Kentico Xperience 13 reaches end of life on December 31, 2026, and Kentico has been blunt about what that means. Through 2026, you get security hotfixes and nothing else. After January 1, 2027, the patches stop, the support stops, and if something breaks, that’s on you.

The official way forward is Xperience by Kentico, and getting there means rebuilding your platform. Kentico’s own partners openly call it a replatform.

The admin is rebuilt on a new framework, the content model changes (yet again), custom code has to be rewritten, and your users, roles, and permissions are set up again from scratch. Once you’re facing a rebuild that size, the cost of staying with Kentico starts to look a lot like the cost of leaving.

So if you’re on Xperience 13, you’re choosing a new platform, whatever the invoice calls it.

Below are the Kentico alternatives worth shortlisting, and where each one fits. One pattern shows up in all of them. The options that keep you renting from a single vendor just restart the cycle you’re trying to end.

But that comes later. First, the cost of the replatform itself.

The Kentico replatform costs what a migration costs

The move off Xperience 13 is a rebuild. Kentico hands you a migration tool that carries your content, templates, and assets into a fresh Xperience by Kentico install. What it won’t carry is your users, roles, and permissions, and Xperience 13 eCommerce has no path into the new commerce platform at all. Custom modules and older features get rebuilt from scratch.

That dumps the real work somewhere a data tool can’t help, in restructuring content, rewriting integrations, and rebuilding custom features. By Kentico’s own numbers, a corporate site runs about 60 hours with the tool and 300 hours to rebuild, and partners scoping the full job plan for six to twelve months.

Across every enterprise CMS migration rtCamp runs, the same thing holds. The data moves fast. The content model and the custom build are where your months disappear.

The new Kentico is still a rental

So when staying costs about what leaving costs, the question flips, and Xperience by Kentico answers it in the vendor’s favor. You pay for it as a cloud subscription, billed by channel, with Web, Email, and Headless priced separately and Kentico setting the rates.

The monthly update cycle hands the timing and price of your next forced move to Kentico too. You’d be paying to rebuild, only to land right back where Xperience 13 left you, inside someone else’s roadmap.

What to evaluate before you compare Kentico alternatives

Forget the feature checklist. Picking a Kentico replacement comes down to four questions.

• Who controls the timing and cost of your next forced move?
• Can you take your content and its structure with you when the vendor relationship sours?
• Can your team publish without filing a developer ticket?
• What does the platform really cost over five years, once you add the build, the rebuild work, the specialist developers, and the paid add-ons on top of the license?

That last one trips people up, because the license is the smallest line in the total. Kentico doesn’t publish its enterprise pricing, but at any tier it’s dwarfed by the rebuild and the engineers to run it. That’s where the replatform math gets uncomfortable.

Owned platforms versus vendor clouds

Those four questions split the field in two. On one side, the vendor-controlled platforms, Xperience by Kentico, Sitecore, Contentful, Sanity, and Adobe Experience Manager, where you rent the capability and the vendor sets the terms.

On the other hand, the open-source platforms you own, WordPress, Drupal, and Umbraco, where you hold the code, pick the host, and decide when to change. If you’re leaving because a vendor controlled your upgrade, switching to another vendor just hands that control to someone new.

Portability is the question most procurement teams skip, and the one they end up regretting. Own the platform, and your content model, your data, and your templates are yours to export and move whenever you want. Rent it, and leaving means rebuilding all of it, which is exactly the bill landing on Xperience 13 desks right now.

Whatever you pick today is also whatever you’ll leave one day. Price that exit in from the start.

Can WordPress do all of it?

One more worry comes up before the list. Can WordPress really do everything your old DXP did? Personalization, structured content, multiple languages at scale, headless delivery, governance and compliance, every one of those is something a capable team builds, and any serious platform can do it with the right build.

WordPress does all of it when the partner building it has done it at enterprise scale. So the comparison that decides this comes down to ownership, talent, editorial speed, and five-year cost.

The Kentico alternatives worth evaluating, and where each fits

A side-by-side look first, then the detail on each.

