When comparing Kentico with other platforms, it’s important to remember that “Kentico” doesn’t mean one thing anymore. There’s Kentico CMS, the original platform you’ll still see referenced in older articles despite no longer being sold. There’s Kentico Xperience 13 (KX13), the legacy .NET 6 platform still powering most existing deployments. And then there’s Xperience by Kentico is the current generation of the platform, built on modern .NET and available as fully managed SaaS or through private-cloud deployments.
These distinctions matter, especially now. With KX13 to be retired on December 31, 2026, every organization still running it has a decision to make. Moving to Xperience by Kentico is essentially a full rebuild, and for many organizations that new reality is raising another question:
Is now the right time to move to WordPress instead?
Drawing on experience from 300+ enterprise migrations, we’ll unpack where WordPress and Xperience by Kentico differ, where each platform excels, and what those differences mean for your organization before you commit to either path.
What Does Kentico Offer?
Xperience by Kentico has earned its reputation as an all-in-one DXP. Before comparing it with WordPress, it’s worth understanding what “all-in-one” actually gets you.
Key Features
Marketing automation, A/B testing, and AI-powered content tools all come built in, so there’s no need to assemble them through third-party plugins. Native ecommerce covers product management, checkout, and order workflows within the same platform, rather than relying on a WooCommerce-style add-on.
It also handles multiple brands, regions, and languages from a single instance out of the box. WordPress can achieve the same result, but typically through Multisite plus additional plugins. On the technical side, Xperience by Kentico supports both headless and hybrid delivery on .NET 8 and 9.
Compliance is equally comprehensive. Xperience by Kentico provides built-in security and compliance capabilities and is backed by certifications including ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II. Organizations still need to configure and operate their implementation according to their own regulatory and compliance requirements.
Cost and Pricing
Pricing starts in the low five figures per year for the self-managed version, with SaaS costing roughly twice that. Alongside the platform’s learning curve, these licensing costs can represent a significant commitment to some teams.
KX13 support ends on December 31, 2026, while the underlying .NET 6 framework has already been unsupported since November 2024. This adds security, compliance, and audit risk as additional challenges to resolve.
Is WordPress a Good Alternative to Kentico?
For KX13 teams facing that December deadline, WordPress is one of the paths worth evaluating seriously, and not just as a fallback option. With its enterprise ecosystem, editorial flexibility, and lower long-term costs, many enterprise teams deliberately choose WordPress in its own right.
Features Comparison
WordPress doesn’t arrive with the same all-in-one DXP toolkit as Kentico. Features like ecommerce and A/B testing rely on carefully chosen plugins rather than built-in modules. Where it pulls ahead is flexibility and infrastructure. WordPress VIP achieved FedRAMP Moderate Authorization to Operate (ATO) in 2025 and includes hosting, patching, and DDoS protection as part of the platform, while self-hosted WordPress leaves those responsibilities with your own team.
Meanwhile, Gutenberg’s block-based editor lets marketing teams publish without developer involvement for routine changes, while Xperience by Kentico also provides dedicated content editing. The difference is more about each platform’s editorial model and how much customization is required around it.
Cost Comparison
Although WordPress core is free to use, the real spend comes from hosting, implementation, and ongoing agency support for an enterprise build – which makes getting a detailed understanding of how WordPress costs break down a valuable step. WordPress VIP licensing is in a similar bracket to Xperience by Kentico’s SaaS offering, but that price includes hosting, infrastructure, patching, and platform maintenance.
One Sitecore-to-WordPress migration delivered a 35% reduction in total cost of ownership.
How Do Kentico and WordPress Compare Side by Side?
Here’s the full picture across the factors that tend to make or break an enterprise CMS decision:
| Xperience by Kentico | WordPress VIP | Self-hosted WordPress | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Licensing | Low five figures+ annually | Similar to XbK SaaS | Free core; costs in build and hosting |
| Compliance | ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR, CCPA, DORA native | FedRAMP-certified | Team-managed |
| Developer stack | .NET (C#), certifications expire every 2 years | PHP, large talent pool | PHP, large talent pool |
| Editorial UX | Consultant-dependent changes | Gutenberg, team-independent publishing | Gutenberg, team-independent publishing |
| Headless support | Yes, hybrid on .NET 8/9 | Yes | Yes |
| E-commerce | Native | WooCommerce plugin | WooCommerce plugin |
| Multisite | Native, one instance | WordPress Multisite | WordPress Multisite |
| EOL risk | KX13 ends Dec 31 2026; XbK is full rebuild | None | None |
Which Platform Fits Your Organization?
