Aprimo vs. Optimizely Content Management System

I think Aprimo is well suited when you are looking for a DAM to house all of your content. It will be easy to find what you need based on the metadata you are including. I think Aprimo works very well in situations where you are looking for both a DAM and project management system. We are using the DAM and Aprimo productivity and they pair well together

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Audit - The trail of what you can look back on is so robust and the IDs are on every task and asset. You see a full picture of something that has been approved and can see any amends that have been made. Having the full view and timeline of any updates is essential for our teams.
• Reporting - Most if not all fields can be reported on. This is essential for us as we use reports to influence management decisions as well as managing day-to-day operations.
• DAM - The DAM functionality and connectivity is a big one for our future plans as well as existing ones. Connectors into the DAM help us integrate the systems we have already, plus plan and support the business with new plans in growing areas.
• Service - Aprimo support is amazing. The support we get as a company is always great, no matter how big or small any issues or queries are. The team at Aprimo is always so attentive and comes back with great answers and support.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Customer support is slow to resolve system issues
• Complicated configuration with no in-depth training amounts to a huge learning curve and expensive concierge services
• The consumer-facing UI does not have all of the functionality that is required
• Training videos are out of date or purport functionality that does not exist

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

While Aprimo provides the fundamental tools to track our actual spend, it has a major void when trying to plan for future programs. Our teams often have offline Excel spreadsheets to track actuals spend vs. our original budget, and lay out the future programs against which we plan to use budget funds. Would also appreciate reporting mechanisms which could splice data in non table format. For example, we often use marketing calendars to display programs/spend over time. This helps our team ensure that programs which are intended to run concurrent with in-store sales executions are happening in the correct time frame. The visual is simply easier to follow.

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.

Really good search and upload process, and great functionality for workflow approval and editing. QuickConnect is handy for on the go, and the SSO keeps it simple. For customization, it is relatively complex and requires some technical knowledge. The user guides are very detailed, and the Aprimo Academy training modules provide lots of information, but there is a steep learning curve to get fully up to scratch with the system. The level of inter-relatedness of areas of customization could be complicated to work out if there is a problem. The support team at Aprimo is fantastic and the high customization potential is a benefit rather than a downside. A system champion is required to make sure it is fully utilized.

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.

Incentivized

We have not yet experienced any downtime

Unplanned outages or errors are fairly rare in our instance. And when there are issues, they're usually fixed fairly quickly

We are struggling with it though I think it’s our firewall i.e. an internal issue. Accessing the software outside or on mobile is faster.

They have a multi-tenant and single tenant option (more expensive) . We bought the single tenant option in anticipation of using Campaign Management and based upon our scale. You get more capabilities with single tenant

Support is support, so mainly reactive when it is about product inside and common issues. But when it is about specific enhancements and business concerns related to our own configuration and settings, we surely feel a gap. and this is why concierge is a must have solution when facing Aprimo support

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

Incentivized

Aprimo offered a number of hands on sessions customized for each group. As such, they address specific needs and configurations of each team. These sessions also offered another round of cross-functional collaboration in process design.

It was very generic and we took it prior to configuration. It was however adequate to educate our user in the basic capabilities that will have become available to them after deployment.

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

We were very well supported. TopRight who performed the process/requirements definition as well as project management functions came with ample experience with various marketing automation platforms. They also came with very good multi-channel marketing experience that allowed them to tackle this implementation as a marketing deployment and not a technology deployment. TopRight bring expertise in multi-channels strategy.

Aprimo performed the configuration and training functions. Their personnel were very well versed in their platform and brought much empathy to a deployment that required a great deal of change management.

I am stunned by how many people (from for-profit sector who work here) have not been exposed to these types of platforms. I want to make sure that folks are so accustomed to user interface. When I roll-out campaign management, teaching them the art and science of campaign management versus just learning the tool. TopRight are marketers. They are familiar with all these technologies. Their job has been to define processes, best practices and turn into training. Similar to training from Salesforce.com about funnel mgmt etc, vs. just the product. We will create training modules that are agnostic to the platform

I was not fully involved.

Incentivized

Unica - Both platforms (i.e. Unica and Aprimo) delivered comparable capabilities. However, due to internal limitations around technical support and technical maturity of the organization we selected Aprimo as it delivered the more user friendly user interface. Unica requires more technical saviness. With Aprimo you can be completely non-technical.

We evaluated Epsilon, but they were too expensive and don’t compete on price.

We evaluated Axciom. They offered an outsourced full service and were very powerful, but we wanted to bring capabilities more in-house. The capabilities were more advanced that we needed today. We felt Aprimo or Unica could both carry us a long way.

We did not look at marketing automation vendors like Eloqua, Marketo. From a scale standpoint, we were looking for campaign management and not just marketing automation. Also wanted MRM (Marketing Resource Management) or internal workflow management capabilities. We did not take a deep dive as they didn’t have the full suite solution

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.

Incentivized

• The stream-lined content process with agency partners who have access to our Aprimo client.
• In app creative review and redlining makes changes easy for client and agency.
• Cost saving in the way that we were able to build custom products and not try and use a costly less effective tool.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized