Kajoo wins CMS Idol 24 in Montreal

By Janus Boye

A happy winner! From left: Mark Demeny, Joyce Peralta and Daniel Backhaus (all three judges) with a Nabil Orfali from Kajoo next to Matt Garrepy from CMS Critic

A new, efficient approach to building digital experiences and a much improved live demo from Toronto-based software start-up Kajoo is what edged them to win a very close race at the CMS Idol contest held at the CMS Connect 24 conference in Montreal earlier this month.

Kajoo offers an AI-powered digital experience builder, which converts sketches, Figma designs and legacy websites to modern Jamstack code.

It’s a solution to a well known problem in the crowded CMS space: How do I bring down the time-to-value and also the cost of implementation.

As Kajoo CEO and Founder Nabil Orfali said:

“Kajoo is all about empowering teams to build digital experiences faster and more efficiently. We're really passionate about liberating front-end experiences, giving brands the freedom to use the experiences they’ve invested in across any platform and framework.”

In their feedback, the CMS Idol judges in particularly highlighted:

  • A well-defined demo with a real-life use case, presented confidently. Much improved since previous entries to the Idol contest at CMS Kickoff 24 and in CMS Expert group meetings.

  • Good positioning as "AI-Powered Digital eXperience Builder” and with a tagline of "Democratizing AI".

  • The judges also commended the branding, name and look and feel.

Kajoo was founded in 2019 and was originally formed out of something called the Sitecore Magic Tool, a powerful package built by Sitecore MVPs at TechGuilds, the parent company of Kajoo. The initial goal was to address the struggle to get from a wireframe to a live Sitecore page. Today Kajoo works with many more vendors in the composable and headless space, but Sitecore upgrades is still a big part of the business.

Are you tired of spending countless hours manually coding your designs? Kajoo allows you to easily convert your Figma designs into high-quality, responsive code.

CMS Idol shows us how fast the industry is moving

The CMS Connect 24 conference was opened by a remark on how key industry problems remain unsolved, yet the live demos at CMS Idol showed us the impressive progress happening right now.

It was a packed race with only one (!) vote separating the top 4 contestants, so well done to the other contestants on taking the time to create and deliver a compelling demo:

  • Agility CMS from Canada, which came with a big win from Europe in November, where they won the 2023 Small Feature Award. Joel Varty showed collaborative editing in their CMS.

  • Fastr from the US, showed how to address developer dependency to enable other stakeholders to build better ecommerce experiences.

  • Little Forest from the UK showed how their domain discovery feature has evolved since their win back in 2019.

  • Magnolia CMS from Switzerland showed a very impressive AI-improved editorial interface geared towards making digital communicators and marketers more effective.

  • Pantheon, who came in a close 2nd, showed how editors and marketers could easily do most of their work in Google Docs, rather than inside a clunky CMS. A compelling demo, with a really clear focus.

  • Uniform showed a fun demo of experience management and personalization using Pampers as a case study.

The CMS Idol 24 in Montreal was hosted by Matt Garrepy from CMS Critic who was accompanied by these three judges:

After each demo, the judges offered constructive off-the-cuff feedback and helpful commentary.

The CMS Idol 2023 winner, Contentstack and also the CMS Kickoff 2024 winner, Directus, unfortunately didn’t make it.

Live demos make a big difference

To keep the art of the live demo going, we’ve integrated them into our conferences for the past decade and you can experience them next at these upcoming events:

You can also read more about live demos in these posts: