When Petr Palas founded Kentico over 20 years ago, he couldn’t have envisioned the level of adoption and performance it might one day achieve. Or perhaps he knew all along that it would rise from a niche, Czech-based startup to a DXP category player, with hundreds of staff across three continents – powering thousands of websites across the globe.

Now, as it looks ahead, the company is reveling in optimism as demand grows for Xperience by Kentico, its multichannel content management, marketing, and digital commerce solution packaged in one cohesive platform. By reducing the cognitive overload, Xperience by Kentico is powering strong outcomes for its customers with its complete ecosystem offering, hybrid headless architecture, and strong focus on content creation and governance.

It’s also buoyed by AIRA, Kentico’s native AI agent, which unpacks and understands content and customer data to help streamline the creation, optimization, and time to deploy for digital experiences. This manifests in a range of AI-powered content enhancements and translations that give marketers out-of-the-box features that deliver real ROI.

Kentico’s story is a hard-fought one, to be sure. And like all software vendors, it has met its share of obstacles along the way. According to CEO Dominik Pinter, there were clear challenges in 2025, but the company has persevered by focusing on profitability and investing in successful customer outcomes.

Kentico CEO Dominik Pinter. Source: Kentico website

“The U.S. market, one of our key regions, was quite unstable in the first half of the year due to broader economic circumstances,” he said, reflecting on the year behind. “But we pulled through. And I’m genuinely proud of how we managed it as a team and as a company. Overall, I would say 2025 was a successful year.”

Successful indeed. When I connected recently with Kentico MVP Brian McKeiver of BizStream – a dynamic digital agency based in Michigan and a Kentico partner – he expressed an unabated optimism for the vendor's roadmap, explaining how the company has made significant strides with its AI investments and the evolution of Xperience by Kentico.

“The focus that Kentico has on AI to enable partners and customers to deliver more is fantastic,” he said. “These innovations will empower us to implement Xperience by Kentico solutions faster, smarter, and more efficiently than ever before. The demos and conversations around migration and automation had everyone in the room brimming with enthusiasm.”

As Brian noted during his talk at the Kentico Partner Connections event in Boston this past October, he sees AI not as a threat, but as a “supercharger.” As Dominik also codified in a recent interview, 2026 will undoubtedly bring pressure to accelerate AI features and innovation. His advice: stay focused on real value and build solutions that make sense.

As Kentico wraps what it calls a “transformative year” – one that saw over 100 new digital projects launched on Xperience by Kentico – it’s also marking the end of the Kentico Xperience 13 lifecycle and looking ahead. The journey to Xperience by Kentico, which started in 2023, is now awash with customer validation and demonstrable outcomes, putting wind in Kentico’s sails.

“We’d been receiving positive feedback from the market before, mostly around the direction we were heading in,” Dominik said. “This year, though, the feedback changed in a meaningful way. Partners and customers are telling us that we’ve delivered on that vision, and it’s clear we’ve moved ahead of our competitors.”

New features drive enterprise adoption

As Dominik noted, there’s still work to do from a migration perspective and moving legacy customers to Xperience by Kentico, but the shift is well underway. Additionally, they are continuing to invest in their product maturity to become a truly AI-native company. That said, he feels confident about the progress.

"This year confirmed that our transition to Xperience by Kentico was the right step,” Dominik said. “The feedback from our customers and partners showed us we’re on the right path, and I can confidently say: we did it."

From a features standpoint, Kentico has steadily enhanced its capabilities as a composable DXP designed for both marketers and developers. This has manifested in faster implementation, low-code flexibility, and scalability across industry use cases.

As mentioned, AIRA was a big part of the innovation arc this year, delivering AI-powered assistance that speeds up content creation and streamlines everyday marketing tasks. AIRA is pitched as a smart assistant that not only helps users create and optimize, but also mitigates delays and ships faster. Kentico says it can even help avoid “burnout,” something that should resonate with marketers across high-pressure enterprise teams.

What’s great about AIRA is its seamlessness and platform accessibility. As a companion, it works across your Kentico DXP, automating content on the go and providing task-specific guidance when and where you need it. No more weeding through docs when you need assistance – you can get real-time answers and take action directly from prompts within the system, from campaign metrics to email performance. It’s everything you expect from an AI copilot in your platform, and it’s secure in all the right ways and scalable on Microsoft Azure.

There’s also the introduction of Customer Journey Mapping, giving users full visibility into how people move through your funnel. Armed with this powerful insight, marketers can optimize faster by spotting drop-offs, enabling behavior-triggered personalization, and facilitating cross-channel orchestration.

Kentico also introduced enhanced Commerce capabilities, which is all about control. It unifies content, commerce, and marketing in a single platform that’s energized by AI. It promises to reduce the cognitive load by eliminating the need for multiple tools and providing a consolidated experience for users.

