Contentstack headquartered in San Francisco offers an API-first headless CMS. From desktops to smart phones, from kiosks to smart watches, from billboards to jumbotrons, from dashboards to VR headsets – content is delivered with the push of a button and optimized for every screen, device and channel.
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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.
Out of those listed, only Umbraco is applicable as it can be directly compared to Optimizely CMS (with the other 3 being Headless solutions, which should instead be compared with Optimizely Headless, which I haven't worked with)
Umbraco offers a really visual experience and far …
Contentstack has flexible functionality which opens up a lot of possibilities for businesses with proactive web development teams to create their own website builder app to compete with 3rd party agencies. This is especially useful in a large enterprise where non-technical teams often turn to expensive outside agencies which cost more in the long run than an up-front investment into an in-house application.
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
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)
In my opinion it's not very intuitive. I've found its difficult to understand how to best structure entries, especially if they are related
In my experience, entries can get difficult to understand if weren't the creator. It would be helpful to have some meta data around the entry itself and the fields within them in my opinion.
Integration with an A/B testing platform would be nice.
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.
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.
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
They have an in-app chat with their support team, who is always quick to respond and provide helpful answers. I've never walked away from an interaction without my issue being solved quickly and easily. They're also very communicative over email and are sure to follow up after any changes are made to ensure we're seeing the desired result. They are always very professional and easy to work with.
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
Contentstack has better international hosting support then Contentful and we found the presales and sales support people were MUCH more responsive than Contentful. The Sitecore sales process was very very slow and overly complex. We felt Sitecore had many features that were not valuable and the cost to benefit ratio was much lower compared to ContentStack
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.
