Cheap, affordable or expensive?

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Is Kentico CMS cheap, affordable or expensive? What is your opinion?
When we talk to our clients about Kentico CMS pricing, we get very different answers. Some clients say something like "we can't afford it" or "your CMS is overpriced". On the other hand some clients say "I can't believe you're selling this product at such a low price."

I think the biggest issue here is that people have no idea what a CMS should cost. Should it be $100 or $100,000? If you're buying a new car, you have quite a good idea of what a common car costs and you understand why you may pay twice as much for a BMW or Mercedes car of the same class and you know whether you need a small car or a truck. However, when it comes to CMS, it's very difficult to compare. There are thousands of CMS systems with very different architecture and features. Their price ranges from free to millions of dollars. What should you choose? And is there a real return on investment?


This leaves the buyers with lots of questions. And I understand that people may have very different feelings when they see the price of Kentico CMS. We found out that this feeling doesn't depend on the country or company size. It's mostly a question of budget and of the knowledge of the CMS market. People who had a chance to work with several CMS solutions throughout their career usually say that Kentico provides an excellent value for their money.

What is your opinion? Is Kentico CMS cheap or expensive? Would you like to see any changes in our prices, editions or licensing schema?

We will appreciate if you vote in this poll or post your comment below!


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Petr Palas

I'm the founder and CEO of Kentico. I write about Kentico, WCM, CXM, digital marketing and related technologies.

Comments

Petr Palas commented on

Tony, thank you for your feedback. Please find my explanation in my comment at http://devnet.kentico.com/Blogs/Petr-Palas/November-2008/Planned-Changes-in-Kentico-CMS-Licensing.aspx.

Tony commented on

I just got new licence prices for version 4.0 and I must say I m not happy. The price it was with version 3.x was affordable. The bigest minus is that E-commerce Edition will not be longer available for the cost of 560$ just professional for double price of 1000$. That is a remarkable difference. I agree with the post of REC that Kentico sholud have some basic low-cost licence for clients who don't need thousands of features. Kentico is excellent CMS, no doubt the best solution I have ever worked with but with this price is slightly going off my budget for the most of my projects.

kentico_petrp commented on

To Keith: Thank you for your kind words. We keep improving the documentation with every version and we will try to implement your suggestions in the next versions.

Keith Summers commented on

I purchased one enterprise license because this is the minumum license required for content staging and multiple languages. Over all, the product is priced about right. They have some challenges to overcome in documentation. I perfer to have more examples, warning, best practice recommendations, etc. Documents should also be divided into several cognative levels with the most technical level having a full index so you can find what you need more quickly.

If they can keep up their customer service support to over-come their documentation limitations -- the product is a good deal and it is correctly designed with respect to their goals of a content management system. I'm happy with my purchase.

kentico_petrp commented on

To karim and REC: Thank you for your suggestion. We will consider that for future.

REC commented on

I think the price is just right for medium businesses. Great product and excellent support and feedback.

However, I agree that there should also be a low-cost option, that would also allow custom branding, for webdesigners to offer to their clients who need very simple CMS solutions for very small websites (limit on pages etc).

karim-okaconsult commented on

I agree with Dani on this one, I would love to see something at the price point of the now discontinued Standard Edition that allows for custom branding. Even just allowing custom branding and having the exact feature set of the free edition at the $500 US price point would allow some of my low priced clients to get on this platform and have the ability to upgrade if they need more functionality. You would be surprised how many clients and more so designers that complain about incorporating the cms logo in their site design.

kentico_petrp commented on

To Dani: Could you please provide more details on what features and at what price would be interesting for you as a new "Express" edition? Thanks!

kentico_petrp commented on

To Ralph: Thank you for your kind words!

kentico_petrp commented on

To JimS: I understand your point. Actually, that's because Kentico CMS is primarily focused on content management - if we give away 15/15, most of our clients will not have a reason to buy a higher edition since most of them currently don't build web sites with 20 blogs/forums. Still, we will reconsider this later as Kentico adds more community features in the nearest versions which will give us more space of the differentiation of the editions.

Dani commented on

I think the price is right, but there needs to be another edition with some limitation on functionality.
Maybe like the express edition but with custom branding.

ralph commented on

Why do I think the price is just right?

With a full server edition you can leverage the cost of the CMS with the first three clients. That is for most small and medium sized web companies a feasable target. Also with three web sites running the cost for upgrades should be covered.

Now even if you add your learning curve to fully understand this product, you can become profitable using Kentico after year 1. That is a lot more diificult with products ranging from 10K-25K per server license.

And BTW, the support only that Kentico is providing is worth this money!

JimS commented on

Have not yet explored the full wealth of it's functionality but I find it well priced and affordable for biz usage. I just feel that "3 Forums / 1 Blog" is a bit low for the Free Edition, compared for example to CommunityServer Express Edition which allows for 15/15.