Craft CMS vs Kentico

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Our analysts compared Craft CMS vs Kentico based on data from our 400+ point analysis of CMS Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Craft CMS Software Tool
Kentico Software Tool

Product Basics

Craft CMS is a software to manage content and design websites from a centralized unified interface. Users can create content through attributes like custom fields, image editor, form builder and live preview. It enables digital asset management with files stored in Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files and Google Cloud Storage. Users can customize its dashboard and add and resize widgets which include an RSS feed, quick post, recent entries, updates, Google Analytics and commerce reports.

User management with role-based access permissions is available in the Pro version and above. Templates are powered by Twig, with DRY code and flexible, bring-your-own HTML development. For non-public URLs, the licensed plans are available for free so long as the site is not deployed to a public server. The vendor provides a free version.
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Kentico is a cloud-based solution that helps manage content and digital experiences. It streamlines tasks, content production, business collaborations, content delivery and integrations. Users can ensure engaging and personalized experiences for existing and potential customers by creating digital touchpoints across websites, online stores, email campaigns and mobile devices. They can also leverage the .NET MVC architecture to build new and developed life cycles. Workflow management helps match business processes and align internal operations.

Its built-in AI and analytics optimize digital initiatives by allowing users to track the most visited pages, create customized websites, send newsletters and identify recurring visitors. It enables businesses to remind customers about abandoned shopping carts and notify them to reorder favorite products. It also includes flexible payment and shipping options, automated checkout processes, marketing integrations and multi-store management.
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$279/Project, Freemium
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$7,999 Monthly
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Product Assistance

