When we speak to clients, especially mid-sized to large businesses, we generally end up at a crossroad of choosing between two content management systems; Kentico and WordPress. Since we are a digital marketing agency we stress the importance of your website being used as an extension of your business development and customer service efforts. It’s not enough for your site to be a pretty brochure. It’s a an active member of your marketing team providing qualified leads, marketing automation and assisting in your content marketing strategy.

So, how do we help enterprise level organization select the right CMS? We start by breaking down their business objectives and their day to day marketing tasks. From there we determine how their website will need to function for them. Before we dive too deep there are a few fundamental differences between the two content management systems we should cover.

Open VS Closed Source, Plugins and Security

Kentico is a secure closed source platform that offers add ons for most of the popular content management and marketing software that’s out. Out of the box you get over 70 modules fully integrated. Also, with the right web development skills you can integrate tools like Salesforce.com, Pardot, Marketo and more. Kentico is known for its customization and scalability options. However Kentico does not offer the vast development community and user-created plugin options you get with an open source platform like WordPress. WordPress focuses on content creation and the publishing workflow. Think of it as a CMS built by bloggers. Because of this you get a strong and engaged community with thousands of 3rd party extensions and add-ons. This does cause security and spam issues. Kentico is inherently more secure than WordPress and is thoroughly tested for security flaws.

Pricing and End-user Experience

Wordpress is very user friendly. Anyone can get started publishing content fairly quickly as that’s the main focus of the platform. Easily applied basic themes can get you a clean responsive web design. Initially WordPress open-source CMS is free. But, the marketer’s needs are usually handled by 3rd party add-ons. It’s hard to gauge a price for WordPress once you start adding plug-ins. (Checkout our pricing estimates for 1-3 years of maintaining your site) Most of the advanced functionality is the work of the community without proper guarantees and support and release notices. Kentico isn’t necessarily the first choice for a beginner or small company that simply needs a static website. However if you have the ability to outsource to seasoned developers and designers, Kentico makes deep content customization easy and is the right choice for large websites. Kentico comes with a clear pricing structure where the client knows the license and maintenance fees upfront as well as 24/7 customer service.

Choosing between Kentico and WordPress Based on Business Objectives.

Lead Generation

Hands down Kentico’s built in marketing automation is the choice here. The CMS out of the box offers email campaign management, persona creation and tagging, content personalization, lead scoring, A/B testing, ecommerce features and cross-site contact profile management. You can easily send and manage coupon codes, test landing pages, homepage banners and email subject lines. Track who’s engaging with what on your site and assign them a lead score based on their activity as well as send the timely personalized communications. Kentico allows you to identify and nurture leads and send only the right ones to your sales team.

Creating Awareness

As we mentioned before, WordPress operates from a content publishing perspective. If your business goal is to create awareness Yoast SEO plugin on WordPress is a superior tool that allows you to optimize every piece of content you publish for search engines. You can expect to avoid annoying duplicate content errors because it allows you to set canonical URLs. Another cool feature is the Internal linking suggestions and the ability to preview your post on Google, Facebook and Twitter. WordPress also offers Coschedule All-In-One Content Marketing Calendar. Content publishing and social media calendars are a breeze with this tool.

To compare more Kentico and WordPress features check out our comparison chart. We hope this was helpful in your search for the right enterprise marketing software solution for your business.