Case Study
View Case StudyTray.ai
Migrating hundreds of thousands of pages, re-platforming and extending for the leading composable AI integration platform
From Joomla to Kentico
We are the Joomla to Kentico migration experts
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Challenges with Joomla
Key pain points
Joomla sits in the same category as WordPress, except somehow even harder to explain to anyone under 40. If your C-suite is filled with boomers who think “PHP developer” is still a personality type, Joomla will make them feel right at home. You might also have a vested interest in making your hosting provider very rich, because nothing about this platform is light, modern, or low-maintenance.
The dev experience still feels trapped in a pre-composer, pre-type-hints era. Migrations are a genuine horror story: extensions break, templates implode, and you’ll often rebuild the whole site because Joomla decided versioning should be a personality test. The community is smaller, the documentation is hit-and-miss, and the admin panel feels like a UI from a government portal that accidentally became a CMS. Performance on shared hosting is questionable at best, workflow is clunky, and there is barely any modern DX. But if you really, truly want Joomla… we’ll point you to another agency or just sit down with us for half an hour and we'll talk you out of your biggest digital regret.
Steep learning curve
Joomla makes even simple tasks feel like you’re onboarding into a new corporate ERP system. If you’re not already fluent in its quirks, prepare to lose a weekend (or three).
Outdated coding standards
Still clinging to older PHP conventions, missing modern practices, and generally stuck in a time capsule. If you enjoy fighting your own tools, you’ll love it.
Complex migration process
Upgrading versions feels less like an update and more like a full-blown rebuild. Random extensions break, templates combust, and you’re left questioning your career choices.
Extension compatibility issues
Half the ecosystem works… depending on your version, your template, the time of day, and whether Mercury is in retrograde. Reliability is not its strong suit.
Limited template selection
Unless you’re aiming for “government website from 2011,” the design ecosystem doesn’t give you much to work with.
Interface complexity barriers
The admin panel still feels like an escape room puzzle. Everything is technically there, but actually finding or using it is another story.
Benefits of Kentico
Key advantages
If Corporate Memphis art, dashboards, and spreadsheets are what you need, Kentico might be your happy place. The interface feels like Microsoft Office; that is, it is familiar, editor-friendly, and hard to break. And unlike platforms that need 14 plugins and a prayer, Kentico ships with the whole toolkit. It has marketing automation, e-commerce, workflows, multisite, multilingual, and the entire lot.
It scales well, handles heavy enterprise workloads, and integrates cleanly through APIs. But it is not the right fit for tiny brochure sites, but for large organizations that want everything under one roof, it’s a serious contender. If you’re unsure whether you really need the full armoury, send it our way and we’ll tell you if you’re ready for Kentico or if you’re just buying a tank to deliver pizza.
User-friendly interface
Kentico’s UI feels familiar with “Office toolbar,” like functions, rather than “developer terminals.” Editors can publish, schedule, and update content without needing a developer on standby.
Built in tools
You don’t need to glue together 12 plugins just to run campaigns or sell products. Kentico ships with automation, personalization, analytics, and e-commerce baked in.
Flexible API and extensibility options
If your team speaks .NET, Kentico supports it. Its APIs and integration options make it easier to connect CRMs, ERPs, BI tools, and custom services without duct-tape engineering.
Workflow and role management system
It has multiple approvers, granular permissions, and strict publishing rules. Legal, marketing, and IT can all sign off without stepping on each other.
Fast onboarding + safe staging
Training is quick, publishing is simple, and staging environments keep mistakes from going live. Teams can work confidently without “oops, wrong button” moments.
Headless-ready
If you want speed, security, and headless flexibility, Kentico delivers. Content moves fast, scales well, and supports multi-site or multilingual setups without falling over.
Common questions
Joomla to Kentico migration FAQs
Answers to the most common questions about Joomla to Kentico migration
How much does it cost to migrate from Joomla to a modern CMS?
For a typical Joomla site with 500 to 2,000 pages, expect $15,000 to $60,000 depending on complexity. The content extraction itself is manageable since Joomla uses MySQL, but the real cost is rebuilding custom extensions, templates, and workflows in a modern stack. Most Joomla sites have accumulated years of plugins that need equivalents or replacements. We've found the migration typically pays for itself within 12 months through reduced hosting costs, faster page loads, and eliminated maintenance overhead from outdated PHP dependencies.
How long does a Joomla migration take?
Plan for 6 to 12 weeks for a full migration. Content extraction from Joomla's MySQL database takes a few days. The bulk of the timeline goes toward rebuilding your frontend, replacing extension functionality, and migrating SEO equity (URLs, redirects, metadata). Joomla's version upgrade issues actually work in your favour here. If upgrading between Joomla versions already means a near-rebuild, you might as well migrate to a platform that won't put you through the same pain again in 3 years. We handle the full process including 301 redirect mapping so you don't lose search rankings.
Why are companies finally leaving Joomla?
Performance and developer availability. Joomla sites on shared hosting consistently score poorly on Core Web Vitals, which directly hurts search rankings. Finding developers who still want to work with Joomla's older PHP conventions is getting harder and more expensive every year. The extension ecosystem is shrinking as maintainers move on to other platforms. Companies that delayed migration are now facing a compounding problem where the longer they wait, the fewer resources exist to help them. High cost-per-click on "Joomla migration" search terms tells you everything about how urgently companies want out.
How much does a Kentico migration typically cost?
Kentico migrations are enterprise-scale projects. For a site with 1,000 to 10,000 pages, expect the migration itself to run 8 to 16 weeks of development time. The cost depends on how deeply you've customised Kentico's marketing automation, e-commerce, and workflow features. Simple content-only migrations are faster, but most Kentico installations have years of custom .NET logic that needs to be rebuilt or replaced. We've seen total migration budgets range from $30,000 to $150,000 depending on scope, which still often pays for itself within 18 months through reduced licensing and maintenance costs.
Why are companies migrating away from Kentico?
Licensing costs are the initial trigger for most conversations we have. Kentico's annual fees add up fast, especially when you include maintenance, hosting, and the cost of .NET developers to keep it running. But the deeper issue is agility. Major version upgrades introduce breaking changes that can destabilise sites with years of custom logic. The admin UI feels dated as projects scale. Multi-tenant setups carry real risk since one bad customisation can take down every site in the cluster. Teams eventually decide the operational overhead isn't worth it.
What's the biggest challenge when migrating from Kentico?
Untangling the all-in-one features. Kentico bundles marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, workflows, and content management into one platform. When you migrate away, each of those capabilities needs a new home. Content goes to your new CMS, email automation might move to a tool like Resend or Customer.io, and e-commerce might need a dedicated platform. We map out every feature your team actually uses before writing a single migration script, because the biggest risk is discovering a dependency mid-project that nobody documented.
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