Kentico vs Drupal: Which CMS Fits Your Enterprise?

Kentico and Drupal: In-depth feature comparison

That quick-glance Kentico CMS vs Drupal comparison was the appetizer. Now, let’s move on to the main course and take a deep dive into their key features.

Content management, multisite capabilities, and editorial governance

Kentico offers a user-friendly Page Builder that relies on reusable components (widgets) to display on-page content. Before your team can use it, though, a developer has to create customizable widgets first. The Content Hub enables you to reuse and update content across channels.

Drupal stores content as nodes, which are then classified in the website’s taxonomy. Each content category is called a vocabulary, with terms as its subcategories. You can define content types (templates for different content types), fields (structural elements for each content type), and views (dynamic content presentation with filtering/sorting/etc.). Drupal CMS ships with Editoria11y built-in, which checks pages for accessibility and suggests fixes in real time.

Kentico’s editorial governance is quite flexible. You can create your own workflows and decide which page types each workflow applies to. Workflows support multiple steps; you can also define the role that can work with each step.

By default, Drupal CMS has an editorial workflow with predefined steps (Draft, Needs review, Published, Unpublished). You can change that workflow’s steps and set roles and permissions. However, Canvas pages don’t support workflows as of writing.

Kentico’s multisite capabilities are powered by the Content Hub. It allows reusing content across multiple sites, email, and headless channels. However, it has no folder hierarchy; all content is organized in a single list per workspace. That can lead to duplicate uploads and lost assets at scale.

You can also set up a Drupal multisite, define modules for each site, and separate codebases and databases. Drupal uses a multisite folder structure, which enables independent deployments and helps prevent content chaos.

Architecture, headless delivery, and integrations

When it comes to Kentico vs Drupal headless CMS capabilities, the hybrid-headless model is one of the key advantages of Kentico CMS. Kentico essentially runs traditional and API delivery in parallel.

However, you need to create endpoints yourself if you can’t use available APIs. Based on our experience in Kentico development services, that can add complexity to development.

Drupal’s core is built around a service-oriented architecture and an event-driven hook system. If you want headless delivery, you’ll have to enable the JSON:API module first. Once it’s done, API endpoints get exposed automatically.

Whether you pick Drupal or Kentico, you may need headless CMS development services to set up the headless architecture.

Kentico offers out-of-the-box integrations, including 6,000+ Zapier integrations, and lets you build your own. Custom integrations have to use .NET, since Xperience runs on this framework, and can involve:

• Creating endpoints for two-way communication with other systems
• Using Xperience API (.NET systems only)
• Using the built-in GraphQL API (for access to the data stored as headless content items)

Drupal offers common third-party integrations as community-sourced modules. Drupal’s community-contributed ecosystem is larger, but not all modules are vetted for security or compatibility. Custom integrations can be implemented with:

• GraphQL APIs (require the GraphQL module)
• REST APIs (supported out of the box)

In either case, you may need CMS integration services to develop custom modules or create custom API connectors or middleware.

Implementation, team requirements, and ongoing maintenance

You can use Xperience by Kentico as a SaaS product or deploy it to a self-hosted cloud environment:

Self-hosted Kentico: Your team handles designing and deploying the infrastructure, setting up content sync, and configuring access, scaling, and monitoring.

Kentico SaaS: Kentico is responsible for weekly hotfixes, scaling, backups, observability, content sync, and infrastructure setup and management.

Note: You have to update Kentico to keep it on a supported version. Otherwise, you won’t be able to access Kentico’s Support and Consulting.

Drupal CMS ships as a quick-start installer, dubbed Drupal CMS Launcher. It’s a desktop application you can use as a local sandbox. Drupal doesn’t offer a SaaS model, so self-hosted deployment is the only option on the table. Drupal recommends several hosting providers that offer Drupal-optimized hosting and SLAs.

You’ll need a .NET/React development team to update and customize Kentico. React is the second most popular web framework, and .NET is in sixth place. So, your talent pool is likely to be quite large.

Planning to turn to an external partner for Kentico upkeep? Check out our guide on how to choose a Kentico development partner.

Just like Kentico, Drupal requires ongoing upkeep. Drupal runs on PHP/Symfony, but its Drupal CMS offers an intuitive, beginner-friendly site builder. Overall, it’s more suitable for non-technical users compared to raw Drupal, lowering the bar for hires.

Drupal claims its ecosystem counts “100+ Certified Partners and 10k+ professionals.” The 2025 Stack Overflow survey, though, shows that only 2.2% of developers work with Drupal, making for a limited talent pool.

As for support and maintenance, Kentico offers Support and Consulting, but they are version-gated. Besides, some reviews call Kentico’s support somewhat slow. Case in point: “The timeliness of development service/support could be improved” (Gartner).

Since Drupal is an open-source project, support is run by the community via free channels (Slack, issue queues, forums). Contrary to popular belief, community-based support does work and can be quite prompt.

