Brightwheel is a platform for early education that combines SaaS, Payments, and a consumer-like daily experience, from the company of the same name headquartered in San Francisco. With brightwheel, teachers have tools for assessment, communication, and photo sharing; administrators can manage their business with enrollment, reporting, and online bill pay; parents get a real-time view of their child’s day that helps them participate in the learning + continue it at home.
N/A
Optimizely Content Management System
Score 8.5 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.
Any preschool can benefit from brightwheel, no matter the size. Brightwheel is also excellent for billing, which is especially helpful for schools that do not have other databases and billing systems. Because our school is a PS-12, it is a little cumbersome to have brightwheel along with another management system that we use school-wide. It would be nice to have a separate price point that does not include the things that another database system does for schools that are required to use what the older grades also use.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Brightwheel does much more for the preschool level than FACTS does. The creators of this app know early childhood. The company also provides helpful webinars that are unrelated to their software, such as staff retention or ways to market. They understand the business of early childhood and exist to make the lives of providers easier.
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.
