Arc XP vs. Optimizely Content Marketing Platform

Arc XP is the state-of-the-art cloud based CMS for news publishing. It's well suited for large to medium organizations that want a robust, secure and scalable platform. Depending on the use case, it may still require a development team to maintain and make changes to the sites the CMS powers.

Incentivized

A 7 only because I think there's question marks around customization. However, I've seen very similar tools in the past where stakeholders have been skeptical, but as you get to know it and use it, you'll find actually you realize those benefits. I just think Optimizely could help its stakeholders and clients see those benefits early on versus later on. However, that's not to say it's not possible, so a 7 at this stage, but I think it's got potential in future. If you are a marketing firm who wants a centralized system for managing workflows and campaigns, it's great. It does that. However, there are better competitors fill in some of the gaps better than optimized leaders does. It could do better. I think for me, visually when I see, when I create a workflow or a campaign, I can see all the tasks associated with it and I've seen the way that our parent company uses it. It's just a list of all the tasks you see in one view. I think visually it needs improving. However, the purpose that it serves fundamentally, it's got potential, if that makes sense. It's going in the right direction, but I think competitors are doing some of it better than Optimizely is. I think they, like I was saying earlier, if they really want to realize the benefits of the product visually there needs to be some improvement. And then the controls element that I mentioned earlier as well, hopefully that answers both of your questions.

Incentivized

• Enables content creation and curation
• Content distribution. Web and APIs
• Easy to use development framework with good documentation and support

Incentivized

• The CMP really is useful for us not only to manage the processes behind how we create content that we serve in different platforms like websites, landing pages, emails, social media, but it also help us as a team that is scattered around the globe to be able to be connected all the time to be able to see what we're working on, to be able to share assets as well. We are not reinventing the wheel to be able to show to other people within the organization what is happening at any given point. We use it not only for assets now, but we use it also for things like planning our webinars, planning our face-to-face events, so it truly is the heart of our marketing organization within the business.

Incentivized

• The CMS lacks a responsive design web interface or a good native app alternative.
• It's heavily dependent on the AWS infrastructure and a disruption of the AWS service can cause serious problems

Incentivized

• One thing that could be improved is some of the promotions that happen in platform. For example, there's a Opal AI little bubble at the bottom right of the corner, which you can't move across the screen. So if you're trying to change the status of a step or you're trying to update a description within a step, that can be a bit challenging and as it seems to be quite an easy fix.
• I would love to see a capability in terms of having visual representation that we can share out with stakeholders that don't necessarily need access to CMP. But for that level of detail, we don't want it to go too granular, but we do want to be able to share in a quick and visual manner some of the activities that are happening so we can keep everybody in the loop without having to create different variations via different tools.

Incentivized

The tool is over-engineered and overly complicated. It makes my job much harder and not easier. There's much simpler tools for a lot less money

Incentivized

The editorial calendar is the one I check multiple times every day. It gives me a clear picture of what's in progress, what's due, and where things can be moving faster. And, there's no need to open a separate doc or ask anyone for a status update.
Also, the workflows are another super useful thing. Being able to assign specific reviewers to specific steps and know that nothing moves forward until they've acted has eliminated many repetitive processes.

Incentivized

I have not experienced any prolonged outages. From time to time there will be errors but nothing that significantly slows down production

Incentivized

Optimizely Content Marketing Platform's performance is generally good. Nothing that has impacted production. Page load speed doesn't typically lag longer than a few seconds. Reports take some time but not any longer than we're used to with other platforms. We have not experienced lag when integrating with other platforms

Incentivized

The NewsCred team is very responsive and helpful with any technical issues.

Incentivized

Training was clear and concise. It was intuitive and helped me understand how to navigate the platform. Options to dive in on each action or skip to learn about areas of regular use. Resource links available to when I had additional questions or needed more training in a specific area. Overall, the training allowed me to use the platform without interruption

Incentivized

We haven't yet explored the CMS or other products within the suite but we see the potential to move all of our tools to Optimizely One. I see this really helping us gain clarity in the end to end content lifecycle, and help us use our resources and bandwidth more strategically

Incentivized

Optimizely is generally a reliable platform for A/B testing and digital experience management. It's helpful for it's stability, flexibility, and comprehensive features, which is helpful when managing an enterprise website

Incentivized

• After the implementation of the CMS, the development team started focusing more on developing new features for the site than maintaining the CMS and the infrastructure. 100% of the work is now focused on creating value to the customer.

Incentivized

• The program has allowed us to meet our content goals more easily (e.g.: we publish X articles per month and track where each article is at).
• It's helped us improve the accuracy of our information. We have SEO, content strategists, and legal teams involved in the workflow now because it's easy to manage.

Incentivized