Kentico Xperience vs. Miva

Well suited for marketers that do not have in-house web programming or web designing resources available. Less appropriate for people that aren't computer savvy (i.e. don't know how to use basic programs like email, Excel, PowerPoint) or for those who are not detail-oriented because if you skip certain steps when adding/editing content, your webpage won't render correctly and/or create negative impact for search engine optimization without you knowing it.

Incentivized

If you are familiar with online retail, you will find it easy to use and love the diverse way of arranging your store and products. If you are brand new to online retail, Miva Merchant has partners that can help you design the perfect present that is easy to maintain.

• Ease of use for the developer, content authors, and internet marketers that use it. The user interface in Kentico 8 truly is amazing and easy to pick up with no training.
• Strong customization and integration capabilities, including the built in REST service, Integration Bus, and elegant API. I love the fact that if there is anything not in the box we can use the system to extend it or connect it to any CRM, ERP, or other third party service very easily.
• Large out of the box functionality. There is an extremely high level of value that the platform provides. Instead of having to build extra modules for things like Event Booking, Forums, Polls, or E-commerce, they are already there for us to use.
• Ability to control the HTML output of the site at a very fine level. Creating HTML5 is very easy in Kentico and implementing any design, as responsive, is totally possible in the system.
• The ability to get a very high level of insight into the visitors journey through the website and market back to them with the Contact management, Lead Scoring, and Marketing Automation modules is very impressive.
• The scalablity of the system is impressive. Running a very highly trafficked web site is totally possible with Kentico and its strong caching and web farm capabilities.
• The support that Kentico provides is top notch, 24/7 global support is included with any purchase, 7 day bug fix policy, and excellent documentation
• The development community is engaged and ready to help if you are a developer learning Kentico, and the Kentico partner community is very strong as well.

Incentivized

• General versatility, though changes commonly require the aid of a true Miva developer to implement
• Compatible with many payment gateways and a fair assortment of third-party services
• Developers employed directly by Miva to handle merchant projects are personable and responsive to most requests

• Their slogan - "Right First Time Technology" - I get what they mean, but some things may be lost in translation. This is a sentence fragment in English, and some clients may be turned off by it.
• Easier to understand documentation - their official documentation could use an overhaul. All of the information is there, but most of their code examples need to be fleshed out a bit. This aspect of their product can be very hard to navigate for first-time Kentico developers.
• Email Queue - this should be in the same section as Email Marketing; currently this is under Configuration

Incentivized

• Training and documentation. Miva Merchant is fairly complex, and while they continue to make good progress in providing resources for all levels of expertise (beginner to expert), there are still a number of gaps. To take the step beyond the initial levels of online storefront requires expert assistance for most businesses (unless they have some substantial IT/technical resources available).
• Market for add-on and add-in products. (Note: this is significantly biased by our own business experience selling workflow and feature products for Miva Merchant.) The long-term goal for Miva has been stated to essentially involve having integration partners (selling their time) and larger companion product partners (selling products that work with, but usually NOT within Merchant). There is clearly a gap of potential customer needs that they are attempting to build into the core platform. Of course, no one can cover all needs! While Miva Merchant is not hostile to third-party product companies, neither do they have an explicit place in their long term roadmap. It is my opinion that their strategy of minimizing third-party add-on developers may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and I shudder to imagine a time when all significant features only come from the developers within Miva. As good as they are (quite good) they suffer from the inevitable myopia that ALL companies have - they are NOT their customers!

We are locked into Kentico for the long haul. It provides us with an easy and flexible solution for a very non technical company to create a site and have the features they want, especially with the inclusion of EMS into our license. Now we have a true platform to build and grow our solutions.

Miva Merchant works! It is a stable platform, it uses many standards and when it does break, typically due to database corruption, if you know a little about SQL or have a Miva support package, repairs are typically minutes away Vs. hours or days.

It seriously is one of the best interfaces I have ever used. I also love the fact that I can use UI personalization to secure any functionality by user or role that I don't want that role to have access to. The best part is the customization of the UI, I can add in any button, tab, or menu item I want through it, no code required.

Incentivized

Miva Merchant allow individual of various skills to create the perfect online store! The wizards inside Miva Merchant that has step by step allow someone with little or no programming skills to a skilled programmer who can customize to his or her heart content.

I work with multiple Miva sites daily, and uptime is fantastic. Outages are rare from my experience, and any issues have generally been short and handled quickly.

Their support staff is friendly, knowledgeable, and will work with you until your issue is fixed. This could take a few phone calls back and forth, but they are very diligent in helping you.

Incentivized

An overwhelming majority of the support technicians are top-notch. One or two key exceptions stand out, but even those are typically fine - just occasionally wrong or unhelpful. Overall I seem to get quick and useful support, whether it's for the software or a web hosting-based need.

The system provides many opportunities to integrate and enhance the platform and makes it easy to do so.

Creating the Miva store originally took a reasonable amount of time, 2-3 months, but we were unable to migrate our orders and customer accounts from the old platform. Additional refinements were required over the following 6 months to refine the functionality and features so that they worked properly for our store and fulfillment process.

Previously we used Microsoft SharePoint as a content management system and it was very limited, required a ton of support, and we encountered bugs on a weekly/monthly basis. All of the negatives that we had associated with SharePoint went away when we switched to Kentico. It was really night and day and Kentico has really helped us move forward and become much more efficient.

Incentivized

BigCommerce, Shopify and Shopware are all superior to Miva. They allow you more power to personalize, power your store, and better B2B options. They have all solved the issues that Miva has with categorizing and subcategorizing products, which Miva doesn't allow that creates issues with duplicating subcategories, duplicate keywords and canibalization. Miva isn't mobile first, mobile friendly, the other sites are.

Miva has proven to be a great solution for smaller mom-and-pop stores through large enterprise-class businesses with tens of thousands of products. Performance is just as strong on enterprise-class stores as on considerably smaller stores, and an increasing number of marketing/sales tools are continually being added to the core Miva functionality to keep up with current marketplace demands.

• Kentico has allowed us to deliver to clients more quickly, more cheaply, and with high quality to our clients. It's an inexpensive licensing model, an easy development platform, and powerful enough we can deliver amazing results to our clients.
• Kentico's quick setup and deployment model has allowed me to very quickly ramp up new developers. This saves money and time.
• We routinely see extraordinary returns in visits, time on page, and other critical metrics after rolling out Kentico-based systems/applications.

Incentivized

• We have lost some business due to lack of easy MIVA connectivity with popular POS systems.
• For the most part, focussing on MIVA as the primary eCommerce platform my company offers has been very positive choice for me and my clients. The choice of MIVA has allowed me to focus on learning a singular platform where I have the ability to modify the look & feel as well as the function of the store. For my clients, MIVA presents an easy to use administrative interface (Magento, by comparison, is a nightmare) with plenty of functionality.