the latest Microsoft platform, Kentico's engineers had a big decision to make. Do they invest months or years of time to rewrite most of their codebase but retain the exact same platform, with all the exact same legacy architecture and features, with full 1:1 upgrade support for older projects on the old platform... or do they use that same investment to architect and build the DXP the way it should be built, taking full advantage of the new technology and everything they've learned from the thousands of projects that have been implemented on their platform over the last 20 years?

Screenshot of the Xperience by Kentico user interface

Image source: kentico.com

A brand new product

Hence, a new product, Xperience by Kentico, was born. Designed by the same product team, built by the same engineers, but constrained by none of the legacy requirements of supporting a twenty-year-old platform.

The benefits are many, and include:

  1. blisteringly-fast performance, both for your website and the incredibly snappy administration interface, 
  2. brand new redesigned user experiences, 
  3. modern APIs compatible with all the latest integration tools and frameworks, 
  4. multi-channel and headless support, and 
  5. a full SaaS cloud-managed version. 

And critically, the new platform is versionless, meaning it gets incremental updates that are relatively seamless, rather than one big upgrade per year that you have to set aside a significant budget for.

The drawbacks are there, but mostly for existing customers, with the upgrade path understandably a little more complex, and with everything being rebuilt from the ground up, there are some features that don't match 1:1 between the older product and the new one.

Key differences


Kentico 13

Xperience by Kentico

Tech stack - front-end website

⭐ ASP.NET Core MVC

⭐ ASP.NET Core MVC

Tech stack - back-end admin

☹️ .NET Framework/Webforms

⭐ ASP.NET Core MVC

Cloud Support

✅ Self-managed in Azure

⭐ Full SaaS platform available, or self-managed option

APIs and headless support

☹️ Legacy REST XML API

⭐ Modern GraphQL headless API and full support for headless channels

Artificial Intelligence

☹️ Limited features

⭐ AIRA assistant built-in

Product features

⭐ Very broad feature set from long version history

✅ Core DXP feature set with more being released regularly

Roadmap

✅ Limited feature releases

⭐ Very active, monthly refreshes

Release schedule

☹️ Historically annual, but no more major releases planned

⭐ Versionless/continuously updated with refreshes

Technical Support Timeline

✅ 31 December 2026 (two years)

⭐ Continuously supported (no end date)

Upgrading from Kentico 13 to Xperience by Kentico

Kentico Xperience 13 continues to be supported by Kentico with feature releases and long term technical support, for customers who aren't prepared to replatform to Xperience by Kentico in the short term.

Typically, considering it's a new product, we would consider it less of a direct upgrade, and refer to the process as a migration to Xperience by Kentico. Kentico has put a lot of effort into developing a fully supported Xperience by Kentico - Kentico Migration Tool as part of their broader Kentico Migration Toolkit, to support agencies and customers with this process.

Roadmap

Being a new platform, the roadmap is understandably long and full of exciting features! For most customers, it already has everything they need. For others, particularly those who are already familiar with the existing Kentico Xperience platform, they may be curious about when certain features are planned be released in the next-generation platform before they move to it. 

If you're in this camp, make sure you read my dedicated post that attempts to answer the question: Is Xperience by Kentico ready?

Is Xperience by Kentico ready?

Xperience by Kentico is the brand new, next-generation DXP from Kentico. With brand new features and a rapidly-evolving roadmap, we spend a lot of time discussing whether the platform and our customers are ready for each other yet! This regularly-updated posts aims to help answer that question for you.

Read Andy's post

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