Storyblok vs Kentico: A Technical Comparison

Why choose Storyblok?

Storyblok is built as a native headless CMS, while Xperience by Kentico is a DXP that combines traditional and headless (hybrid) CMS capabilities. Storyblok was built as a headless CMS and offers robust APIs, tooling, and some of the most bleeding-edge features within the CMS space.

• Storyblok Strata adds a layer of semantic meaning to your content, making it AI-ready and opening the door to new possibilities.
• Storyblok Flowmotion, built on top of n8n, supports workflow automations with 300+ third-party integrations.

Storyblok also offers a free tier and a 45-day trial of the Growth Plus plan for POCs and MVPs, and different pricing plans to fit your team’s needs.

Xperience by Kentico is a full DXP that bundles a CMS, personalization, e-commerce, and hosting. Unlike pure headless solutions, Kentico uses a hybrid CMS model that merges traditional and headless approaches. The platform requires ASP.NET Core knowledge and involves a more complex setup, including local instance installation. Kentico offers a 30-day free trial rather than a free tier.

Storyblok Out-of-the-Box (OOTB) offerings

• Visual Editor included in all plans, with drag-and-drop layout editing and real-time preview.
• Modular content blocks that mirror frontend components and support deep nesting.
• Built-in localization and multi-language content handling.
• Built-in workflow steps and workflow step comments.
• Folder-based routing with slug and URL management per entry or locale.
• Role-based access control, granular permissions, editorial workflows, and content staging.
• Collaboration with field-level comments, the Concept Room, and the Ideation Room.
• GraphQL and REST APIs: Content Delivery API (CAPI), Management API (MAPI), and webhook support.
• Dedicated framework SDKs: Mature SDKs for major frameworks and a general JavaScript SDK.

Kentico Out-of-the-Box (OOTB) offerings

• Page Builder that requires developer setup and allows page editing within dedicated areas.
• Form and Email Builders to create forms and components to compose emails.
• Content tree-based routing automatically generates URLs for pages based on their location in the content tree.
• Built-in localization and multi-language content handling.
• Built-in workflow steps and workflow step comments.
• GraphQL API for headless solutions.

Getting started: setup and first impressions

Getting started with Storyblok is blazing fast. At the 2025 RenderATL tech conference, a developer used the Storyblok CLI to go from sign-up to a fully functional local development environment in just 49 seconds.

Since Storyblok is a SaaS product, there’s no local installation; just consume Storyblok’s APIs. Storyblok’s Blueprints help you get started quickly with predefined components, layout structures, and support for your framework of choice. Choose from base or business templates, pre-integrated with the Visual Editor and deployed automatically to Netlify or Vercel.

Getting started with Kentico requires developers to:

• Install the tools and project templates using the .NET CLI
• Create a new Xperience project and configure a database
• Run the application locally to begin development

Once the project is ready, it’s packaged and deployed to either Kentico's SaaS platform or the desired hosting environment.

Since Kentico only offers a hybrid CMS approach, the .NET project requires ongoing updates when creating or editing

• Custom components (widgets, form components, etc.)
• Data classes and models
• Configuration options and custom logic

After making the changes, developers must rebuild and redeploy the project.

Visual Editor

Storyblok and Kentico both have WYSIWYG editors.

Storyblok’s Visual Editor lets you

• Easily edit and arrange components
• Edit content inline
• View and edit translated content
• Edit images
• Preview a visual representation of draft changes
• Manage plugin integrations within the page: personalization, ecommerce, A/B testing, and more

Kentico offers a Page Builder, but it requires more setup and developer involvement:

• To enable the Page Builder, you need to edit the C# code of your Kentico project.
• Prepare pages with editable areas within the ASP.NET project.
• Kentico’s GraphQL API doesn’t consume content from the Page Builder. In practice, this means that projects that leverage headless content delivery fallback to a form editor instead of a visual editor.