If you’re willing to pay extra, Drupal offers Drupal Steward. It applies zero-day protection rules at the request layer to protect your website before your team can install the actual security patch.

As for updates, keep in mind that Drupal core updates fall under your responsibility. The update UI doesn’t work on all hosting providers, however. For minor and major version updates, you’ll have to use Composer. There can be a noticeable lag between contributed-module updates and the CMS’s own release cadence, which can cause compatibility issues.

Overall, Drupal CMS will be suitable for companies with a PHP/Symfony team. Kentico will be a sounder alternative to Drupal if you already have a .NET team in-house.

Security, hosting, and scalability

On the security front, Kentico is ISO 27001-certified and follows the Secure Development Lifecycle framework. The latter means that Kentico integrates security into every stage of the development and validates feature designs against NIST/OWASP best practices.

Under the SaaS offering, Kentico fully handles backups, infrastructure security, and server configuration—and offers DDoS protection and a WAF. In self-hosted deployments, those are your responsibility; plus, you have to install all updates manually.

As Drupal CMS is self-hosted, expect to handle infrastructure security and backups on your end, too. If Drupal rolls out an emergency security patch, you’ll have to apply it manually via the update UI or Composer. Drupal Steward can protect your website in the meantime if you pay for it. You can also subscribe to an email newsletter with official security advisories to learn about new security issues; it’s free.

Scaling looks different for Kentico depending on the deployment mode:

• Kentico SaaS comes with automatic scaling included, courtesy of the vendor.
• Self-hosted Kentico makes scaling your responsibility.

Drupal CMS doesn’t have a SaaS offering, so scaling setup falls onto your shoulders. That said, Drupal’s recommended hosting providers like Acquia offer dedicated solutions with autoscaling, load balancing, CDN, advanced caching, and more.

Note: Although Drupal CMS could technically be deployed to a first-party managed cloud, that’s an exception rather than a rule.

AI capabilities

As for Kentico versus Drupal AI capabilities, both CMS have something to offer. Kentico comes with two AI capabilities to boost team productivity:

• AIRA is a marketer-facing AI agent that streamlines content-related tasks and offers in-product guidance. It's provider/model-agnostic — it can run on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Meta models — and available right out of the box, no separate LLM account necessary.
• KentiCopilot is a bring-your-own AI coding assistant that speeds up development-related tasks. It’s a bundle of plugins that let you integrate AI tools like Claude Code or GitHub Copilot via MCP servers. You’ll need a separate account for the AI tool.

Drupal CMS also offers several AI capabilities:

• Admin chatbot
• AI dashboard
• Media organization
• Alt-text generation

Out of the box, Drupal’s AI features are powered by amazee.ai at no extra cost. You can also integrate OpenAI or Anthropic models, but that requires a separate account and may create extra costs.

Ultimately, the choice boils down to the built-in vs bring-your-own decision. Drupal's AI features run on amazee.ai for free, with OpenAI or Anthropic as bring-your-own upgrades. Kentico's AIRA is bundled and model-agnostic from the start, so there's no separate account to set up if you want to switch providers.

True cost of ownership: Kentico vs Drupal over 5 years

To estimate the true cost of ownership, you need to go well beyond licensing fees and consider implementation and long-term support and maintenance costs.

Here’s our breakdown of the five-year TCO you can expect:

Overall, Kentico usually fits companies that:

• Have a .NET team and/or stack in place
• Need native developer- and marketer-facing AI tools
• Prefer vendor-managed SaaS patching over self-hosted ownership
• Have multiple brands or sites and need built-in governance

Drupal is usually a better choice for companies that:

• Have a PHP team or are ready to hire one
• Need a CMS with zero licensing fees
• Are comfortable fully owning architecture and security (with or without Drupal Steward)
• Need a large third-party module catalog or ERP/CRM flexibility

Look into other options if:

• You have a small team that can’t handle extra technical overhead at all
• You're operating in a highly specialized industry

• Migration involves transferring content models, URLs, media assets, integrations, permissions, and marketing data to the target CMS.
• There’s no automatic tool for Drupal to Kentico or Kentico to Drupal migration.
• Customization required will determine migration complexity—not page count.

The direction of migration (Drupal to Kentico or Kentico to Drupal) will impact your approach and tools used. For example, a Kentico-to-Drupal migration involves creating endpoints and using the GraphQL API to pull structured data from Kentico and feeding it into Drupal via Migrate API and source plugins.

We’ve touched only on the specifics of the Drupal/Kentico migration here. For a more thorough overview of risks and considerations, check out our step-by-step CMS migration guide.

Kentico vs Drupal for business: Expert verdict

Kentico will be a better Drupal alternative if you run multiple brands or sites and are more comfortable with a shared-responsibility SaaS model. Opt for it if you prefer the vendor to handle weekly patches, scaling, and infrastructure management.

Drupal, on the other hand, is geared toward businesses that can handle technical overhead and fully own architecture and security. Go with it if you prefer the flexibility of the open-source CMS and its large ecosystem, too.