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In this article, I am going to explain – via some background and historical context before moving onto a number of key reasons – why moving from DNN (Platform or Evoq editions) to a modern CMS or DXP for your website is likely already well overdue for your organisation.
DNN was originally developed by noted open-source guru (and all-round nice guy I’m privileged to have met on several occasions) Shaun Walker from the IBuySpy portal. IBuySpy was a .NET reference application released by Microsoft in 2001 to showcase the capabilities of the then-new .NET Framework. Launched to replace the venerable Active Server Pages (now typically referred to as ‘Classic ASP’) technology, the .NET Framework represented a giant leap forward for Microsoft and developers working with its technology.
By 2009, DotNetNuke (now DNN) was recognised as the leading .NET-based open-source CMS. The same year, Cantarus became a DNN Gold Partner and, between 2012 and 2017, was indisputably the world’s leading DNN specialist, winning DNN Corp.’s global DNN Partner of the Year award every year.
During the 2010s, and with the release of commercially licensed editions of the software, DNN grew to over 2,000 paying clients. During that time, Cantarus was responsible for some of the world’s largest deployments of DNN, perhaps most notably to Europe’s largest sports retailer, Sports Direct (now Frasers Group).
In 2017, DNN Corp. was acquired by ESW Capital, who did the open-source community a service by transferring stewardship of the open-source project to the .NET Foundation.
For those wanting more details, there’s a great history of the project, as well as the people and company behind it on Wikipedia here.
In the latter years of the 2010s, our team became increasingly of the opinion that the DNN CMS was not keeping up with the pace of change in the CMS (and DXP –see here for an explanation of the difference between the two) space.
Consequently, we reviewed the CMS and DXP market in depth to choose best-of-breed products upon which we could build exceptional digital experiences for our clients over the next decade. We chose Umbraco and Kentico and rapidly pivoted to build our business around these market-leading products. Much as I get misty-eyed when I think of the golden days of DNN and remain thankful for the enormous contribution it made to the growth of Cantarus, I cover below the main reasons you should consider moving to modern platforms such as those mentioned above if you’re still using DNN today.
By the late 2010s, DNN was still using Microsoft Web Forms technology, originally released in 2002. Attempts had been made to modernise the tech stack with somewhat clunky support for Model View Controller (MVC) and Single Page Applications (SPA), but DNN continued to be centred on increasingly outdated technology.
I remember attending various DNN conferences in Europe and the USA in the late 2010s when there was much excitement about DNN being redeveloped with Microsoft’s then-new ASP.NET Core technology. Such work was daunting in its scope but essential, in my opinion, if DNN was to remain relevant to both developers and end-users.
Sadly, the move to the new .NET world never happened, and DNN remains based on increasingly antiquated technology to this day. While that may not seem immediately relevant to business users and end-users, the reality is that DNN misses many of the benefits delivered through the ongoing development of the Microsoft tech stack and surrounding ecosystem.
Developers rarely wish to develop on outdated technology. In this market, developers can pick and choose their roles, making recruitment and retention for DNN work difficult. Similarly, third-party vendors gradually drop backwards compatibility with their own products due to the costs involved. This leaves many organisations relying on DNN in a position where development skills and compatible products are ever harder to access.
DNN offered a superb content management experience in its time, particularly via the commercially licensed editions. For in-page WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) content editing, it was outstanding and remains competitive to this day.
However, things have moved on; structured content and headless capabilities are expected in today’s digital landscape as digital experiences span multiple channels, and content must be dynamically repurposed. DNN had a stab at this with Liquid Content, but based on our experience with the feature, we don’t feel it measures up to more modern, purpose-built alternatives.
Put simply, if you want the best content management experience for your editors, DNN is no longer competitive except in some increasingly uncommon scenarios.
DNN’s use of outdated technology generally leads to worse like-for-like performance – and greater hosting overheads and costs – when compared to its peers. That also has an impact on energy utilisation, and thereby our planet. Umbraco has a particularly strong focus on ensuring websites built using its content management system have a minimal impact on the environment; you can read about their sustainability activities here.
Further, DNN generally does not play well with the latest cloud hosting architectures the way cloud-native applications do. For example, Umbraco’s Azure-based Umbraco Cloud offering is light-years ahead of any DNN hosting solution we’re aware of, particularly when it comes to making it easy for developers to rapidly develop, test and deploy code.
Ensuring websites are accessible to as large an audience as possible is both the right thing to do and good business sense. Accessibility really is a core requirement rather than a ‘nice to have’.
As DNN is still based on legacy Microsoft .NET technology (Web Forms), and the CMS editing environment is intertwined with the presentation logic (i.e. the front-end experience for website visitors), it is inherently difficult to ensure even WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards as developers do not have full control over the presentation markup to ensure the necessary guidance on WCAG can be implemented (such as fully-semantic HTML and ARIA tags).
Modern DXP platforms, such as Umbraco and Kentico, separate the front-end presentation markup from the back-office CMS, ensuring that developers and editors can have full control over the HTML markup to ensure full adherence to accessibility guidelines can be achieved.
DNN has always enjoyed an excellent reputation for security – it was used by the US Department of Defense, after all! – and Cantarus made a significant contribution to the DNN community in this area back in 2018 in the form of PolyDeploy. In short, we developed PolyDeploy in response to a security vulnerability related to the way DNN supported the installation of multiple modules, something that was a common use case for developers. PolyDeploy rapidly became the de facto standard for bulk module installation, and we subsequently approved it being rolled into the DNN open-source core.
Unfortunately, as technology ages, more vulnerabilities are almost inevitably discovered, and the issue of issuing security updates for older technology can become more serious. This needs to be considered in a risk assessment when using any technology.
The history of DNN security vulnerabilities is interesting:
Note: As of May 2025, DNN released a tranche of bug fixes and additional patches. [Added Jul-25]
A clean installation of the latest version of DNN (v9.13.7 as of December 17th 2024) has no known security vulnerabilities. However, I would have two concerns:
DNN installations that have been upgraded from older versions over time can be difficult to entirely clean of certain vulnerabilities; that has been improved with more recent releases which make removing legacy (and vulnerable) components easier.
For organisations using the latest version of DNN, there is no reason to believe it is vulnerable. However, for those on older versions, please check carefully that your installation is secure.
In simple terms, most organisations using DNN should be looking to migrate to other CMS or DXP solutions.
On the Microsoft tech stack, the major players tend to be the likes of Umbraco, Kentico, Sitefinity and Sitecore. Common LAMP-stack options include WordPress and Drupal. The new generation of pure headless content players include Contentful, Contentstack, Strapi, Umbraco Heartcore and Kontent.ai.
Given our history with DNN and current status as a Platinum Partner of Umbraco, Silver Kentico Partner, and others, Cantarus is uniquely placed globally to advise on and assist with migrations away from DNN. Please do get in touch if you’d like to discuss your requirements.
This article was originally published in November 2023 and was updated in July 2025 to reflect the latest DNN bug fixes and ensure accuracy and relevancy.
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