With the Page Builder, you can

• Edit and arrange components within editable areas
• Edit content
• Preview draft changes

Collaboration

Both Storyblok and Kentico offer field-level commenting and content workflows, while Storyblok includes them as standard features across all plans. Editors can collaborate directly within the Visual Editor without extra setup or upgrades.

Rich text editor

While both Storyblok and Kentico support basic formatting (headings, links, lists, inline styles, embedded entries/components), Storyblok’s rich text editor goes a step further by including additional features out of the box. No custom implementation is required.

In addition to the basics, you get:

• Structured rich text, where HTML nodes are represented by key-value pairs in a JSON object, instead of as an HTML string. This makes it easier to target and manipulate nodes and blocks.
• Ability to add custom resolvers within the frontend code to manipulate the response.
• A dedicated rich-text package to render the structured rich text to HTML.
• AI-powered actions: summarize, rephrase, or improve content with AI suggestions.
• Document import/export: convert Markdown, ODT, or DOCX to rich text or vice versa.
• Inline Markdown: write Markdown directly in the editor.

Kentico’s rich text editor is different:

• Resolves to an HTML string, not as a JSON object.
• No ability to embed entries. Custom resolvers require a custom implementation.
• No support for document or Markdown import/export.
• Offers AI-powered content generation and refinement features within the rich text editor.

Frontend integration

One of the most immediate benefits developers notice when working with Storyblok is how smooth the integration process is. Instead of manually resolving linked entries or building mapping logic between content types and frontend components, Storyblok provides tools that streamline the process with dedicated SDKs for major frameworks as well as core JavaScript and PHP SDKs.

• The @storyblok/react, @storyblok/vue, @storyblok/nuxt, @storyblok/svelte, @storyblok/astro, and @storyblok/symfony-bundle render your components dynamically based on the structure defined in your CMS, either via a simple mapping of block IDs to component names or automatic resolution, depending on the SDK.
• You can define custom SDKs or implementations based on Storyblok’s core JavaScript and PHP SDKs. Alternatively, fetch data straight from the CAPI endpoints.
• Because Storyblok returns content in a consistent JSON-based structure, you can render nested or duplicated blocks the same way you render top-level ones, using regular component composition. There’s no need for complex traversal logic. If a block includes other components, you can render them as children inside the parent component. And since you define these relationships in your schema, you have full control over how deep things go: whether you allow recursive nesting, keep it shallow, or limit it to a specific depth.

Kentico’s frontend integration is more open-ended. Kentico provides only a GraphQL API for consuming headless content. The implementation is custom, there are no official SDKs to assist with this integration. The alternative is to create an ASP.NET MVC project instead of a headless frontend-focused project.

Component modeling

Storyblok uses a modular, schema-driven system of blocks with reusable nestable components that map directly to frontend UI elements. This allows for a 1:1 relationship between the content model and the frontend.

Beyond modularity, Storyblok also provides built-in content model types:

• Content Types: represent full pages typically composed of nested components.
• Nestable: reusable building blocks that can be nested or duplicated within content types (for example, Hero, Feature, Grid, CTA).
• Universal: can act as both. These are ideal for flexible content that might be reused across contexts or nested within other content.

Xperience by Kentico offers composable modeling, but its content modeling approach is different:

• Custom content type classification: there’s no native distinction between pages, components, or shared content.
• The Page Builder requires pages (templates): to allow authors to visually create pages, developers create templates with editable areas.

Since Xperience by Kentico offers a hybrid CMS, structured content modeling doesn’t apply to every model.

Routing and localization

With Storyblok, your content organization and routing structure are one and the same.

Storyblok

• Declarative routing via folder structure and slugs.
• Nested routes and dynamic pages are straightforward to model and resolve.
• Localization is first-class: language variants, translated slugs, and alternate paths are part of the CMS architecture.
  • Field-level localization lets you translate every piece of content for an entry. If a field isn’t translated, the fallback is the default language you set.
  • Folder-level localization uses separate, dedicated folders for each language. This structure duplicates some content but lets you customize each locale independently, based on the structure and order of the story's components. Storyblok also offers the Dimensions app to make this multi-tree structure for locales even easier.