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Product Insights

  • Intuitive Content Management: Craft CMS offers a user-friendly interface that simplifies the process of creating, managing, and updating website content, making it accessible for users of all skill levels.
  • Flexible Templating: With its Twig-based templating system, Craft CMS allows for the creation of complex, dynamic websites that can be tailored to meet specific design and functionality requirements.
  • Highly Customizable: Developers can extend the functionality of Craft CMS through plugins and modules, enabling the creation of bespoke solutions that cater to unique business needs.
  • Robust Security: Craft CMS is built with security in mind, offering features like proactive updates, secure password hashing, and built-in protection against common vulnerabilities, ensuring your website remains safe from threats.
  • SEO Friendly: Craft CMS facilitates SEO efforts with features like automatic generation of SEO-friendly URLs, easy metadata management, and the ability to create sitemaps, helping improve your site's visibility in search engine results.
  • Multi-Site Capabilities: Manage multiple websites from a single Craft CMS installation, allowing for streamlined operations and consistent branding across all your digital properties.
  • Live Preview: The Live Preview feature enables content creators to see how their content will look in real-time before it goes live, ensuring accuracy and alignment with design standards.
  • First-Class Localization: Craft CMS supports multi-language and regional differences out-of-the-box, making it an ideal choice for businesses targeting a global audience.
  • Performance Optimization: Designed with performance in mind, Craft CMS ensures fast loading times and a smooth user experience, even for content-rich sites.
  • Community Support: Benefit from a vibrant and supportive community of developers and users who contribute to the platform's extensive plugin ecosystem and offer help and advice through forums and social media.
  • Content Versioning: Craft CMS automatically saves versions of your content as you make changes, allowing you to easily revert to previous versions if needed.
  • Comprehensive Asset Management: Efficiently manage digital assets like images and videos with powerful tools for uploading, organizing, and editing, directly within the CMS.
  • Granular User Permissions: Control access to different parts of your site with detailed user permissions, ensuring team members can only see and edit what they need to.
  • Scalability: Whether you're running a small blog or a large e-commerce site, Craft CMS scales with your business, accommodating growth without sacrificing performance.
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  • Enhanced Productivity: Kentico streamlines content management and delivery, enabling teams to publish content faster and more efficiently, reducing the time to market for new initiatives.
  • Scalability: As your business grows, Kentico grows with you. It supports the expansion of your digital footprint without compromising performance, ensuring your website can handle increased traffic and content volume.
  • Customization: With its flexible architecture, Kentico allows for deep customization to meet specific business needs, ensuring that your website and content management system align perfectly with your brand and operational requirements.
  • Integrated Marketing Tools: Kentico comes equipped with a suite of integrated marketing tools, enabling businesses to execute comprehensive digital marketing strategies, including email marketing, A/B testing, and automation, all from within the same platform.
  • Improved User Experience: By providing tools for creating responsive, accessible, and fast-loading websites, Kentico helps businesses improve the overall user experience, which can lead to increased engagement, higher conversion rates, and customer loyalty.
  • Security: Kentico places a strong emphasis on security, offering features like advanced user management, permissions, and protection against common vulnerabilities, ensuring that your website and data remain safe from threats.
  • SEO Optimization: With built-in SEO tools, Kentico makes it easier for businesses to optimize their content and website structure to rank higher in search engine results, driving more organic traffic to their site.
  • Multi-language Support: Kentico's multi-language capabilities allow businesses to easily create and manage content in multiple languages, making it simpler to reach and engage a global audience.
  • Comprehensive Analytics: The platform includes analytics and reporting tools that provide insights into website performance and user behavior, enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions to optimize their digital strategy.
  • Community and Support: Kentico has a robust community of developers and users, along with professional support from Kentico, ensuring that help is readily available whenever you need it, from troubleshooting to best practices.
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  • Field Customization: Manage all custom field types and organize them. Assign bespoke fields to sections, users, tags and more.  
  • Multi-site: Run multiple sites from within a single software installation. Manage content across different regions and use other websites under the same parent company. Configure site-specific settings and employ site groups to keep them organized and define the order they should appear in on the control panel. 
  • Hassle-Free Localization: Target multiple territories and translate different languages by creating new sites to represent the content. 
  • Sharing Page Reviews: Share unpublished pages privately with team members using a link, keeping a tab on the work progress. 
  • Optimized Asset Management: Access built-in desktop-class asset management. Move files and folders quickly between local and cloud-based sources. Create a new transform that sets the parameters to output images at a specific size. 
  • Single-Click Update: Keep the software and plugins up-to-date with bug fixes, security enhancements and the latest features with a single click. 
  • Control Over Publishing: Full control over when to publish changes, along with the option of ‘Post Date’. 
  • Image Enhancement: Use the software’s Image Editor for resizing, rotating, flipping and cropping images. Set focus points, ensuring that every image renders seamlessly on all devices. 
  • Matrix: Split the content into different blocks and use them multiple times in any order. Enjoy the flexibility in creating any number of blocks containing as many fields as required. Change the layout of fields within the Matrix field to save space and give a better experience. 
  • Real-Time Preview: Update changes in the content and preview them even before publishing. Get a better idea of the design and appearance of the content in advance. 
