Portal Engine support ended at the end of 2023. There is no converter for web parts. Kentico Xperience 13 itself ends 31 December 2026. We will tell you what content can come across, and which destination is actually worth paying for.
Australian .NET team. We look at the site before anyone talks about a rebuild.
01
What you have
02
What is safe to keep
03
Upgrade or move
The site still works. That is why it has been left alone.
Portal Engine is the old Kentico model: web parts on a page template, edited in the browser, running on ASP.NET Web Forms. Kentico 12 is the last version that supports it. A lot of the installs we hear about were built that way on 11 or 12. Some are 12 MVC. A few are already on Kentico Xperience 13 and are staring at the next product name. Then a support date, or a licence conversation, makes the stack impossible to ignore.
You might recognise one of these:
You do not need a new brand, or a DXP pitch. You need a clear read on the content and the custom layer you already have.
Kentico is not dead. The current product is Xperience by Kentico, an evergreen DXP. Kentico still publishes a support-lifecycle table and a Migration Toolkit. The problem is rarely “Kentico vanished”. It is that Portal Engine and Kentico 12 are already past technical support, and the official tools move structured content, not the site you click around in.
Structured content can move. Web parts cannot be converted. That is why sites stall.
Kentico’s lifecycle page: 12.x technical support ended at the end of 2022 for MVC, and at the end of 2023 for Portal Engine. 11.x ended 30 November 2021. A valid maintenance contract does not restore support once the version is off that table. Kentico’s own DevNet answer is that a 12 Portal Engine app keeps running; you lose hotfixes and official help. That is not the same as a kill switch.
Kentico’s MVC FAQ is the clearest official statement. Portal Engine runs on ASP.NET Web Forms, which does not exist on ASP.NET Core. There is no tool that turns web parts into MVC widgets. Structured data, and some online-marketing objects, can upgrade. Content sitting in widgets, web parts, and Portal Engine-specific page types will not. The front end is a rebuild. That is why a Portal Engine project is a different job from a 12 MVC one.
Kentico’s Kentico Migration Tool accepts Kentico Xperience 13, Kentico 12, and Kentico 11 as sources into Xperience by Kentico. It migrates database content and related files. It does not migrate code. Customisations and unsupported content have to be rebuilt. For Portal Engine on 12/11/10 they describe two options: use the tool for structured content into a new Xperience instance, or hop through upgrade tools and a community Portal-to-13 converter, then run the Migration Tool. Either way you are building a new application. That path is vendor-shaped toward Xperience. It is one option, not the only responsible destination.
13 is supported until 31 December 2026. From 1 January 2026 that support is remote technical help plus security hotfixes only. From 1 January 2027 Kentico ceases all support, hotfixes, and security repairs; they say post-EOS use is at the customer’s risk. A “quick lift to 13” from Portal Engine is still a Portal Engine → MVC rebuild, and then you are on a line with months left. Do not land a project there unless it is a short stepping stone.
A module written against Portal Engine APIs, or data the Migration Tool discards, does not come across. Kentico says some data is mapped to an alternative and some is discarded. That list is why we inventory modules before anyone books a cutover — and before anyone signs a renewal that only covers the old version.
None of that makes the content, media, or URLs worthless. It does mean “run the toolkit on Monday and go live” is the wrong first move, and “Xperience by Kentico is the answer to every Portal Engine site” is the wrong first sentence.
We start with the install, not with a destination.
Version (11, 12, 13), Portal Engine or MVC, web parts and page templates, custom modules, licence / maintenance status, and how the site is hosted. We will tell you what structured content the official tool can take, and what has to be rebuilt.
There are three honest outcomes. We recommend one, not all three.
Content, media, and URLs matter more than a clean-room rebuild. Redirects and the pages people actually use come across. Unused web parts do not.
Source, a short record of what changed, and a site someone else can understand.
We will not tell you Kentico is finished. Xperience by Kentico is a current product. We will not tell you it is the only responsible destination, and we will not tell you WordPress is the answer to every Portal Engine site. If you already know you want to stay on Kentico forever, a dedicated Kentico partner may be a better fit. If you want an honest fork in the road, talk to us.
A URL and a rough version is enough to start.
The first call is 30 minutes. You leave with a recommendation you can take to a manager, not a rebuild estimate pulled from thin air.
We have taken over and modernised ageing .NET systems for Australian organisations, including work with Data#3, Hastie, NESS, and NSW Health. Hastie was SharePoint 2007 plus ASP.NET 3.5. NSW Health TESL was SharePoint plus ASP.NET 4.0. NESS is nopCommerce and Dynamics NAV. That is related Microsoft web work, not a published Kentico or Xperience case study. A Portal Engine or v12 install still starts with its own assessment. We will not pretend it is a project we have already published.
Thirty minutes. Bring a URL and a version number if you know it. We will tell you whether to rebuild on a Kentico line, move the content off, or leave it alone for now — and we will not pretend 13 is a long home.
Book a free 30-minute discovery call