Overall Satisfaction with Optimizely Content Management
We use Optimizely Content Management as the Content Management System for a number of public-facing websites. It allows non-technical users to create and manage content and provides a robust system for software engineers to create reusable components and integrate with our other already existing APIs. We also use it as a headless CMS, allowing us to build single-page applications that get much of their content from the Optimizely Content Management CMS.
- CMS 12+ User Interface is particularly nice
- Out-of-the-box APIs for content searching, indexing, manipulating pages, etc.
- Much of the CMS functionality is customizable and extendable by engineers
- Sticks closely to .NET principles - easy to learn if you are a .NET engineer
- Documentation of APIs - specifically, we had trouble configuring content search APIs and authentication. Something that looked simple enough but ended up being a headache. The information is technically there in the documentation, but it is not always coherent, and there are crucial gaps missing in the docs. You end up having to file a support ticket which DOES (in my experience) unblock you, but the problem is caused by incomplete information in the first place. The guesswork and assumptions that I have to make should be minimal.
- The Optimizely Nuget package that we started on (at the time, it was the latest) had a seriously major bug on it that broke many APIs and features of the CMS. We had to use an older release until this was fixed. Not sure how it got through QA.
- Much faster development speed
- Excellent developer experience compared to previous CMS
- Happier content editors
From a developer perspective - if you know .NET or .NET core, it is pretty easy to learn, especially if you have previous CMS experience. You can learn the basics in a week or two. There are many out of the box APIs that will dramatically increase development speed as most of the functionality that you need has already been created. There are many helper APIs that also make it easier to create custom features.
We previously used a custom-made CMS. This was quite old and did not have many features, so it's not really a fair comparison. However, we do have engineers who have worked with Sitecore, and they say Optimizely Content Management is a FAR better developer experience. Sitecore is massively complicated in comparison.
Do you think Optimizely Content Management System delivers good value for the price?
Not sure
Are you happy with Optimizely Content Management System's feature set?
Yes
Did Optimizely Content Management System live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of Optimizely Content Management System go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Optimizely Content Management System again?
Yes