Bloomreach is a Commerce Experience Cloud, that aims to enable brands to deliver customer journeys so personalized, they feel like magic. It offers a suite of products that aim to drive true personalization and digital commerce growth, including: Discovery, offering AI-driven search and merchandising; Content, offering a headless CMS; and Engagement, offering a CDP and marketing automation solutions. Together, these solutions combine unified customer and product data with…
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Optimizely Content Management System
Score 8.4 out of 10
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The Optimizely Content Management System (CMS) helps users to deliver exceptional digital experiences across channels & devices. It boasts a marketer-friendly interface, AI-generated insights that support real-time personalization, and flexible content delivery options—including true headless delivery. The Optimizely CMS can be integrated with Optimizely Content Marketing Platform, Optimizely Digital Asset Management, and Optimizely Data Platform, to support the entire content…
As a manager at an entertainment platform, Sonora helps us maintain a consistent communication flow with our end user. It allows this communication to be automated which helps our team focus on what's important - making sure the creatives of the communications are well suited for their objective and ideating new scenarios for communication.
I'd say Optimizely CMS is best used at medium to large organizations with a lot of content and resources. Smaller businesses could have a lot of use of the basic product but with the price tag (not only for licences but also in development) I usually find smaller clients turning to cheaper alternatives.
All in one. We have experience working with other CDP/Marketing suites and it is really difficult to connect their different modules. Bloomreach Engagement has been built to be a single product which makes everything easy to use
Fast and real-time. Other platforms struggle with getting real-time volumes or segmenting based on real-time events, that is not the case with Bloomreach Engagement
GCP partnership. Being deployed over GCP and having BigQuery as raw data export makes really easy to expand and connect with existing stacks
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)
While Importing the offline data, sometimes the auto detection is failed to detect the csv file
While we import with wrong mapping, even after pressing escape before the import starts, its not cancelling the import. it start running. It would be great if it stops the import
it would be great if we receive email for successfully finished imports too
Optimizely Content Management System recently started moving features into internal namespaces, making it harder to provide custom implementations. Customization being one of the key benefits of using Optimizely Content Management System, this approach tends to be going in the opposite direction. I would love to see some of those features be added back to public APIs.
Some topics either lack documentation or have outdated documentation. Updates on those would definitely be helpful.
So far, Hippo is our ideal tool given its use of open standards which helps us to have a clear overview of what's coming next in the future Hippo releases. We are very confident in the future-readiness of the product
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.
In my time working with Bloomreach Commerce Experience Cloud, I always liked to work with it. It is crucial that you get support from experts from the beginning to show you how to work with the vast amount of options and activities to choose from. The learning curve is also well-rounded because of its user-friendly interface and highly skilled customer support.
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
99% of the time the site is available for when we need to use. With any cloud based software there will be occasion that there is an outage but this is communicated effectively and dealt with quickly. This has never got in the way of what we need to do in our day to day work and wouldn't be thought of as a problem
The search API is very fast (150ms), even considering we have nearly 2 million products in our catalog. The console pages where you do your configuration, add ranking rules and synonyms are sometimes a bit slower to load, but your customer would not notice any of that. The reports pages are also not the fastest, but definitely okay
Communication with the Bloomreach support team is very easy and they have always taken prompt action to help us with anything. The support team is also very helpful on explaining how and why things should be done in a certain way and why it's not possible to set or executive integrations in a different way than the recommended.
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
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
Bloomreach makes a marketer much more self sufficient than Hubspot does. When using Hubspot I was reliant on data professionals providing me with large excel sheets containing all variables used in an email. Bloomreach connects with our data warehouse and as a marketer I can use all this data to create the right segmentations and use the right variables in my email campaigns.
Magento fell off the list in an early stage because we didn't need a webshop functionality. We needed a "content/marketing platform. In regard to Sitecore I concluded that handling multiple websites in multiple languages was less flexible and a bit more complex in this matter. Together with our partner, the decision was made for EPI/Optimizely. In this matter my previous experience with EPI/Optimizely was good as well. But, I have to make the remark that the EPI/Optimizely system is great but if it is implemented wrong (basic idea behind building/set-up and design of the website) it will never work, with any system. So think before you do, the basis of the website is extremely important.
Easy to use, very clear guides and instructions and available support. Omni channel marketings, everything is in one place. Better Understand and Activate Your Customers. It allows us to create personalized, real-time marketing campaigns that will drive real results. Get your hands on your customer data, then use that data to engage these customers with relevant and consistent messaging across all channels, at scale.
