Likelihood to Recommend It made it super easy to upgrade 300+ Drupal sites to the latest major version in 12 weeks, end to end. It is easy to deploy legal changes and updates to components at scale. Turnkey service to deploy new environments and to clone sites. There are no ecosystem lock-in principles for Customer service/success services and professional services for new approaches.
Read full review Well suited to an organisation who wants a real presence and a superior customer experience when visiting your website. Very modern look and feel and is great for hosting videos and specialist graphics. It is hard to fault the product and it is up there amongst the best in the market
Read full review Pros It's fast, no lag time Exceptionally good support. When there's a problem, you reach out to your account manager who either fixes the issue or gets you to the right person. We've had no downtime. Platform is very accessible to those who know how to manage the back end software. Read full review A centralized UI to maintain multiple websites using a common entry point. Page types and blocks that can be highly customized using .NET code, but at the same time allows checks and validations when being created by Marketing/Content Users. A very good set of extra libraries/add-ons that allows to expand website functionality in a very short period of time (Content APIs, Personalization, A/B Testing, Social) Read full review Cons Support responds pretty quickly to critical tickets, but they can be slow to respond on non-urgent items. Some of what we experienced may have been related to a newer ticketing system recently implemented. Standard support covers business days/hours but only critical support is available outside those times. We typically schedule our website updates for the weekend or "off" hours when only critical support is available. Read full review On the technical side, Spire is all built on React Redux, so there's a React framework and then Optimizely built their own framework on top of that React implementation, which is, I'd say customized and non-standard. So learning that as a developer is usually a four to five month learning curve. So that is a con where it's not a standard React redux implementation. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We're moving away from Drupal as a platform. Drupal 8 and 9 were simply too overburdened and difficult to maintain compared to other offerings. PHP seems like a dying language so we are currently in the process of migrating all of our Drupal 7 functionality and custom modules to a Python/Django/Wagtail platform. This doesn't mean Acquia isn't a great service, they are professional and top-knotch, but the only way we'd say with them is if I didn't complete the migration.
Read full review Since I work on the implementation side of things, and do not directly own licensing for Ektron CMS, I have to base this rating off of how I think it will be received or presented to customers looking to start a new site deployment. I try to remain CMS agnostic, though my specialty is with the .NET and Microsoft stack. Because of the experience I have working with Ektron, I tend to be more forgiving with the shortcomings as I am familiar with how to work around them or past them from experience. Being familiar with the community available also helps, as you become familiar with the best approaches to find solutions to your issues. Each product has it's ups and downs and all of them are only going to be as good as the company or development team implementing them can make them. This is EXTREMELY important to remember when choosing a CMS, as it can make or break your expensive investment.
Read full review Usability It's a great user interface. It's always being updated and I've never noticed a bad update that increased the complexity or reduced
Read full review The Opti CMS is pretty easy to use once you get used to it. Setting up the experience editor takes some time and difficult to follow and do in a group setting. We found working one on one or in smaller groups works better
Read full review Reliability and Availability Unplanned outages or errors are fairly rare in our instance. And when there are issues, they're usually fixed fairly quickly
Read full review Support Rating Every time we have had an issue, Acquia support has responded promptly and worked with us as a team to solve the problem. The Acquia support team is global and we have literally had interactions with all of their support offices, yet the experience has been the same - top notch
Read full review I attended multiple trainings/tutorials early in the process. The vendor-supplied content about Optimizely was engaging for users/attendees (I often analyze training content, compliance programs, governance plans), which helps our OCM people by having good "word of mouth" about the product long before a rollout ever happens. I actually when the user-focused portion of the Optimizely Academy twice in 2022 to ensure I had a grasp on operability and to be able to support the training and OCM efforts
Read full review Online Training Ektron is one of the best solution for .Net platform. Over the years have improved the performance issues that the previous versions had. My only complain is right now you can't do Page builder pages if you choose to have a MVC architecture
Read full review Implementation Rating It was implemented when I got there. I don't know how it was prior.
Read full review I was not fully involved.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We chose Acquia for a much better UI that gave non-analytical marketers and easy to use tool where they could create their own reports. The campaign side of things also had an easier to use UI as well, that made the targeting of audiences much easier.
Read full review Optimizely CMS is part of a more composable suite when it comes to DXPs. With that, some other systems like
Sitecore Experience Platform are monoliths, which makes the development and maintenance of those products fairly complex (this includes system architecture). In our experience, Optimizely makes it simpler to implement solutions in a rapid manner and "tack on" additional products if needed as organizations grow and are able to leverage that functionality.
Read full review Scalability The DXP tools can handle millions of requests and can scale automatically to fit your needs. We have clients that use only part of the DXP tools and have a small usage, but even in these cases they see great value in using tools like personalization and CDP.
Read full review Return on Investment Acquia has helped us to stabilize and optimize our website performance, lowering page load times and dramatically decreasing the frequency of issues experienced by end-users. Acquia SOLR search provided a much-improved search experience on our website. Acquia's PCI-compliant hosting has helped us to remain compliant and cyber-secure. We are working to implement Acquia Site Studio and Acquia Personalization now and expect those to improve our operation agility and ability to drive more relevant experiences to our various website visitors. Read full review The positive is on ROI as we can get more done without needing to go through 3rd party or know Code to create and add content. Workflows could use improvement. I don't know that there are workflows that I'm aware of. Make it easier to connect to 3rd party software like Hubspot, Magento, email services, etc. Read full review ScreenShots Optimizely Content Management System Screenshots