PlatformBest forPricingWordPressAlmost every enterprise leaving Kentico that wants full capability without the lock-inOpen source, no license fee; hosting extraSitecoreCompanies whose core need is a single-vendor personalization suite~$100K–$500K+ a year, no public pricingContentfulTeams already committed to pure headless, with their own front-end engineersFree to ~$300/mo; enterprise around $179K a yearUmbracoOrganizations built around Microsoft that want open-source .NETOpen source; Cloud and add-ons extraDrupalPublic sector or universities with unusual structured-data needsOpen source, no license feeSanityDeveloper-led teams that have chosen a code-first headless toolFree tier; ~$15/seat/mo; enterprise custom

WordPress

Best for: almost every enterprise leaving Kentico that wants the full power of a DXP without the lock-in.

WordPress fixes the exact thing you’re running from, and it gives up nothing to do it. You own the code and the data, you pick where it runs, and you decide when it changes. You pay no license fee, and no vendor can reprice your platform or force a rebuild on a schedule you didn’t choose.

It does the work a digital experience platform charges you for.

• Personalization through a customer data platform and the integrations you choose, with your customer data staying yours.
• Structured content set up however you need, with custom post types and fields.
• Headless and multichannel delivery out of the box through the REST API and GraphQL, with ownership intact.
• Governance and compliance as far as the strictest rules demand. WordPress VIP carries FedRAMP Moderate authorization plus GovRAMP, TX-RAMP, and SOC 2, which is why WhiteHouse.gov and NASA run on it, right alongside CNN, Salesforce, News Corp, and Bloomberg.

Then come two things no proprietary platform can touch. Your editors work in Gutenberg and ship pages without waiting on a developer. And WordPress has the deepest talent pool of any enterprise CMS, so hiring stays easy and long-term cost stays low. You even pick the host, whether that’s WordPress VIP, Pagely, or Kinsta, and you can move whenever you want.

WordPress is only as good as the team that builds and hosts it, so the build and the host set your ceiling on security and performance. That’s the part an experienced partner and managed VIP-class hosting take off your plate.

The only team it doesn’t suit is one that wants a single vendor to own and answer for the whole stack, and is happy to keep paying for it.

Sitecore

Best for: the rare company whose core, active need is a single-vendor personalization suite, with the team and budget to run it.

Sitecore’s real strength is the all-in-one personalization and marketing suite, run by one vendor, for a company that wants exactly that out of the box.

The trouble is, it’s the same model you’re trying to leave. Sitecore pushed its customers off perpetual licenses onto the XM Cloud subscription, charges for add-ons like CDP, Personalize, and Send on top, doesn’t publish prices, and rebuilds the platform whenever it decides to.

Sitecore licensing alone runs $100K–$500K+ a year, and most companies use a sliver of the personalization they pay for. WordPress covers what they actually use through a CDP, with the data and the budget staying in their hands.

For anyone leaving Kentico to get out from under vendor lock-in and upgrade costs, it just restarts the same cycle at a bigger number.

Contentful

Best for: a team with its own front-end engineers that has already committed to a fully decoupled, headless architecture.

Contentful is good at clean, API-first headless delivery, which suits a company that’s already committed to separating its front end from its back end.

The cost is where it bites. Pricing climbs with usage and seats and is hard to predict. The public plans leap from free to about $300 a month, with custom enterprise pricing above that, and procurement benchmarks put average enterprise spend near $179K a year.

And because it’s headless-only, the entire front-end build lands on your developers, which deepens the exact dependency you’re trying to shake. WordPress gives you the same headless setup through REST and GraphQL while you keep ownership, so going headless never means handing yourself to a vendor’s SaaS.

It’s the wrong call for a team trying to lean on developers less after Kentico.

Umbraco

Best for: an organization already built around Microsoft that wants open-source ownership inside the .NET stack.

Umbraco’s pitch is simple. It’s open-source .NET, so a team deep in Microsoft can keep that stack and still own the platform.