The benefits are clear: No more duplicated processes, excessive integrations, or painful fragmentation across your ecosystem. With Kentico, you can manage your websites, product pages, and commerce properties all from a single repo, and update content with a single click. It includes multi-currency support, dynamic product listings, and content-led product discovery.

Customer success across G2, Info-Tech platforms

Speaking of customers, Kentico recently announced several milestones, including its status as a Leader in G2’s Winter 2026 Grid Report for Digital Experience Platforms (DXP). G2 provides a well-established, industry-leading review platform that features software customer satisfaction ratings, and Kentico has delivered consistent usability scores.

A quick glance at the G2 results shows Kentico in a favorable position relative to its competitors, including Adobe and Optimizely. This includes scoring around web analytics, personalization, and other DXP-centric features. Kentico’s top scores in areas like customizable templated workflows and asset management demonstrate the impact of Xperience by Kentico on content management and multichannel marketing.

Kentico also touted glowing reports from Info-Tech SoftwareReviews, a platform that provides in-depth, experience-based software reviews and data for enterprise buyers, focusing on real user feedback about product performance, vendor support, and the overall relationship. Info-Tech helps organizations make better tech decisions using data visualizations, leveraging unique measures like its Data Quadrants and Emotional Footprints.

In back-to-back reports, Xperience by Kentico was recognized for its emotional connection and feature satisfaction, garnering a +77 Net Emotional Footprint and a Composite Score of 8.3/10 across the 2025 Emotional Footprint and Data Quadrant assessments.

Key highlights included an “Integrity” rating of +85, “Respectful Client Interactions” of 93%, “Ease of Admin” of 81%, and a “Likelihood to Recommend” of 85%. All solid metrics.

Additionally, FeaturedCustomers named Kentico a Top Performer in Enterprise Content Management Software in its Fall 2025 report, with over 1,400 verified customer references supporting the platform’s leadership in usability, scalability, and successful delivery. FeaturedCustomers is a B2B customer reference platform that helps businesses showcase their software and services through real customer stories – things like case studies, testimonials, videos – to help prospects make informed purchasing decisions.

The verdict

2025 brought a wave of opportunities and challenges, and Kentico has navigated the peaks and valleys with finesse. The transition to Xperience by Kentico has been a key milestone, and the company is embracing the shift – and its investment in AI – in a big way.

One thing that Kentico has always done exceedingly well is building and maintaining a strong partner ecosystem. Agencies are on the front line, and these channel relationships are viewed by many vendors as a critical conduit to ensuring customer success and achieving growth. It's evident that Kentico is committed to its partnership hygiene, and that's a plus when it comes to selecting competent partners for complex projects.

Despite the economic headwinds of 2025, particularly in the U.S. market, this year’s Kentico Connection events – held in multiple global markets – reinforced the partnership bonds and provided both insight and confidence surrounding the company’s AI innovation roadmap. It also affirmed the migration track and successful realization of Xperience by Kentico as the future path.

As Dominik noted in his recent interview, Kentico’s partners are helping them generate more business and grow faster than its competitors, and he attributes that to their clear strategy and effective execution. There's also been a notable shift towards proven, pre-composed solutions that are shaping SI and agency toolsets – and Kentico is growing its presence in the competitive mix.

AI holds a lot of promise, but it’s mired in complexity. At the same time, enterprises are avoiding some of the essential friction needed to deliver success – one of the key reasons why 95% of GenAI projects are failing before they reach production. This is where Kentico is establishing guardrails for success via its KentiCopilot, an initiative designed to help developers effectively and responsibly adopt AI when developing Xperience by Kentico projects. This is a hugely beneficial blend of expertise and technology that is sorely needed.

My recommendation: If you’re scoping DXPs in 2026, Kentico’s promise as a future-proof CMS and DXP platform could deliver strong ROI while reducing complexity with its single-source solution. We’re all talking about reducing the cognitive load for marketers, and Kentico is doubling down on that with high-utility AI and strong benefits for both marketers and developers with a Microsoft .NET backbone. Overall, it’s a great competitive option if you’re shopping for enterprise-grade capabilities.

From a pricing standpoint, you’ll want to engage with a Kentico expert to discuss your options, which are based on Channels, License Tiers, or SaaS options. Getting a tailored estimate is standard practice, but according to G2, Xperience by Kentico SaaS starts at $1,990 per month for a single license. An expert can also cover questions related to custom development and support.

Kentico doesn’t utilize a consumption-based SaaS model, opting instead for predictable, fixed pricing based on pre-defined levels – giving you transparency and confidence in your investment. That’s a huge check in the win column.

First stop: schedule a demo of Xperience by Kentico and see how these capabilities can deliver.

Looking for more guidance on Kentico? Talk to an expert.

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Kentico Achieves Big Milestones in 2025, Citing AI Innovation and Xperience by Kentico as Key Drivers