  • Syntax Alert: Catch typos within the template with a helpful error message, along with a snippet of the code highlighting the offending line. 
  • Twig: Compile powerful template engines into optimized PHP files. Access various solutions offered by the language to keep templates DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself). 
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  • Personalizations: Deliver personalized digital experiences across web, mobile, email and other channels. Create relevant, tailor-made content based on customer behavior, contextual history and demographics. Dynamically change content on websites based on the visitor’s actions. Use visual rule designer to set personalization rules and segmentation. 
  • Automation: Send automated alerts to customers to remind them about abandoned shopping carts. Create personalized automation through the drag and drop designer. 
  • E-Commerce: Deliver personalized digital experiences through online stores. 
    • Product Management: Create a catalog with flexible navigation and design to showcase products. Design pages with rich text, specifications and pictures. Sell multiple products and categorize them based on attributes. Facilitate easy search options with filters like availability, features and categories. 
    • Checkout: Customize shopping cart and checkout processes according to customer needs. Create single-page or organization-specific checkouts. 
    • Promotions and Discounts: Boost sales through discounts, offers and gift cards. Apply multiple targeted rebates and cross-sell and up-sell promotions. 
    • Shipping and Payments: Ensure safe and flexible payment processes through card, cash on delivery, PayPal or other third-party solutions. Automatically calculate shipping costs and taxes based on factors like weight and country. Provides multi-currency support. 
    • Shopping Cart: Let customers add, remove and update products and services. Ensure stock availability by leverage out-of-the-box modules. 
    • Order Management: Send customers detailed summaries of their purchases with product, shipping and payment details. 
  • Website Management: Manage multiple websites from a unified interface. Import code, data and content across different sites. Create microsites, online stores, community forums and blogs. Leverage ASP.NET Core MVC technology to deliver high-performing, scalable websites. Ensure quick data loading and reduce inessential processing. 
  • Analytics: Gain real-time insights, analyze performance and track audience engagement through analytical modules. 
    • Sentiment and Web Analysis: Analyze positive and negative comments on websites and send automated thank-you notes and apologies. Gather information on visitors, email recipients and customer behavior. 
    • Reporting: Access reports on content, commerce, customer touchpoints and workflows. Visualize data through custom reports. Gain statistical information according to downloads, slicks, referrals, conversions, campaigns and more. 
    • Testing: Test several variations of web pages and emails to gauge impact. Set multiple metrics like conversion goals, traffic sources and customer segments. 
    • Dashboards: Display relevant information and drill down into data through customizable dashboards. Monitor campaign assets and measure effectiveness. 
  • Audience Management: Gather information on visitors and manage contacts across all channels.  
    • Automated Lead Scoring: Automatically identify prospective clients according to location, title and data completeness. Define company-specific rules and create lead scoring processes. Share leads with sales teams via emails or through CRMs. 
    • Tracking: Monitor visitor journeys at all touchpoints — capture page views, downloads and video watches. Track email interactions, customer actions and campaign activities. 
    • Segmentation: Use the visual interface to categorize contacts based on context, behavior and demographics. Collect data on anonymous visitors, subscribers and registered clients. Create customer profiles according to activity scores and automatically add them to segmentation. 
    • Compliance: Ensure data process with GDPR, PII and CCPA compliance. 
  • Content Production: Manage, create and reuse content in email marketing campaigns, mobile apps, websites and other channels. 
    • Page Builder: Use drag and drop widgets to create new web pages and adjust content on websites. Deliver customer-specific experiences by applying personalization rules. Develop layouts according to needs and divide web pages into sections. 
    • Templates: Reuse content by saving high-performing pages as templates. Save content, sections and widgets. Customize templates to add text, pictures, videos and other media files. 
    • Workflows: Design custom workflows to ensure content consistency and regulation compliance. Define workflow processes and steps by selecting editors, owners and approvers and manage content throughout its lifecycle. Set timed actions to move content to the next step automatically. Track published content and store outdated versions in retrievable archives.  
    • Digital Asset Management: Create media libraries and store pictures, videos, PDFs and presentations in a centralized repository. Edit images, convert them into multiple formats and automatically resize them to fit different layouts and devices. Assign role-based access for security. 
    • Language Support: Create and translate content into several languages like Chinese, Spanish, Hebrew, Russian, Arabic and more. Display region-specific language on websites or stick to default if the page is not translated. Display date and time according to time zones. 
  • Campaign Management: Launch and manage cross-channel campaigns. Set landing pages and tracking links according to UTM parameters. Receive real-time information on campaign performance, visitor interactions and conversion. 
  • Email Marketing: Deliver personalized, targeted emails to customers based on activity, behavior, data and lead scoring. Measure crucial metrics like delivery, open and click rates. 
  • Artificial Intelligence: Display relevant content and optimize engagement through AI-based recommendations. Design widget variants and drag-and-drop the best one to product categories, shopping carts, emails or homepage. Suggest products to customers based on behavioral attributes. 
  • Forms: Collect information, applications, leads, registrations, surveys and more. Create forms with custom fields and insert them on websites.  
  • Security: Protect data and websites against vulnerabilities with multiple security layers, anti-CSRF tokens, custom authentication models, role-based permissions and reCAPTCHA. 
  • Integrations: Access pre-packaged connections with Salesforce, Zoho, Recombee, Dynamics 365, Visual Studio and more. Use API to build organization-specific integrations with CRMs, ERPs, PIMs and payment gateways. 
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Product Ranking

