End of Support, Not End of the Story

EOL vs. EOS: Two Letters, Two Very Different Futures 

The market keeps using “End of Life” and “End of Support” as if they’re the same. They're not, and the difference matters enormously to anyone planning a budget or a roadmap. 

End of Support (EOS) means the vendor stops releasing updates, security patches, and hotfixes, and stops answering your tickets. But the software keeps running. It doesn’t vanish. It doesn’t get delisted. You can keep using it, you’re simply doing so without a safety net. 

End of Life (EOL) is the harder stop. The product is retired, deprecated, often pulled from distribution, and no longer guaranteed to play nicely with modern infrastructure. It’s not “no more help," it’s “this is officially over.” 

If you want the clean, jargon-free version to share with your team, we wrote one up here: EOL vs. EOS, explained. 

Why does this distinction matter right now? Because 2026 is a crowded year on the calendar: 

• Drupal 10 reaches End of Life on 9 December 2026.
• Umbraco 13 reaches End of Life on 14 December 2026.
• Sitecore is going through a significant support-model change on 1 June 2026, with multiple legacy versions hitting EOS and EOL across product lines.
• Adobe Experience Manager 6.5 continues its long march toward EOL.

And here’s the part I want every Kentico customer to read carefully: 

Kentico Xperience 13 reaches End of Support on 31 December 2026, not End of Life. 

That’s a deliberate choice on our part. Kentico Xperience 13 will keep running. It won’t be delisted. It will stay compatible with supported infrastructure. We’ll ship security hotfixes through the end of 2026, and full support ends on 1 January 2027. 

If you’re on Kentico Xperience 13, you're not standing on a trapdoor. You have time, and you have a clear runway to plan an upgrade without anyone setting off the fire alarm. 

So no, the sky isn’t falling. But I’d be doing my job badly if I didn’t tell you what you actually give up the day support ends. 

What “Support” Really is (And What You’ll Miss) 

Here’s the thing about great support: when it’s working, you barely notice it. It’s the quiet hum behind a platform you trust. You only feel its absence when it’s gone, like good plumbing, or a good night’s sleep. 

So let me make the invisible visible. When you have access to Kentico support, this is what’s actually helping you: 

• 24/7 global coverage from our support engineers: real people who work on the product, not a script-reading outsourced layer.
• A 7-day bug-fixing policy we’ve honored since 2009.If you find a genuine bug in the latest version and there’s no workaround, we fix it within seven business days. That’s not a marketing promise; it’s a commitment we’ve kept for over fifteen years.
• A one-business-day response on standard support, and a guaranteed 1–3 hour response for Premium customers, based on severity.
• Regular hotfixes and a public changelog, so security and stability keep improving while you sleep.

The day support ends, all of that goes quiet. No more patches when a new vulnerability surfaces. No engineer on the other end when something breaks before a campaign launch. No safety net under your most important digital asset. The platform still runs, but now every risk that used to be our responsibility becomes just yours.

Organizations running end-of-life or unsupported software spend roughly 30% more on IT support (Aseva), and 33% say legacy tech has seriously compromised their security. Going without support doesn’t save money. It just moves the cost somewhere less predictable. 

You can see exactly what’s included at every level on our Support Center. 

The Numbers Behind the Promise 

I’m naturally suspicious of any vendor (including mine) that tells you its support is “world-class.” So don’t take my word for it. Take our customers’. 

In the G2 Grid® Summer 2026 DXP report, Kentico scored 91% on Support, ahead of Adobe (84%), Sitecore (82%), Optimizely (80%), and Sitefinity (76%). The same report gives Kentico a Net Promoter Score of 73 and a 91% Likelihood to Recommend, both well above the category average and well ahead of Adobe (NPS 48) and Sitecore (52). 

Those aren’t analyst opinions. They’re the verdicts of teams who actually open tickets, wait for answers, and decide whether the help they got was worth recommending to a colleague. After nearly a decade helping customers navigate this platform, that 91% is the number I’m proudest of, because it’s the one our customers control. (The full breakdown is here, if you like your reassurance with a spreadsheet attached.) 

On Migration: A Word From Someone Who’s Watched Hundreds of Them 

The fear of migration is almost never about the technology. It’s about the unknown. I’ve sat with customers who delayed an upgrade for two years, not because the move was hard, but because the idea of the move felt enormous. And almost every time, once it was done, the same sentence came back to me: “I wish we’d started sooner.” 

That’s the truth of this work. The painful migrations are the rushed ones, the emergency moves made the month before a deadline, with no time to test, no time to plan, no safety net. The smooth ones are the ones that start early, with support still in your corner. You have that window right now. The whole point of an EOS date that isn’t an EOL date is that it gives you the luxury of time. Please don’t spend it waiting. 

The Real Fix: Stop Facing the Cliff Altogether 

Every “end of support” date is, at heart, the same problem wearing a different year on it. Version-based software will always, eventually, reach the edge of its support window. You patch, you plan, you upgrade. And then a few years later, you do it all again. 

There’s a way off that treadmill. 

Xperience by Kentico is an evergreen platform. It updates continuously with seamless monthly refreshes for security, performance, and new features, with no looming version cliff and no five-year countdown hanging over your roadmap. You upgrade once, and then you simply stay current. Forever. The end-of-support conversation we’re all having in 2026 becomes a conversation you never have to have again. 

And you don’t just escape the cliff, you trade up. Xperience by Kentico brings a centralized Content Hub, hybrid headless delivery, native AI through the AIRA Agentic Marketing Suite, and the same support team, now backing a platform built for the next decade.

That’s the part that genuinely excites me. The teams I’ve watched make this move don’t just remove a risk. They get faster, more independent, and more confident. And my team gets to spend its time helping them grow, instead of helping them hold on. 

Where to Start 

If you’re on Kentico Xperience 13, you have a clear runway through 2026 and a team that wants to make this easy. Don’t wait for the calendar to make the decision for you. 

See what upgrading really unlocks, and let’s plan your move while time is still on your side: kentico.com/platform/upgrade. 

I’ve spent nearly a decade making sure our customers understand the path forward and feel confident taking it. An upgrade to an evergreen platform is how we make sure that path never runs out.