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 Kontent.ai
We are the Joomla to Kontent.ai 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Outdated coding standards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 Kontent.ai
Key advantages
Calling your CMS “Kontent dot ai” is a brilliant way to convince people you’ve built an AI-powered future. And to be fair, the platform does have a clean editor, strong workflow tools, and a respectable multi-channel setup.
It's perfect for the kind of company that has more infosec members than it does have devs. But calling yourself an AI platform doesn’t mean you’re built like one.
Real AI-driven CMS platforms start at the foundation with structured content, flexible modeling, real-time indexing, and an architecture that doesn’t panic the moment you try something complex. Sanity doesn’t even market itself as “AI-first,” but it’s been ahead of the curve for years. They shipped an embedding index before “AI CMS” was a pitch deck buzzword. We even built one of the first AI search tools on top of it.
So yes, Kontent.ai is great. If you want a polished interface and enterprise workflows, go for it. And if you’re dead-set on building your website there, talk to us first. We’ll walk you through it and maybe even find a better way before you spend six months discovering the limits yourself.
Intuitive content management
You shouldn’t need a week of onboarding to publish a paragraph. Kontent.ai nails this with a clean interface that doesn’t punish you for being a marketer instead of a developer.
Flexible content modeling
Build content the way your brain works. Modular, structured, reusable. No dev intervention every time marketing decides “we need one more field.”
Strong API-first architecture
The APIs are predictable, well-documented, and don’t require wild workarounds. Everything connects the way it should and developers stay happy too.
Tech stack integration
React, Vue, Angular, or whatever framework you’re obsessed with this week, Kontent.ai plays nice with all of them and keeps deployments smooth.
Advanced image transformations
You can resize, crop, and optimize visuals without leaving the CMS. Think of it as an in-house designer that doesn’t complain about aspect ratios.
Real-time collaboration
Writers, editors, and developers can work together without stepping on each other’s commits. Instant updates, fewer Slack messages, and zero “who overwrote my draft?” moments.
Common questions
Joomla to Kontent.ai migration FAQs
Answers to the most common questions about Joomla to Kontent.ai 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 Kontent.ai cost?
Kontent.ai hides pricing behind a "book a demo" wall, which is never a good sign for budget planning. Based on what we've seen across client engagements, the Developer plan is free but extremely limited (1 user, 2 languages). The Scale plan starts around $1,249/month (billed annually), and Enterprise pricing goes higher depending on API usage, content items, and seats. The real cost is in implementation. Kontent.ai requires upfront developer time to set up content models, build a custom preview pipeline (there's no native live preview), and configure workflows. Budget 4-8 weeks of developer time for initial setup on top of the subscription cost.
Is Kontent.ai worth it compared to other enterprise headless CMS platforms?
Kontent.ai does enterprise content workflows well. The role-based permissions, multi-step approvals, and content scheduling are polished. The API is predictable and well-documented. Where it falls short is flexibility. The content modelling tools are competent but not as powerful as Sanity's, and the lack of a native preview system means your team needs to build and maintain custom preview infrastructure. At similar price points, Contentful offers a larger ecosystem and Sanity offers deeper customisation. We'd recommend Kontent.ai primarily for teams already invested in the Kentico ecosystem or organisations where workflow governance is the top priority over developer experience.
What happens to image URLs when you replace assets in Kontent.ai?
This is a genuine pain point. Every time you replace an image or file in Kontent.ai, the platform generates a completely new URL. That means any hardcoded references, cached versions, or external links to the old asset break instantly. For content teams publishing at scale, this creates a maintenance burden. You need to update every place the old URL was referenced, or accept broken images. Most CMS platforms handle asset replacement by keeping the same URL and invalidating the cache. Kontent.ai's approach feels like an oversight that hasn't been fixed. If you're managing hundreds of assets, this adds real friction to daily editorial work.
What's involved in migrating away from Kontent.ai?
The content extraction itself is clean. Kontent.ai's Delivery API and Management API let you pull content items and assets programmatically. The challenges are schema translation and workflow replication. Kontent.ai's content types map to their own structure, and converting those to another CMS's schema requires careful field-by-field mapping, especially for linked items and modular content. If you've built custom workflow states and approval chains, those need to be recreated in the target platform. Plan for 6-10 weeks depending on the number of content types, locales, and workflow complexity. The API rate limit of 100 requests per second can also slow down bulk exports for large content libraries.
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