#57

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#73

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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 34 reviews
Great User Sentiment 312 reviews
83%
of users recommend this product

Craft CMS has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 83% when considering 34 user reviews from 2 recognized software review sites.

87%
of users recommend this product

Kentico has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 87% when considering 312 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

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4.7 (15)
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4.3 (212)
5.0 (1)
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4.1 (33)
4.4 (42)
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4.0 (1)
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4.5 (42)

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Intuitive Interface: Craft CMS is often praised for its user-friendly interface, making it easy for content editors and administrators to manage and publish content efficiently. The interface is clean, well-organized, and intuitive, allowing users to find what they need quickly and easily.
Flexibility and Customization: Craft CMS provides a high degree of flexibility and customization, allowing developers to create bespoke content models and tailor the system to meet specific project requirements. This flexibility empowers users to build unique and complex websites without being constrained by rigid structures.
Performance and Scalability: Craft CMS is known for its excellent performance and scalability, ensuring that websites built on the platform can handle high traffic volumes and complex content structures without compromising speed or reliability. This is crucial for businesses and organizations that require a robust and scalable online presence.
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Easy to Use: The platform's user-friendly interface makes content management tasks simple and efficient, even for non-technical users. The intuitive design and clear navigation contribute to a smooth user experience.
Versatility: Kentico offers a wide range of features and functionalities, allowing users to create various digital experiences, from simple websites to complex e-commerce platforms and intranets. This adaptability makes it suitable for diverse business needs.
Scalability: As businesses grow and evolve, Kentico can scale to accommodate increasing demands. Its architecture and performance capabilities ensure that websites and applications can handle high traffic volumes and complex functionalities without compromising speed or stability.
Security: Kentico prioritizes security and provides robust features to protect websites and data from cyber threats. Regular security updates and a strong focus on data privacy give users peace of mind.
Support: Kentico offers comprehensive support options, including documentation, community forums, and professional services. Users can access the resources they need to resolve issues and optimize their use of the platform.
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Steeper Learning Curve: Craft CMS's flexibility and power come at the cost of a steeper learning curve compared to simpler platforms like Squarespace or Wix. Users accustomed to more intuitive interfaces may find Craft's initial setup and content management less straightforward.
Plugin Dependence: While Craft CMS offers core features, extending functionality often requires plugins. This can lead to challenges in maintaining compatibility between plugins and the core system, especially during updates. Additionally, some essential plugins may require a purchase, adding to the overall cost.
Pricing Structure: Craft CMS's pricing structure, which involves a per-project license fee and potential plugin costs, can be a deterrent for budget-conscious users or smaller projects. The initial investment might seem higher compared to open-source alternatives or platforms with freemium models.
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Overly Complex Interface: Many users find it difficult to navigate and perform simple tasks due to the complexity of the interface.
Limited Customization Options: Users have expressed frustration with the limited ability to customize the platform to their specific needs, especially when it comes to design and functionality.
Expensive Licensing: The cost of licensing can be prohibitive, especially for smaller businesses or organizations with limited budgets.
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Looking to "craft" the perfect website? Craft CMS might just be the tool you need. Craft CMS has garnered a reputation for its user-friendly interface and flexibility. Users appreciate the intuitive control panel, which simplifies content creation and management. The ability to customize the dashboard to individual preferences further enhances the user experience. Craft CMS's flexible content modeling system allows users to design their content structure, making it suitable for various website types, from simple blogs to complex e-commerce platforms. Its headless architecture provides developers with the freedom to deliver content to any platform, offering greater versatility compared to traditional CMS platforms. However, some users find Craft CMS's capabilities less extensive than those of platforms like WordPress, which offer a wider range of built-in features and plugins. Additionally, Craft CMS's flexibility can lead to a steeper learning curve for beginners. Despite these drawbacks, Craft CMS's strengths lie in its ability to empower users to create unique and tailored digital experiences. Its focus on customizability and user experience makes it an ideal choice for businesses and individuals seeking a CMS that can adapt to their specific needs and grow with them over time.

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Kentico has garnered a mixed bag of user reviews over the past year. Some users sing its praises for its user-friendly interface, flexibility to adapt to various needs, and ability to scale alongside growing businesses. It's like having a Swiss Army knife for content management – it can handle a wide range of tasks without breaking a sweat. However, other users point out its hefty price tag as a significant drawback, especially when compared to more budget-friendly options like WordPress. Additionally, some users have expressed frustration with the level of support provided and the complexity of navigating the user interface, which can feel overwhelming for those new to content management systems. When stacked up against competitors, Kentico stands out with its robust set of features, particularly its marketing automation capabilities and multilingual support. This makes it a powerhouse for businesses with a global reach or those looking to streamline their marketing efforts. However, its complexity can be a double-edged sword, making it less appealing to smaller businesses or those with simpler website needs. Ultimately, Kentico is best suited for mid-sized to large businesses with the budget and manpower to leverage its extensive features and navigate its intricate interface. It's like opting for a high-performance sports car – you'll get where you need to go with speed and precision, but it requires a certain level of expertise to handle effectively.

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