The widget/content copy is very useful (when it works)
The centralized content hub makes it easier to re-use assets across properties and pages.
It is much faster to build a page either starting from a pre-defined template or by dropping components in. It's also better that templates are now a starting point rather than set in stone as to what elements a page has.
It is a little faster to build forms than before.
We run a multilingual site, so the AI has been helpful for translating content on the fly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Some features of the previous versions are missing.
Most notably the listing view for pages, or A-Z sorting for pages, either for viewing or for re-organizing content.
Content items also cannot be sorted by their specific fields (non-system fields).
But the search features are robust enough to alleviate this shortcoming.
The reporting feature is also gone. You won't believe how common it is to be asked "how many of this type of content did we publish in X amount of time, by who, what topic"
We worked with a vendor (Wakefly) to rebuild our existing K11 site into XbyK, and many of the configuration settings are now in a black box, for features that I used to be able to code in K# or by knowing basic SQL (adjustments to what used to be called transformations). I'm not a full time developer, but I was able to configure and develop so much on my own I didn't need to rely on our IT department. In the current environment, that freedom is gone.
The workflows are also too broad in scope, we sometimes require to limit access to specific assets, either in a folder path, or only certain forms, or only certain folders for some content.
The feature for "recently items" is also missed. With a website as large as the one I manage, the recent pages was frequently used.
The old WYSIWYG had multilingual spell check and it even automatically fixed unclosed html tags. The Word cleanup was also better, it really did strip all the code from copying from word.
If another user is working on a page we don't get the message "Xuser has this content checked out (or in draft)"
I can't speak for the pricing since that was not part of my decision when choosing the CMS. But we experienced performance issues when moving out of the developer's server (Wakefly) into the Kentico servers. The CMS would constantly crash and time out, the website wasn't even open to the public yet, it was crashing from our own internal traffic and normal amount of work edits. Kentico had to upgrade our capabilities even more despite already being on Tier 2. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
Moving from K11 to Xperience by Kentico is a big change, and your review is clear about both what it costs and what it gives back. Faster page building, content reuse through the content hub and AI translation are the gains the new platform is meant to deliver.
The gaps you raised, such as sorting by custom fields, reporting and workflow permissions, are useful for our product team to hear. You can follow what has shipped on the roadmap, and the community Q&A is the best place to raise them with product and other editors.
If the performance issues you described are still happening, please contact Kentico Support with your project details so we can look at it with you.
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