Kentico is a .NET content management system and digital experience platform (DXP) built by Kentico Software, a company based in the Czech Republic. The original product, Kentico CMS, has been rebranded and rebuilt several times and is now sold as Kentico Xperience. A separate headless product from the same company, Kontent.ai, spun off as its own business and is no longer marketed under the Kentico name.
What Kentico actually is today
“Kentico CMS” is largely a legacy name. The product line has gone through several rebrands:
- Kentico CMS – the original ASP.NET Web Forms product
- Kentico EMS – added marketing and personalisation features on top of the CMS
- Kentico Xperience – the current name, rebuilt on ASP.NET Core, combining CMS, e-commerce, and marketing automation in one platform
- Kontent.ai – a headless SaaS CMS that started life inside Kentico as Kentico Cloud, then Kentico Kontent, before becoming an independent company and product
If someone says “Kentico CMS” today, they usually mean Kentico Xperience, since that’s the product still actively developed and sold under the Kentico brand.
Content model
Kentico Xperience uses a page-and-component model similar to most enterprise CMS platforms, with some MVC-specific conventions:
- Content types define reusable structures with fields, similar to custom post types elsewhere
- Pages sit in a tree structure, with each page tied to a content type
- Widgets and page builder components let editors assemble layouts without touching code
- Content can be shared across channels, which is the basis of its DXP positioning rather than a single-site CMS
Developers work in C# and Razor views rather than a templating language of the CMS’s own invention, which is one of the main reasons organisations already invested in .NET choose it.
Hosting requirements
Kentico Xperience is a self-hosted platform, unlike Kontent.ai which is SaaS. Typical requirements are:
| Component | Requirement |
|---|---|
| Runtime | .NET / ASP.NET Core (current versions run cross-platform on Windows or Linux) |
| Database | Microsoft SQL Server |
| Hosting | IIS on Windows Server, or containerised deployment, often on Azure |
| Licensing | Commercial license, tiered by features and traffic |
This puts Kentico firmly in the enterprise .NET category, alongside platforms like Sitecore and Umbraco, rather than the open-source LAMP-stack world of WordPress or Drupal. For a broader view of where it sits against other platforms, see the supported CMS list.
Current status
Kentico Xperience remains under active development, with Kentico Software continuing to release updates and a newer cloud-oriented product line marketed as “Xperience by Kentico.” The company has moved away from the old Kentico CMS and Kentico EMS naming entirely, so anyone evaluating the platform now should look at Xperience documentation and pricing rather than older CMS-branded material, which is out of date.
Kontent.ai, despite its shared history, is a different product with its own roadmap, pricing, and headless-only architecture. Treat searches for “Kentico headless CMS” and “Kentico Xperience” as pointing to two separate products, not two names for the same thing.