Clickability was a content management system acquired by Upland Software in 2013 which provided a SaaS platform for web content creation, management, publishing, analytics, digital marketing, and online publishing for marketers and enterprises. It has been discontinued, and is no longer available.
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Optimizely Content Management System
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Optimizely's Content Management System (CMS) is purpose-built for marketers, and fully composable for developers. The CMS supports the end-to-end content lifecycle so users can deliver on-brand, high-impact digital experiences that 'wow' audiences.
As a true content management system it is great for site and content creation. It does need some help when it comes to adding functionality for using modern code systems that require server side scripting. For a marketing or public company site, it is an ideal CMS. For a SAAS type site, there could be many road blocks.
Well suited to an organisation who wants a real presence and a superior customer experience when visiting your website. Very modern look and feel and is great for hosting videos and specialist graphics. It is hard to fault the product and it is up there amongst the best in the market
Easy to get going for a business that has tons of content they need to manage.
Clickability offers development and design services so you don't really even need IT.
No need to worry about server uptime, storage, bandwidth, etc you have all the reports at your fingers for what you are using.
Simple template and content design system, easy to expand and add.
Powerful CMS and settings with a design and programming guide provided.
AkAMAI and Limelight CDN's can be used for powerful and fast loading in many regions.
Debugging tools to see how long specific templates and content load is exceptional. One can narrow down that this specific template ran X number of times and took this look and had to be stopped at X number of time due to exceeding set limits.
Having a built in Dev, Staging, Production environments for testing makes seeing new features and how they will integrate into your site seamless.
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)
Choosing ad size/placement should be easier than it is. Now, I have to re-create the whole thing.
When you "save" anything a pop-up comes up that is redundant.
Ad list only shows a limited number. It's not until you click on one and cancel it out, then you can see all the listings. A bit tedious and redundant.
On the technical side, Spire is all built on React Redux, so there's a React framework and then Optimizely built their own framework on top of that React implementation, which is, I'd say customized and non-standard. So learning that as a developer is usually a four to five month learning curve. So that is a con where it's not a standard React redux implementation.
As mentioned in the last questions we are going to use a competitor brand next year. I think the issues are trying to find and fix problems from the previous programer. The steep learning curve and lack of mobile and social sharing capabilities. Things that I like are the strength of the programing which comes with a trade off. The ease for those who don't know markup to make updates to the website. Clickability isn't the easiest and can be difficult to find the content that you are interested in. We will not be using it next year.
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.
My experience with Clickability has been mostly positive but there are a few areas for improvement. It's generally easy to learn and use on a daily basis. I can move fast and do my job with speed with needed. But there is some clunky functionality with targeting and page building. My rating would be higher if some improvements were made.
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
I found that some agents were better then others, usually you have an account representative and that I would consider level 1 support. To get really complex answers you need to talk with an engineer.
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
Many of other content management systems similar to WordPress need custom installation. The server costs and upgrades quickly add up. Clickability while expensive, eliminated the overhead of managing all the dependency needs for a CMS. Clickability also works with its clients to understand the business needs and proposes the solutions accordingly. They have a good support team.
Optimizely CMS is part of a more composable suite when it comes to DXPs. With that, some other systems like Sitecore Experience Platform are monoliths, which makes the development and maintenance of those products fairly complex (this includes system architecture). In our experience, Optimizely makes it simpler to implement solutions in a rapid manner and "tack on" additional products if needed as organizations grow and are able to leverage that functionality.
I know a big positive is the fact that it is always-on. We are the leading news corporation for our state, and in many markets, nationwide. We pride ourselves on our strong ethics in the community and thus need to exude reliability to maintain the trust of these communities. Having a website fail periodically erodes that reliable perception.
It has allowed different areas of the company to approach our team and work in a cohesive manner.