Kentico

• Content tree-based routing, which automatically generates URLs for pages based on their location in the content tree.
• Only offers page-level localization. The duplicate translated version of the page needs to be managed separately from the original entry.

Additional Storyblok features

Storyblok includes several unique features designed to enhance the entire content lifecycle:

Flowmotion

Storyblok FlowMotion is a workflow-automation layer built on top of n8n’s engine, tailored for content teams and composable architectures. FlowMotion lets you automate approvals, translations, asset processing, CRM/PIM updates, notifications, and other actions, all triggered by content events (save, publish, translate). This transforms Storyblok into an intelligent content-operation hub, letting you orchestrate content, tools, and team workflows as part of your digital experience pipeline.

Strata

Storyblok Strata is a next-generation content layer built for the AI era. Rather than treating content as text stored in entries, Strata vectorizes your content from the start, enabling semantic understanding (keywords vs. meaning) of texts, images, audio, and video. It enables smarter content discovery, deeper personalization, and intelligent content operations at scale.

Ideation Room

The Ideation Room in Storyblok introduces the idea of “sandboxes” for content editors. Editors can draft and collaborate on ideas in isolation directly within Storyblok. No need for third-party text editors like Google Docs or Word. All content is centralized and remains versioned with consistent formatting. Once ready, editors can move content from the Ideation Room into a live entry and publish it without copy-paste headaches or formatting issues.

Concept Room

The Concept Room in Storyblok helps bridge the gap between developers and content teams by offering a collaborative space to visually map out a site’s structure before implementation begins. With its intuitive drag-and-drop interface, teams can use the Concept Room to align on layout, hierarchy, and reusable components without diving into code. Editors and marketers can leave comments directly on nodes and sections to streamline feedback and approvals, eliminating back-and-forth across tools. It’s also a powerful way to scope new feature requests: content teams can visually explain what’s needed, where it fits, and how it connects to existing structures. This clarity helps developers quickly understand requirements and accelerates implementation by visually organizing components. The Concept Room makes it easier to spot patterns, identify opportunities for reuse, and define a more modular and maintainable content structure from the start.

Side-by-side Comparison

	Storyblok	Kentico
Transparent Pricing	✅	❌ - Must contact sales
Free Tier	✅	❌ - Free 30-day trial
Native Headless	✅	❌
Headless	✅	❌ - Hybrid
Vectorized Content	✅	❌
n8n integration/automation	✅	❌
SaaS	✅	✅
Requires Local Setup	❌	✅
Composable Content	✅	❌
Rich Text Returned as JSON	✅	❌
AI Translation	✅	✅
AI Content Generation	✅	✅
AI SEO	✅	✅
Role based access control	✅	✅
WSYWIG Editor	✅	❌ - not for headless solutions
Content API	✅	✅
Management API	✅	✅
Personalization	✅ - bring your own	✅
A/B testing	✅ - bring your own	✅
Search	✅ - bring your own	✅ - bring your own
Multisite Support	✅	✅
eCommerce	✅ - bring your own	✅
Joyful CMS	😁	🫤

Conclusion

Both Storyblok and Xperience by Kentico are powerful CMS platforms, but their approaches to developer experience, content modeling, and implementation requirements differ significantly. Kentico requires expert knowledge of ASP.NET, local installation overhead, and extra developer effort to enable visual editing for headless projects.

Storyblok, on the other hand, is built with modern developer workflows in mind. It offers seamless framework integrations with dedicated SDKs that automatically handle component mapping, a component-based content modeling system that mirrors your frontend architecture, and a Visual Editor that works out of the box across all plans.

Built-in folder-based routing, field-level localization options, and unique, innovative features like Flowmotion and Strata further distinguish Storyblok as a platform designed for the modern composable stack. The result is a faster, more joyful developer experience and a platform where both developers and content teams can collaborate with confidence.