The “new version” that is a new product

If your site runs on an older Kentico — the Portal Engine, or Kentico Xperience 13 and earlier — the route forward is to Xperience by Kentico. The naming makes this sound like a continuation of the same product. It is not. Xperience by Kentico is a new product built on modern .NET, and moving to it is a migration and a rebuild, not an in-place upgrade.

The clearest evidence of this comes from Kentico itself: rather than an upgrade button, it provides dedicated migration tools to export content from older Kentico versions and import it into the new platform. When a vendor ships a tool to move your data across, rather than a path to upgrade in place, that tells you what kind of move you are facing.

Why it is a new build, not an upgrade

Older Kentico and Xperience by Kentico are built differently. The new platform is built on modern .NET and a different development model from the Portal Engine approach that many long-standing Kentico sites use. Because of that, the templates, custom code, controls and integrations built for the old platform do not carry over. They are rebuilt for the new one. The content and structured data can be migrated with Kentico’s tooling, but the site around them is, in practice, a new build.

So the decision is not “shall we upgrade Kentico.” It is “shall we rebuild the site on the new platform and migrate our content across.” That is a project-sized decision, and framing it correctly from the start prevents the unpleasant surprise of discovering mid-way that the “upgrade” was a build all along.

The cost of staying on older Kentico

An older Kentico site keeps working, which is why the move gets deferred. But the older versions, and especially the Portal Engine model, are the past of the product. The platform’s development, its new features and its long-term support are all on the Xperience by Kentico side. Sites left on the old model sit on technology that is ageing out, with a shrinking pool of developers who know it well and a growing distance from anything current.

For a site central to how the business operates or how customers engage, that is a risk that compounds quietly — until a security issue, an integration need, or a missing skill set forces the move on someone else’s timetable rather than yours.

The opportunity the rebuild creates

Because the move is a rebuild, you are not bound to reproduce the old site. This is the moment to decide what the site should do now, which content genuinely needs to migrate, and which custom functionality was load-bearing versus simply inherited. A migration planned around those questions delivers a cleaner, more maintainable platform. A migration that recreates the old site faithfully spends the budget carrying old decisions forward.

It is also a fair moment to ask whether Xperience by Kentico is the right destination or whether the wider platform market should be considered — though for organisations already invested in the Kentico ecosystem, staying within it is often the pragmatic choice.

What to do now

Start with an assessment: the version you are on, the custom functionality and integrations the site depends on, the content that must migrate, and where the business is heading. That turns “we need to move off old Kentico” into a defined, costable piece of work, and an independent view of it keeps the scope honest against whoever would carry out the build.

If you are on an older Kentico or the Portal Engine, the move to Xperience by Kentico is a rebuild — better planned deliberately than forced later. We will work out what your site genuinely needs to make the move.

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