Crownpeak CMS is a composable, enterprise-ready content management system that empowers global teams to seamlessly orchestrate personalized digital experiences across all content channels. Marketing teams can create, manage, and monitor inclusive, accessible, and transactional experiences fast without compromising on functionality, security, or service.
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Optimizely Content Management System
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Optimizely Content Management System (CMS) is used to deliver digital experiences across channels and devices with a marketer-friendly interface, AI-generated insights that drive real-time personalization, and flexible content delivery options—including headless delivery.
Crownpeak DXM has a better total cost of ownership with a real and straightforward SaaS model for version updates. DXM has a better composable enterprise capability, allowing for easier and more effective API integrations. Crownpeak partner relationships are more open and …
I've only briefly reviewed Sitecore and Crownpeak as a comparison for episerver, and after reading other reviews that I mostly agreed with I came to the same conclusion about episerver. Their flaws are there but not something that is holding them back more than any other …
Crownpeak DXM is a great solution if you are looking for a flexible platform that allows engineers to quickly develop while also making it easy for content authors to work especially in scenarios where you need multi-language support. It is also good for scenarios where you want a cloud-based solution and are looking for just one vendor to handle hosting and offer the CMS.
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
Build & manage digital experiences without dependency on your IT team
Built-in Digital Quality tool (DQM) tool allows you to check the quality of content and any accessibility issues and immediately flag any issues before publishing.
Build websites with the component-based technology and spend less effort in creating the best user experience for the end-user
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)
Crownpeak moved to a web browser admin tool in 2018, which has made the admin experience much better, but there are still a couple of features missing from the browser version that won't arrive until later in 2019.
Integration with 3rd party digital asset management tools would be great.
Smoother integration with source control 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.
Crownpeak DXM is a flexible easy to use CMS platform speaking to the most challenging localization scenarios. Crownpeak users have the freedom to integrate DXM platform with their existing technology at no cost. Moving from legacy systems to the Saas platform is painless and cost-effective. Extensive targeting and personalization options are something that users will benefit from.
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
Pages load very fast on production (assuming you develop with basic SEO practices in place) due to Crownpeak's publishing architecture. The slide downside is that publishing can be a bit slow at times.
Crownpeak DXM's service and support are outstanding. We have immediate access to both the tech support team and the software engineering team. We can get a support person on the phone whenever needed, and we can schedule impromptu training sessions at any time. Best support I have ever received from a platform provider in 20 years of software and application development.
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
We received on-site training from Crownpeak, the trainer had touched upon every possible scenario and provided great insights about the product & ease of implementation.
My team left training with a solid understanding of how to use the product and the developer training ended with a test to ensure the ability to properly develop was learned properly. Recently, Crownpeak has added a self-paced training option which makes it extremely flexible to on-board new developers.
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
SaaS model is perfect for us to avoid slow and costly version updates to get access to new features and functions. Crownpeak is a true SaaS model, so we get all the good new stuff without the need to invest in effort, time or money. this frees our teams to focus on content creation and deployment, which is pretty fast because the DXM publishes straight to html through the headless model.
I was not at this team within my organization during the evaluation period of Crownpeak. However, my previous team used Sitecore. Crownpeak is a bit easier to use from a UI perspective and has more creative options within the tool. Sitecore's clunky UI also was a reason I found out later why we ended up using Crownpeak as our DXM.
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.
In some recent projects we have delivered to our clients, we were able to roll out sites in shorter time period due the scalability of the Crownpeak's DXM solution.
I'm pretty sure it raises our back-end development costs by making the development process (of creating input forms and producing outputs from the content) more complicated and painful than it needs to be.
It helps lock our clients in to us because not a whole lot of agencies have Crownpeak expertise.
It helps our clients not have to deal with their own IT teams, which they tend to dislike working with.
