When I present Kentico, our preferred content management system to clients, I often get asked why I selected this particular system over all the others. My answer is that it was one of the hardest decisions that I took in my professional life.
Indeed, if you go to cmsmatrix.org you can see that there are currently 961 CMSs listed on the site, if you consult the list of Content Management systems in Wikipedia, you will find roughly 90 free or open source and 50 proprietary solutions.
Defining your needs
The first pragmatic step to take in this decision process was to create a list with the most important selection criteria. Here is what was most important to me:
- I wanted to build all my web sites with this tool, so it needed to be flexible and powerful at the same time;
- The administration interface needed to be very user friendly and relative easy to understand, because I want my clients, who are definitely not web experts, to use this tool without going through weeks of training;
- In order to be able to service clients with smaller sites, the cost per site that the CMS will add on should not surpass $1,000-2,000;
- The system needed to run under Windows Server/IIS/ASP.NET - because that’s what we are using and know the best;
- I wanted to be assured of professional support, one that provides answers within 24 hours.
ASP.NET based systems
A search for a ASP.NET based CMS quickly reduces the number of results but not the quality: Rainbow, Ektron, ADXstudio, Digimaker, Kentico, Sitefinity, DotNetNuke, SiteKit, Umbraco, Community Server and some more.
To create an in-depth comparison chart between the products I extended my evaluation matrix with the top technical requirements:
- Multi-lingual site support
- Multi-lingual administration site
- CMS outputs valid XHTML and permits the use of style sheets
- SEO friendly (URLs, Meta data, site structure)
- No restrictions on web design
- User friendly administrative interface that allows non-technical clients to maintain a site
- Built-in File Management
- Built-in Search Engine
- Complete Documentation
- Built-in modules
- Possibility of shopping cart integration
- Possibility of easily adding on own modules while maintaining forward compatibility.
The selection process
Some solutions were quickly eliminated due to their high price tag. Approximately 10 solutions were actually tested. This reduced the list further partly because some user interfaces were unacceptable, the systems was not powerful enough or the list of built-in modules was too short.
The winner
The Kentico CMS however responded to all the requirements and even had a couple of extra features like workflow and versioning, as well as some community functions.
After a three month testing period, the final deciding – in addition to very good documentation - was the excellent support: Not only were all my questions answered within 24 hours, the quality of the answers was superior to everything else I experienced thus far.
Moreover, I realized that Kentico listens to its users and deploys feature request within an amazinglu short time-frame. Currently, there are 2-3 version updates per year.
Resumé
One year later there are no regrets. The system proves to be very flexible, and my clients are able to update the content of their sites with as little as one or two training sessions. Kentico continues to enhance their product with some exciting new features and recently increased their support staff. All that makes me confident that this product will stay my number one choice for the years to come.
Kentico CMS home page