Recently, one of our long-time customers contacted us to request guidance on selecting a new platform that will enable us to manage multiple websites currently hosted on various CMS platforms. After gathering requirements, we started doing the comparison and shared our recommendations, which we will not share in this article. This article has been written to discuss something else that many tend to forget – choice should not be made only based on the list of features. And sometimes you have to pay more attention to your company and make the proper comparisons. 

Structures of your company 

When your company needs multiple websites, for instance, for different markets or languages, it means that your team is large enough to expect a better experience from the platform they are using. Additionally, the growing complexity of your business's needs presents far more interesting challenges. 

What are the needs that you have to take into account?  

• Multiple websites managed by multiple teams through a single platform, with clearly separated data, shared only in some cases 
• Complex company structures mean that there are also possible multiple layers of content acceptance 
• The release cycle can be influenced by multiple stakeholders 
• Marketing teams are mature enough to know how to use websites to drive growth 
• Teams want to work independently and manage internally as much as possible 

Does your platform of choice allow you to fulfill all of the requirements from above?  

Digital maturity of your marketing team 

Your websites can be simple brochures, but can also be very useful marketing tools. The way you look at it depends on the level of your digital maturity.   

Marketing does not depend on one-time actions; it is a cycle of actions – you plan, execute, test, and repeat constantly with the hope of getting better results.  

Marketing also requires high-value data to calculate expected KPIs and to help understand if the run campaigns were successful or not.   

Data used by your marketing team has to be stored somewhere, and the way you manage it has to comply with existing laws like GDPR.  These are very complex challenges that often are too complex for small or immature organizations.  

To constantly improve, you also need to run tests on the data and users.  

You can buy a platform providing you with tools that help manage the data and make use of it, the question is if you are ready to use these tools?  

If you are not ready yet, but you predict that you will need all of that soon, you have to think about it in advance and select platform that gives you the right tools from the start or can be easily extended in the future – and by ‘easy’ I understand available module or license extension not integration with external 3^rd party systems that will be another large and expensive project for your company (that you most likely do not have budget for).  

Does your platform give you an option to quickly change it from only CMS into a real DXP? 

Overall, a better experience of data management and quick delivery 

When you are facing a challenge of migration from a single platform or multiple platforms to a newer one, your expectation should always be to improve what you had before. You should expect a better experience for your team when they are working on daily tasks like adding new pages to the website or adding, for instance, personalization for defined segments of customers you are dealing with. All of that has to be as simple as possible, provide as much support as necessary, and as quickly as possible, to move your business.  

You will need to have visual editors, comprehensive reports, and workflows to streamline the work. Data and changes should be visible in real-time and should be available from the system you are familiar with, because scattered data is not something that is friendly for your team.  

Does your platform of choice give you all of that?  

Final thoughts 

You probably see now how many layered and complex considerations have to be taken into account, and that the final choice should never be taken based only on the list of features – unless you know what you are doing. For the same reason, I believe that platforms from the title should not be compared if your company and you did the homework right.  

Umbraco is a CMS platform, while Xperience by Kentico is a DXP platform. These two groups are very different, but they can be treated as similar when companies expect only content management capabilities to be available. And these companies can be focused on content because of the three reasons: 

• they are not ready yet to focus on using the website as a marketing tool or  
• they know they should be doing that, but they leave it for later, which may never come 
• they consciously focus only on the content because, in the long run, they do not see any reason to use the website to learn about customers and provide them with what they expect (btw. this is the case when the comparison of Umbraco and XbK makes some sense) 

Either way, I hope that with this article, I have helped you change the way you look at the platforms, so that future comparisons will be made with more factors in mind.