Migration Without Migraines: All the CMS Versions Reaching End-of-Support in 2026
Key Takeaways
- Drupal 10, Umbraco 13, Sitecore, AEM 6.5, and Kentico Xperience 13 all reach end-of-support in 2026.
- End-of-support cuts security patches and support access, but sites keep running without interruption.
- Migration costs spike in Q4 2026 when Drupal, Sitecore, and AEM customers compete for limited developers.
- Planning now avoids crowding. Organizations treating migration as a calm project get faster timelines and better pricing.
- Evergreen platforms like Xperience by Kentico with monthly updates eliminate the three-year panic cycle entirely.
Every few years the software world hits a kind of collective deadline, a moment when a whole cluster of platforms reach the end of their supported life within months of each other. 2026 is one of those years. And it's a big one.
This isn't intended to create fear.
It's just the nature of how software lifecycles work: major versions ship around the same time, get their three-or-so years of support, and then reach the end of the road together. Think of it like a building's mandatory safety inspection: everyone on the street got their certificate the same year, so everyone's renewal lands the same year too.
So before the calendar does the reminding for you, here's an honest look at which platforms are reaching end-of-support or end-of-life in 2026, and a calmer way to think about what to do next.
The 2026 End-of-Support Roll Call
One quick distinction first, because it matters more than people realize: most of these dates are end of support, not the platform switching off. Your site keeps running. What stops is the safety net, security patches, fixes, and someone to call when something breaks. Hold that thought; we'll come back to it.
- Umbraco 13 reaches end-of-life on 14 December 2026. As a long-term-support release it got the full three-year run; after that date, no more security patches without paid extended support.
- Drupal 10 reaches end-of-life on 9 December 2026, and the 10.5 branch already lost security coverage on June 17, 2026. Drupal 11 is the destination, and anyone who's done a major Drupal jump knows it's rarely a weekend job.
- Sitecore changed its whole support model on 1 June 2026: production-incident and security support move into paid Extended Support for older versions, and Sitecore JSS reaches end-of-life the same month. XP 10.3 mainstream support ended in December 2025.
- Adobe Experience Manager 6.5 ends support for Managed Service customers around 31 August 2026, with on-prem core following in early 2027: a real deadline for platforms that took years and serious budget to implement.
- Optimizely actively maintains only the two most recent major versions, so depending on your version history you may be closer to the edge than the headline dates suggest.
And, because it would be a bit rich to list everyone else's deadlines while skipping our own: Kentico Xperience 13 reaches end of support on 31 December 2026. Through 2026 it receives security hotfixes only; from 1 January 2027, support ends.
Here's why Kentico Xperience 13 sits at the bottom of this list rather than hidden in the middle: end of support is not end of life. Your KX13 solution won't be switched off. It keeps running after December 2026 exactly as before. What changes is that updates, hotfixes, and support stop arriving. Customers kept asking us to spell that out, so we did, on our own upgrade page, and now here.
The Real Deadline isn't December, it's the Cost of Waiting
Here's the thing nobody tells you about end-of-support dates: the date itself is rarely the expensive part. The expensive part is what happens in the months before it, when everyone on that shared deadline starts looking for the same partners, the same developers, and the same migration slots at the same time.
Migrations don't get cheaper or easier as the deadline approaches. They get more crowded. The organizations who'll have the smoothest 2026 are the ones treating right now as planning session, calm, unpressured, off-peak.
And "planning" is genuinely all we're asking. Not "rip everything out this quarter." Just: know where you stand, know where you'd go, and know roughly what it takes to get there.
A Platform with No Next Deadline
The deeper lesson of a year like 2026 isn't "upgrade now." It's that the upgrade-panic-upgrade-again cycle is the actual problem. You shouldn't have to re-live these every three years.
That's the entire idea behind Xperience by Kentico: an evergreen platform with seamless monthly updates and no looming end-of-support cliff. You upgrade continuously, in small painless steps, instead of bracing for one giant migration every few years. The red date disappears from the calendar for good.
Getting there shouldn't be painful. This is exactly why we've done the heavy lifting. Our Universal Migration Tool moves content and structured data from any source CMS, not just Kentico's own: WordPress, Sitecore, Adobe, Optimizely, Drupal... It turns "rebuild from scratch" into "structured, planned, and around 3x faster than a traditional rebuild." Add the phased migration checklist and guided onboarding, and the migraine in the title starts to look a little melodramatic. For our Kentico Xperience 13 customers, we have a dedicated Kentico Migration Tool that uses AI to analyze your project, migrate your content, and even transform your code to Xperience by Kentico.
If your platform is on the 2026 list (and statistically there's a fair chance it is) you don't need to act tomorrow. You just need a plan. So, talk to us. Tell us what version you're on, what's holding you back, what features you're missing.
We'll help you map the path forward, migraine-free. And if you're currently on Kentico Xperience 13 and looking for extra resources to get started, we've created a practical guide to help you get started.
Download your free copy and see how you can make the move to Xperience by Kentico with confidence.
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