Rather than a generic recommendation, here’s how to self-select based on what your organization needs.
- Choose Xperience by Kentico if you’re already invested in the full DXP suite, have .NET expertise in-house, and see its documented SEO limitations as a reasonable trade for native enterprise tooling. Kentico is well suited to organizations already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem that want to avoid stitching together multiple third-party tools. If you want A/B testing and campaign management in a single platform, Kentico delivers that functionality without depending on a growing assortment of plugins.
- Choose WordPress VIP if you’d rather let someone else handle infrastructure while giving your marketing team the freedom to publish quickly. Broadly speaking, WordPress VIP tends to be the stronger fit for large media and publishing platforms. It offers enterprise-grade hosting along with editorial flexibility, while allowing teams to offload compliance and server management from their in-house workload.
- Choose self-hosted WordPress if your team has strong PHP expertise, your compliance requirements are lighter, and you want complete ownership of the platform from top to bottom. This is often a good fit for smaller media platforms and SMBs.
None of these options is objectively better. They simply reflect different priorities around responsibility and how much of the platform you want to manage yourself.
Developer Availability
Beyond features and pricing, the long-term cost of a CMS will also depend on how easy it is to find people who can build on it, and the freedom your content team will have once it’s live.
Kentico relies on .NET specialists, and those skills come with a smaller talent pool. Certifications expire every two years, the learning curve is steep, and support often flows through vendors or consultancies rather than a broad developer community.
WordPress, on the other hand, has extensive documentation, active community forums, deep Stack Overflow coverage, and support for both headless and hybrid architectures. With 41.9% of tracked websites running on WordPress, finding experienced developers is simply much easier.
Together with ongoing Gutenberg development and FedRAMP certification for WordPress VIP, WordPress presents a capable solution for both enterprises and SMBs.
What’s the Competitive Landscape for WordPress?
At the SMB end of the market, WordPress competes with Wix, Squarespace, and Webflow. At the enterprise level, the conversation shifts towards Adobe Experience Manager, Drupal, and Kentico. Kentico’s closest rival is arguably Sitecore, with both platforms targeting .NET-heavy organizations looking for built-in DXP functionality and enterprise compliance.
Across the market as a whole, though, WordPress remains comfortably ahead, powering more websites than any other CMS by a large margin.
How Multidots Moves Kentico Teams to WordPress
Migrating off any enterprise CMS is a complex project, and Kentico is no exception. That’s why every enterprise migration Multidots delivers follows the same proven four-phase process:
- Discovery.
- Build.
- Dry run.
- Zero-downtime cutover.
For Kentico, that means content modeling, .NET-to-PHP data mapping, validating everything against your live environment, and only then making the switch. Our enterprise migration planning guide covers the content modeling and risk management decisions that should be nailed down before a single line of code is written.
For teams with compliance on the checklist (i.e., most enterprise teams), Multidots brings both WordPress VIP Gold Partner status and SOC Type 2 certification – valuable credentials for businesses already working within the audit and governance requirements that come with KX13.
With 300+ migrations, our team has deep experience with mapping data models from a proprietary CMS onto WordPress. This is work we’ve already delivered for Sitecore, AEM, Drupal, Contentful, and Django. Kentico fits squarely into that category. If you’re looking for proof at enterprise scale, Ask Media Group migrated 11 sites and 50,000 posts in just 12 weeks, with zero downtime.
Every KX13 team that starts this process gets a scoping call, a written migration plan, and a named delivery team before build work begins.
Start Your Migration Before December
The December 31, 2026 deadline isn’t moving, and migration scoping alone typically takes 2 to 4 weeks before build work even starts. Waiting until the deadline is close doesn’t leave much room for the discovery and planning that make a migration go smoothly.
If you’d like to start planning your migration before KX13 support ends, contact Multidots for a scoping call.
