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Kentico Xperience 13 End of Life: What you need to know

  • Blog
  • 05 March
  • 7 mins
  • Dani Barker

Kentico Xperience 13 is scheduled to reach its official End of Life (EOL) on 31st December 2026. While your site won't suddenly stop working, failing to prepare for EOL could expose your organisation to mounting risks over time. 

Whether you're a marketing team dependent on agility, an IT leader focused on long-term maintainability, or a digital transformation manager overseeing multi-year roadmaps – this guide is designed to help you plan your next move with clarity and confidence. 

What does EOL mean for Kentico Xperience 13?

When Kentico Xperience 13 reaches EOL, it will no longer receive:

  • Security patches
  • Bug fixes
  • Performance updates
  • Official vendor support

Your site may still run but over time, the cost, risk, and technical debt will rise. Compatibility issues with modern browsers, hosting environments, and third-party tools will creep in. Support from agencies and partners will become limited. You’ll be running on borrowed time. 

The risks of running an unsupported version

Let’s break down the real-world impact of staying on Kentico Xperience 13 past 2026: 

  • No official support: You won’t be able to access Kentico’s support team for help resolving bugs or performance issues.
  • No security patches: Ongoing vulnerabilities may emerge, putting your data and users at risk – especially if your website handles payments or personal information.
  • Compatibility issues: As third-party tools, APIs, and browser technologies evolve, older Kentico versions may struggle to keep up, affecting site performance and integrations.
  • Reduced innovation and flexibility: You’ll miss out on the faster innovation cycle of Xperience by Kentico, including hybrid content delivery, headless architecture, and SaaS hosting models.
  • Regulatory and compliance gaps: Unsupported software may breach compliance requirements – especially for organisations operating in sectors such as finance, education, healthcare, or government. 

The benefits of upgrading to Xperience by Kentico

Kentico’s latest platform, Xperience by Kentico, is a modern, modular Digital Experience Platform (DXP) built for long-term agility, scalability, and innovation.

What you’ll gain:

  • Cloud-first architecture: Run your site via SaaS, PaaS, or your own infrastructure with flexible options for any IT strategy.
  • Hybrid headless delivery: Go headless where needed, while retaining editorial flexibility for marketers and content teams.
  • Faster time-to-market: The modular architecture and streamlined workflows reduce technical bottlenecks and accelerate campaign launches.
  • Built-in personalisation, analytics and automation: Empower your marketing team with out-of-the-box tools for segmentation, scoring, and user journey tracking.
  • Developer-first productivity tools: Support for CI/CD, modern DevOps pipelines, and enhanced integration with Git – helping your developers work faster and smarter.
  • Universal Migration Toolkit: Reduce complexity when migrating content, media, and key configurations from Kentico 13 to the new platform.

Native AI built directly into the platform: AIRA

Xperience by Kentico includes AIRA, a native, Azure-powered AI agent embedded directly within the back office. Unlike disconnected AI plugins or external tools, AIRA understands your content structure and customer data to help marketers create, optimise, analyse, and execute all without leaving the platform. Designed as part of the AIRA Agentic Marketing Suite, it provides structured AI support across planning, execution, optimisation, and reporting to reduce manual workload and ensuring consistent brand output.

What AIRA enables:

  • AI-assisted content creation that writes on-brand, localised content tailored to tone and context
  • Real-time content optimisation with SEO and GEO recommendations
  • Automatic generation of content variations for different formats, regions, and channels
  • One-click translation of pages, emails, and content items with consistent terminology
  • Automated image resizing, cropping, tagging, and format optimisation for multichannel use
  • Data-driven insights to spot trends, detect anomalies, and uncover performance friction points
  • A built-in chat interface to analyse metrics, execute actions, and complete platform tasks instantly
  • Context-aware AI agents that support campaign planning, execution, and reporting
  • Enterprise-grade security suitable for regulated and complex environments

By embedding AI natively within the CMS and DXP, AIRA scales your marketing output without scaling your workload.

Where to start

Upgrading from Kentico Xperience 13 requires careful planning, stakeholder alignment, and technical execution. With End of Life looming at the end of 2026, organisations that haven’t yet begun preparations should be moving now. If you’re still evaluating your approach, the priority should be establishing clarity — understanding your current platform footprint and defining future requirements.

At this stage, the priority extends beyond upgrading to ensuring operational continuity, maintaining security, and ensuring your next platform supports the next five to seven years of digital growth.

How Cantarus can help

Our proven approach ensures your upgrade doesn’t just meet technical requirements but aligns with your wider digital goals:

  • Discovery and audit: We assess your existing platform, infrastructure, and business requirements to ensure the upgrade supports your future ambitions.
  • Strategic roadmapping: We co-create a phased roadmap that aligns with your budget, timelines, and digital strategy – whether that’s a direct upgrade or broader replatform.
  • Migration and rebuild: Our Kentico-certified developers manage the full upgrade, delivering a high-performance platform optimised for your audience and internal teams. Alongside this, our certified marketers are on hand to support content migration and optimisation — ensuring pages are restructured to make the best use of page components, enhance user experience, and improve overall engagement rather than simply being lifted and shifted.

Ready to plan your next step?

Whether you need a high-level roadmap, a technical audit, or full upgrade support, the first step is understanding your options and defining the right path forward for your organisation. Speak to our consultants to start planning your move to Xperience by Kentico.

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