Acquia Digital Experience Platform vs. Optimizely Content Management System

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
The Acquia Digital Experience Platform is an "Open DXP" with its two core pillars being content and data. Built on top of one of the largest open-source content management systems, Drupal, it aims to provide the flexibility and interoperability a modern organization needs. With its customer data platform, it allows organizations to understand who their customers are and deliver personalized experiences. Acquia's DXP offers variety of other tools including digital asset management,…N/A
Optimizely Content Management System
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Optimizely Content Management System (CMS) is purpose-built for marketers, and fully composable for developers. The CMS supports the end-to-end content lifecycle, helping users to deliver on-brand, high-impact digital experiences that 'wow' audiences.N/A
Pricing
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformOptimizely Content Management System
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformOptimizely Content Management System
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeRequired
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformOptimizely Content Management System
Considered Both Products
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Chose Acquia Digital Experience Platform
Acquia is so much more flexible when it comes to using products beyond what they sell.
Optimizely Content Management System
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
Optimizely Content Management System is on par with these other platforms. They all have the strengths and weaknesses so it comes down to what features work best for your needs.
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
Ultimately it had little to do with features, as all 3 were capable systems. We preferred the tech stack and 3rd party integrator choices for OCMS.
Features
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformOptimizely Content Management System
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
8.0
49 Ratings
0% below category average
Optimizely Content Management System
8.5
167 Ratings
3% above category average
Role-based user permissions8.049 Ratings8.5167 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
7.7
41 Ratings
6% below category average
Optimizely Content Management System
8.0
164 Ratings
3% above category average
API7.839 Ratings8.0157 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language7.732 Ratings7.9125 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
7.9
43 Ratings
7% above category average
Optimizely Content Management System
7.8
192 Ratings
1% above category average
WYSIWYG editor7.331 Ratings7.8176 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness8.134 Ratings8.1164 Ratings
Admin section7.942 Ratings8.1176 Ratings
Page templates8.030 Ratings8.2170 Ratings
Library of website themes8.226 Ratings7.496 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design7.828 Ratings7.9174 Ratings
Publishing workflow7.934 Ratings8.2170 Ratings
Form generator7.924 Ratings6.8129 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Acquia Digital Experience Platform
7.1
35 Ratings
3% above category average
Optimizely Content Management System
7.6
178 Ratings
2% above category average
Content taxonomy7.728 Ratings8.1163 Ratings
SEO support6.129 Ratings7.2162 Ratings
Bulk management6.931 Ratings7.0135 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions7.532 Ratings7.6141 Ratings
Community / comment management7.226 Ratings7.9116 Ratings
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Score 9.0 out of 10
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Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
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User Ratings
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformOptimizely Content Management System
Likelihood to Recommend
8.4
(93 ratings)
8.6
(203 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.9
(11 ratings)
9.7
(34 ratings)
Usability
7.7
(2 ratings)
8.5
(72 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.2
(4 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(5 ratings)
10.0
(8 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(4 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(1 ratings)
6.4
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.3
(73 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Acquia Digital Experience PlatformOptimizely Content Management System
Likelihood to Recommend
Acquia
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.
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Optimizely
If you want to build a website quickly there are plenty of ways to do so with some great examples and plenty of support both from the company and in the forums. if you want to build a more complex structure you can but be ready to spend the time to build exactly what you need as a solid foundation goes a massive way before building out content and making those choices early and sticking with them helps
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Pros
Acquia
  • 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
Optimizely
  • I think the user interface for content admins is very good and very competitive. And compared to other providers, the technology that CMS in particular has. So the way it integrated the net ecosystem is very well because it follows the MBC pattern. So basically it just allows really simple implementations for what would normally be complex components on any other sort of vendor that's out there.
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Cons
Acquia
  • 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
Optimizely
  • Magento did have some nice tools for creating product groups or carousels for promotion. Opti seems to be lacking in that.
  • A blog - maybe this is available and we don't have it installed, but a searchable blog would be very appreciated.
  • Structured Data/MicroData - maybe it's our install, but this seems to be missing
  • Meta data: we have access to limited types and need to make a request from IT, it would be nice to be able to access more to adjust for SEO needs.
  • When in a folder on the BLOCKS tab, it would be wonderful to hit the MEDIA tab and stay in that same folder.
  • I have some less technical people that will make folders with spaces - which Opti handles, but it would be great if it wouldn't accept a space or gave an error message not to use them.
  • I think I know why the extra code is added to urls and image links, but it causes issues when taking things from our testing site to the live site. For example, I need to copy the Navigation from Inspect Element on testing to put it in production. I have learned to work around it, but it's not my favorite.
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Likelihood to Renew
Acquia
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.
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Optimizely
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.
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Usability
Acquia
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
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Optimizely
From our editors perspective they find the CMS system easy and to clear to use. Our developers find it very easy to design on and appreciate the level of service support available. It's also always evolving and getting better every year. We find this investment reassuring and encourages us to try keep pace and see how we can continue to push the envelope and continue to improve all aspect of our websites and online touch points.
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Reliability and Availability
Acquia
No answers on this topic
Optimizely
Unplanned outages or errors are fairly rare in our instance. And when there are issues, they're usually fixed fairly quickly
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Support Rating
Acquia
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
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Optimizely
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
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Online Training
Acquia
No answers on this topic
Optimizely
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
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Implementation Rating
Acquia
It was implemented when I got there. I don't know how it was prior.
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Optimizely
I was not fully involved.
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Alternatives Considered
Acquia
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.
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Optimizely
Optimizely Content Management System is much more feature rich, and less complex that the other CMS platforms we have used. Optimizely Content Management System is more intuitive in how the content is structured and how easy it is to pull blocks of content to create the layout of a page.
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Scalability
Acquia
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.
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Optimizely
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Acquia
  • 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.
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Optimizely
  • Flexibility with design that allows us to work towards our mission of 'Tennis Opened Up'
  • Speed of deploying content, meaning users can really on us for the most up-to-date content on tennis in Britain
  • Ability to have different logged-in areas for different user groups, allowing us to create more bespoke and personalised experiences
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ScreenShots

Optimizely Content Management System Screenshots

Screenshot of Content delivery: Developers can use modern GraphQL and REST APIs to query content from any source and send it to any channel or device.Screenshot of User roles and permissionsScreenshot of (SaaS CMS): Visual Builder: Add an image: Optimizely Visual Builder offers a range of editing features designed to make content creation and layout building intuitive and accessible to both technical and non-technical users. A drag-and-drop system is used to add, move, and rearrange elements within the layout, for quick and flexible content organization.Screenshot of (SaaS CMS): Visual Builder: Create an experience: Create an Experience functionality in Optimizely Visual Builder offers a code-free way to build and manage captivating digital experiences. It offers pre-built content blocks or elements (like text, images, buttons, forms, etc.) that can be positioned on the page layout as desired. Visual Builder offers extensive options to customize the appearance and behavior of these elements. Users can modify colors, fonts, sizes, animations, and even add interactive features providing flexibility in arranging content, accommodating various design needs and responsiveness across different screen sizes.Screenshot of (SaaS CMS): Visual Builder: Publish: The Visual Builder displays changes in real-time as they are made. This includes side-by-side previews for different devices like desktops, tablets, and mobiles. Before publishing, the Interactive Preview mode can be used to test elements like forms, buttons, and other interactive components to ensure they work as expected on the live site. Changes can then be published directly from the Visual Builder interface, making them instantly available to site visitors.Screenshot of the central location to manage assets, editing and publishing content.