The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management (WCM) 2018

The Quadrant provides an overview of leaders in WCM solutions, positioning them in one of four sectors; niche players, visionaries, challengers and leaders. Companies who are seriously looking at WCM systems featured in Gartner’s Quadrant will typically invest upwards of £50k. For the top WCM system performers (Leaders) in the Quadrant, companies can invest as much as £500k. 

In this blog, we will look at three of our favourite .NET solutions. We will find out how they have fared in this year’s Quadrant, discuss how this year's Quadrant has changed from last years and briefly look at some of the new contenders. 

Kentico only featured in the Quadrant a few years ago, they continue in a position of strength and maintain their position with the key challengers. Gartner identified a number of factors leading to their rating of Kentico, including the strength of the Kentico Enterprise Marketing Solution (EMS).  

Kentico EMS offers a robust platform, delivering advanced features such as personalisation and segmentation, contact management and marketing automation.  

Gartner also identifies Kentico’s value for organisations who are looking for a more modest investment but still want many of the features that an enterprise level WCM offer. 

We agree. In our opinion, organisations looking for a competent WCM at a price that’s hard to match for the value offered, Kentico is hard to beat. With the base license cost starting from £3,599 going up to £16,199 for the Enterprise Marketing System (EMS) Kentico offers medium-sized organisations an affordable price compared to the market leaders. 

Kentico’s 12th major annual version release is due in the next few months. We expect Kentico to secure and strengthen its position in the Quadrant. Furthermore, their headless offering (Kentico Cloud) continues to go from strength to strength in a fairly new sector. 

Kentico continues to be ours and our clients CMS of choice for the majority of our projects, seeing recent launches of sites for Markel and Efficiency North, with more on the way. 

Since making the transition from Sitefinity, Progress continues to dominate the challengers sector of the quadrant. Gartner puts this continued success down to a combination of their good reputation and the system's ease of deployment. 

Quba has developed many sites using the Sitefinity Content Management System (CMS) and have seen the product mature and develop into the well-rounded WCM solution that it is today. Investment in the product by the parent company Progress is likely to see further strengthening of its position, with the possibility of making it into the leader's sector in the coming years.   

That said, Gartner identify some areas of caution. One area is the availability of the partner network which they consider to be less developed than many of their competitors. In our experience, some of their competitors have better supported partner networks however, it appears to be something they're addressing. 

Similar to Kentico, Progress has been investing heavily in their cloud services, the Digital Experience Cloud. This is a trend we expect to see for all WCM vendors, as customers increasingly look for managed services, scalability and pricing models that offer more flexibility.  

Sitecore continues to dominate the top spot along with Adobe as market leaders. 

Gartner put this down to several factors; it’s appeal as an enterprise WCM solution to both medium enterprises and large corporates looking for a no-compromise solution with “business-logic-level capabilities”. The addition of Sitecore’s commerce engine also adds to the appeal. 

Sitecore offers a proven headless solution for companies looking at engaging experiences across multiple channels. Coupled with its personalisation capabilities and business logic capabilities, it makes for a compelling package. 

The main barrier for SME’s in adopting Sitecore is cost. It’s expensive compared to Kentico and Progress Sitefinity. This may not put off larger organisations with deep pockets, but medium-sized enterprises will certainly have to look carefully at the product features to assess whether they really need or will even use all the enterprise features Sitecore offers. 

Another factor when selecting Sitecore is the time it takes to get to market. It has a reputation for lengthy implementation and deployment times, whilst partner support in the past has been below industry par. Gartner states that these issues are being addressed, but still has work to do this area.  

Other observations 

There are a host of other solutions to make this year’s list, both .Net based and open source solutions.  

What’s apparent from this year’s quadrant is that there has been little change amongst the market leaders, with the exception of OpenText moving into this space and Episerver strengthening their position in the top four. 

This segment is particularly competitive; for larger organisations looking to make a significant investment we recommend looking closely at not just what you are buying into today, but the strategic direction in which the vendor is taking their product and roadmap over the next few years. 

At the lower end of the segment, we see GX Software has been dropped. WP Engine has managed to make its debut on this years due to its large community of loyal users and a comprehensive set of user-friendly tools.  

If WP Engine was judged on the number of deployments then it would be in the leader's segment but it’s not and whilst popular it’s still treated with caution by those organisations looking for a WCM solution. 

In summary, when considering a WCM solution the Gartner Magic Quadrant is an invaluable guide in qualifying technology solutions that fit the needs of organisations across all sectors and with a diversity of needs. It should be used as a starting point in the selection process as a precursor to more detailed research.    

To download the full report from the Kentico website, click here.

If you would like to discuss an existing WCM solution or a new project then we are here to help, call Ryan on 01142 797 779 or email us at enquiries@quba.co.uk