At SilverTech, we’ve had the opportunity to work with both Kentico Xperience SaaS and our established Azure hosting process.  We often get asked which one is preferred and if there are benefits to either.  Both approaches deliver secure, scalable, and high-performing digital experiences, but the way they handle deployments, content, and infrastructure is quite different.   We go into some technical detail in this article, but here are the top differences summarized:

1. Hosting Responsibility and Control

Kentico SaaS: Hosting and infrastructure are fully managed by Kentico. The SaaS portal provides a central place to handle deployments, backups, monitoring, and domain management. With Kentico SAAS, you have one vendor to work with for licensing and hosting.

Azure Hosting (SilverTech): We design and manage the hosting environment ourselves, using Azure best practices, Terraform automation, and DevOps pipelines to optimize infrastructure and deployments.  

Even with Kentico SaaS, we do recommend engaging in a managed services contract with SilverTech for 24/7 monitoring and response. That way, if the site goes down, we can pinpoint the issue and engage with Kentico support to get the site back up and running even in the middle of the night.

2. Deployment Process

Kentico SaaS: Deployments are package-based, moving code from Dev → QA → Production through the Kentico portal. API access makes it possible to integrate into CI/CD pipelines, though by default deployments also export content, which is very helpful for migrating content between environents, but does require careful oversight to avoid overwriting live updates.

Azure Hosting (SilverTech): Our process follows a structured branching and approval workflow, with pipelines for Dev, Stage, and Production. Blue/green deployments and automated rollback options allow for zero downtime releases.

3. Content Management Between Environments

Kentico SaaS: Built-in tools support syncing content between QA and Production. This simplifies the process but does require care to ensure the correct version of content moves forward.

Azure Hosting (SilverTech): Historically, content migrations required freezes and database restores, though newer features like Content Sync and the upcoming Page Sync are streamlining this process.  Improvements to Kentico Sync will help with content propagation for both SaaS and managed hosting.

4. Backups and Restores

Kentico SaaS: Backups are automatically created before every deployment, with additional options for manual backups, downloads, and one-click restores directly in the portal.

Azure Hosting (SilverTech): Backup and restore strategies are custom-designed for each environment, with fine-tuned schedules, retention policies, and automated failover options.

5. Downtime and Reliability

Kentico SaaS: Early deployments introduced short periods of downtime, but recent improvements have reduced this significantly. Zero-downtime deployment is on the roadmap.

Azure Hosting (SilverTech): Zero downtime is already standard practice through blue/green deployments and swap-based release processes.

6. Monitoring and Visibility

Kentico SaaS: Provides an intuitive dashboard with performance metrics such as CPU, memory, response time, and error logs.

Azure Hosting (SilverTech): Monitoring integrates with enterprise-grade tools, offering advanced visibility, alerting, and logging tailored to organizational needs.

7. Scalability and Security

Kentico SaaS: A fully managed platform built to scale automatically and provide enterprise-level security without requiring additional IT oversight.

Azure Hosting (SilverTech): Scaling and security are fully customizable, allowing infrastructure to be tailored to unique performance, compliance, and governance requirements.  SilverTech has standardized Web Application Firewall rules we use for all XbyK sites.

Which One is Right for You?

Kentico SaaS and Azure hosting each offer clear benefits—it comes down to what fits best for your organization.

Kentico SaaS is ideal for teams that want a fully managed platform, with simplified infrastructure management and content management with a single vendor.   Its also ideal for organizations with complex vendor onboarding as you are only dealing with one vendor.

SilverTech’s Azure Hosting is the right fit when advanced customization, zero-downtime deployments, and deep infrastructure control are priorities.  Our managed services also provide one less point of failure.  If the site goes down, we have full control and access to fix the issue.

Both solutions provide excellent performance, reliability, and security. The difference lies in how much control you want over the environment versus how much you prefer to offload to a managed service.