Staying on .NET because it’s what you know feels like a reason to pick Umbraco. But it’s the same stack attachment that made leaving Kentico hard in the first place. Umbraco also keeps you on Microsoft’s release schedule, where versions 14 through 16 each brought real upgrade work, licenses Forms and Deploy separately, and draws from a smaller, pricier talent pool than WordPress.

You get real ownership, with the upgrade work and the staffing bill attached. If you care most about talent, editorial speed, and cost, WordPress is the stronger platform to own.

Drupal

Best for: public-sector or higher-education teams with unusual structured-data needs and Drupal talent already on staff.

Drupal earns its place with deep structured-content modeling and governance, for the small set of organizations that need that depth.

For most enterprises, though, that edge is smaller than its reputation suggests. WordPress handles structured content with custom post types and fields, and governance with roles, editorial workflow, and VIP-class controls, which covers what the vast majority need for structured data and multiple languages.

Drupal also comes with baggage. Moving from Drupal 7 to 8 was a full rebuild, and Drupal 7 hit end of life in January 2025. The talent pool is smaller, the learning curve for content teams is steeper, and publishing slows down because of it.

If you want that power with faster publishing and a deeper talent pool, WordPress is the better fit, and rtCamp handles Drupal to WordPress migrations.

Sanity

Best for: a developer-led team that has already chosen a code-first headless tool.

Sanity offers a highly customizable, code-first headless studio, with a React-based editor and its own query language, GROQ. Developer-led teams tend to love it.

It carries the same trade-off as Contentful. Sanity is a vendor SaaS where your developers own and build the whole front end, so dependency climbs. WordPress gives you headless and ownership in one.

It’s the wrong fit for a team that wants headless without leaning harder on developers.

What a Kentico-to-WordPress migration actually looks like

Discovery comes first

On a Kentico to WordPress migration, the data is the easy part. Coordination is the hard part. Matching your Kentico content model to a new structure, and every old URL to a new one, takes longer than moving the data ever does.

So the whole thing starts with discovery, a full inventory of everything your Kentico setup touches, so nothing gets rebuilt by surprise. Start with 20 hours of free discovery. If the audit doesn’t produce a clear path forward, you’ve lost nothing but time.

What moves to WordPress, and how

From there, the steps are concrete.

• Kentico content types map to WordPress custom post types and fields, with the original hierarchy left intact.
• Every custom Kentico component gets rebuilt as a Gutenberg block your editors can use directly.
• Roles and single sign-on get set up again.
• SEO gets handled before launch, with every URL mapped and redirected before a single page moves, so your rankings hold through the switch.

Nothing gets taken on faith, either. rtCamp checks the migrated content against the original, confirms every redirect fires, and makes sure images, metadata, and fields all came across. On a big archive, that’s what catches the broken links and stray files that would otherwise show up as lost traffic weeks down the line.

Proof from three enterprise migrations

We’ve executed 500+ enterprise WordPress engagements, enough to know the patterns that repeat and the failure modes to expect. The approach we use with Kentico clients is built around preventing them.

VinSolutions is a good example. rtCamp moved them off Kentico onto a WordPress VIP multisite and landed a 48% jump in Core Web Vitals, with the content hierarchy held together by mapped redirects.

The team even rebuilt Kentico’s staging and draft workflow on WordPress, using a fork-and-merge draft setup with shareable private previews for legal and marketing. That meant no separate staging site to babysit.

The same pattern scales up. rtCamp pulled eight Cox Automotive brand sites onto a single WordPress VIP multisite, launched seven large sites in twelve months with 70 to 80 percent code reuse, and Cox saw 103% more visitor engagement and 100% more lead conversions.

For Dealertrack, the move cut landing-page time-to-market by 50%, with zero downtime and rankings intact, and it killed the recurring license cost. That’s the kind of result we build for as a WordPress VIP Premier Partner, formerly Gold Partner.

Life after launch

The cutover itself is the easy part to plan. The part teams underestimate is the six months after launch, when content governance, editor training, and rebuilt integrations decide whether the whole move actually paid off. rtCamp scopes all of that during discovery and stays through go-live, which is part of why our client repeat rate sits at 96%.

