Choosing the right deployment model for Xperience by Kentico is an important decision. This page offers a side-by-side comparison of Kentico SaaS and private cloud solutions. It focuses on real deployment tasks and troubleshooting, building on top of our feature comparison page.
You'll find actionable insights to help you select the best hosting approach, understand the benefits of Kentico SaaS, and streamline your deployment process.
We structured the material as a table comparison of deployment tasks, where each task is clickable. You can find more detailed explanations and guidance for each task below the table, to dive deeper into any area of interest.
This comparison was created in collaboration with our Kentico MVPs, drawing on their real-world experience and insights. We reference the following MVP blog posts throughout this material—feel free to explore them for additional context and practical tips:
Some of these blog posts mention "upcoming" and "roadmap" features that Kentico has since released.
| Deployment area | Private cloud (e.g., Azure) | Kentico SaaS |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure setup | You design and deploy infra (Azure, AWS, etc.). Must handle networks, certs, access, scaling, and monitoring. | Fully hosted by Kentico. Preconfigured environments (QA, UAT, STG, PROD). Scalable, monitored, and secure. |
| Initial deployment | Manual work to push code, configure CMS, run migrations. | Easy to upload deployment package via Xperience Portal. CMS and DB come preconfigured. |
| CI/CD pipeline setup | Create GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps pipelines for each environment. Must integrate testing, secrets, infra provisioning. | Kentico .NET cloud templates come with sample default configuration for CD and Xperience Portal, reducing custom setup. |
| UAT and Staging environments | You create and maintain your own UAT and Staging environments. You manage coordination between editors, developers, and testers in terms of content edits. | Preview (QA, UAT) and Staging (STG) are built-in (depending on your license). The Portal supports seamless deployment flow from one environment to another. |
| Content synchronization | Additional configuration required to set up content sync. | Xperience Portal automatically handles content sync for Kentico SaaS. |
| Automated testing | You manually integrate tests and manage environment resets. | Include GitHub workflows and automated testing steps in your deployment pipeline using Xperience Portal API. |
| Go live | Manual deployment, DNS, final checks, and backups. | Promote to PROD from Portal. Kentico manages infrastructure and SSL certificates; you point your custom domains with guided DNS setup in the Portal. |
| Post-go-live operations | You monitor uptime, apply patches, handle scaling and logs. | Kentico handles observability, scaling, platform patches, and backups. |
| Troubleshooting | You debug across cloud logs, services, and app monitoring. | Xperience Portal gives access to logs, deployment results, and rollback. |
| Configuration | You store secrets in Key Vault or config files and handle configuration for each environment. | Managed via GitHub and the Xperience Portal. |
| Media & image handling | You configure blob storage, CDN, image rules manually. | Default Azure blob storage configuration included in Kentico .NET template. Media files deployment happens automatically. |
"Our typical self-managed Xperience projects run in Azure tenants. Production uses the most robust infrastructure, QA mirrors production to validate every layer, and Dev stays intentionally simple."
"My site currently lives on a Rackspace shared server with other internal IDHL projects, while the database is already hosted in Microsoft Azure."
"Kentico has kindly provided a Level 1 SaaS instance which has two environments, a non-production (QA) and production (PROD) environment."
— Liam Goldfinch, A Step-by-Step Guide (opens in a new tab)
"We rely on Azure DevOps multi-stage pipelines together with Xperience Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD)."
"The main change is to ensure that the artifact created after a Dev deployment matches the SaaS deployment-package format, ready for upload through the Xperience Portal, and deployment with a click."
"Before migrating to SaaS, my existing CI/CD flow was built around deploying to a self-hosted environment."
— Liam Goldfinch, Automated Deployments (opens in a new tab)
"...Xperience SaaS takes over with a robust process, deploying application files, applying Xperience refreshes, synchronizing the CD package, and creating automatic backups of SQL, storage, and app files."
Developers can take advantage of the environment identification extension methods to run certain code only in a specific environment.
"At present, customers [can] edit content directly in Production using Xperience publishing workflow and preview features. Kentico’s ... Content Synchronization feature [allows] a separate authoring tier"
See the Content sync documentation.
"The core CI/CD principles hadn't changed, I was still building, testing, packaging, but instead of deploying to a self-hosted server, I was using Xperience Portal's deployment API endpoint."
— Liam Goldfinch, Automated Deployments (opens in a new tab)
-ZeroDowntimeSupportEnabled parameter and make sure your code supports read-only mode."You can now use the Deploy to button to promote the same package to the Production environment."
— Liam Goldfinch, A Step-by-Step Guide (opens in a new tab)
Optimize and automate/Automate monitoring and backups
"The platform automatically backs up databases and files before deployments, supports manual backups, and can download backups for refreshing local dev environments or debugging issues. You can also restore the QA and Production environments right from the portal."
"Full infrastructure access delivers control but also significant burden: DNS records, certificates, VNET routes, WAF rules, storage keys, bindings, SQL restrictions, and upgrades. All can fail and demand deep expertise to fix in an emergency."
"Teams sometimes fear losing low-level access, but we retain what we need while facing far fewer failure points. ... We have all the access we need, have much less to worry about, and avoid risky, ad-hoc fixes."
"The release pipeline picks up the artifact, extracts it onto the shared server, ensures IIS is configured with the correct bindings, and applies environment specific configuration transformations. As this part of the pipeline will be completely replaced, I won't be spending time covering it here."
— Liam Goldfinch, Automated Deployments (opens in a new tab)
We are continuously working on improving our materials. Are you missing any information or need further explanation on any aspect of our SaaS? Would you like to contribute to this guide by sharing your own SaaS deployment experience? Use the Send us feedback button at the end of this page to let us know.