And if the switch itself worries you, that’s fair. “Zero downtime” means the new platform gets built right next to the live site, content moves over in stages, and the cutover happens at the DNS level with a rollback ready to go. Your old site keeps serving traffic until the new one has proven itself.

Which alternative fits your situation

The platforms differ, but for an enterprise leaving Kentico, the answer keeps landing in the same place, whatever your top priority is.

Primary driverThe answer is…WhyOwnership and no forced upgradesWordPressYou own the code and data and decide when it changes, so no vendor can reprice or rebuild it on a schedule you didn’t choose.Editorial independenceWordPressGutenberg lets editors publish directly, so content ships without waiting on a developer.Talent pool and total costWordPressThe deepest hiring pool of any enterprise CMS keeps cost down and staffing easy.Personalization without lock-inWordPressRuns through a CDP and integrations, with your customer data kept in-house.Headless or multichannel deliveryWordPressNative REST and GraphQL give you headless while you keep ownership. Pick Contentful or Sanity only if you’ve already gone fully decoupled.Structured content and governanceWordPressCustom post types, fields, roles, and VIP-class controls cover it. Drupal only for unusual structured-data needs with Drupal people on hand.

Make this your last forced migration

You’ve already lived through one forced cycle. The Xperience 13 deadline is the second, and the platform you choose now decides whether a third ever shows up. Pick another vendor and you’ve just bought a fresh upgrade clock and a pricing model you don’t control. Own your platform and the cycle ends, which was the whole point of leaving.

We’ll map your Kentico architecture, identify the migration constraints, and help you build an internal business case, before any contract is signed. 20 hours of discovery, free.

Book your free platform audit

Common questions about leaving Kentico

Is Xperience by Kentico an upgrade or a replatform?

It’s a replatform. The admin gets rebuilt on a new framework, the content model changes, and custom code has to be rewritten. The migration tool brings your content and data across, but users, roles, and permissions get set up again, and Xperience 13 eCommerce has no direct path into the new commerce platform.

Will migrating from Kentico to WordPress hurt our SEO?

Not if you handle redirects first. rtCamp maps and redirects every URL before any content moves. On the VinSolutions migration, the content hierarchy stayed intact and the rankings held.

Can WordPress do the personalization and structured content we relied on in Kentico?

Yes. WordPress does structured content with custom post types and fields, and personalization through a CDP and integrations, with your customer data staying in-house. These are things a good enterprise partner builds as a matter of course.

How long does a Kentico-to-WordPress migration take?

That depends on your content volume, custom features, and integrations, which is exactly what the 20-hour discovery is there to figure out before you commit to a timeline or a cost.

The Kentico replatform costs what a migration costs

The new Kentico is still a rental

What to evaluate before you compare Kentico alternatives

Owned platforms versus vendor clouds

Can WordPress do all of it?

The Kentico alternatives worth evaluating, and where each fits

WordPress

Sitecore

Contentful

Umbraco

Drupal

Sanity

What a Kentico-to-WordPress migration actually looks like

Discovery comes first

What moves to WordPress, and how

Proof from three enterprise migrations

Life after launch

Which alternative fits your situation

Make this your last forced migration

Common questions about leaving Kentico

Is Xperience by Kentico an upgrade or a replatform?

Will migrating from Kentico to WordPress hurt our SEO?

Can WordPress do the personalization and structured content we relied on in Kentico?

How long does a Kentico-to-WordPress migration take?

On this page

kentico to wordpress migration, kentico alternatives

Credits

Salman Ravoof

Author

Salman Ravoof

Author

Salman Ravoof is a Senior Technical Content Writer at rtCamp. He’s a self-taught developer who switched to writing, which means he’s actually built the things he writes about and broken a few produ…

VIEW PROFILE

Related articles

• Why CMOs and CTOs are moving away from Kentico

  Articles

• Kentico vs WordPress for enterprise: An honest look at both platforms

  Articles

Comments

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Name*

Email*

Comment*

Submit

Δ