Likelihood to Recommend 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
Read full review I have a gorgeous website that I made myself, thanks to Squarespace. I'm able to integrate marketing emails, SEO, analytics, online carts, pretty much instantly. If you want to get started fast, it's really great. I think if you want to customize square space and you're having trouble, it would be most helpful to hire a square space designer. That's what I would have done in retrospect.
Read full review Pros 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) Read full review Stupid simple to use. I know very creative people who cannot code and this is probably the easiest ever platform for them! Pretty website templates and great functionality with showing off portfolios. They've already figured out what are the problems that non-coding people have when creating websites and they've figured out a simple solution for all of it. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review As a wine company it would really love it if Squarespace had an easy plugin for wine club subscriptions. Squarespace would be awesome if it could automatically take your photos that you upload on the site and optimize them for the web and for the website. I do wish we could have more than two contributors for the basic website costs. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Unless our website requires significantly more functionality in the future, I can't see us terminating our contract
Read full review Usability 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
Read full review It's simple to use for someone who is really good with computers as well as those who are not. I've been using my personal squarespace for years and have also helped clients build a starting page which they are later able to manage theirselves.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Unplanned outages or errors are fairly rare in our instance. And when there are issues, they're usually fixed fairly quickly
Read full review Support Rating 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
Read full review Help is available directly from the back end and uses full sentence searching to find answers to questions others may have asked before. With a ton of articles and support questions documents, it is very likely that your question has been answered. If not each page has the ability to open a direct email to support. Each case has a number and can be followed. Responses are often quick and have links and directions clearly stated
Read full review Online Training 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
Read full review Implementation Rating I was not fully involved.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Overall, as a designer, it makes perfect sense for small to large businesses to use a site such as SquareSpace. Costs are relatively reasonable with the ability to go in and do custom code.
The issue is certain aspects of it, depending on the plan, you can't do. So, if you want to do API to the site, you need to use the top-tier program to do so. Even at custom code, you won't have access to the API section.
As well, like all templates and themes, everybody is using the same style too.
Read full review Return on Investment The positive is on ROI as we can get more done without needing to go through 3rd party or know Code to create and add content. Workflows could use improvement. I don't know that there are workflows that I'm aware of. Make it easier to connect to 3rd party software like Hubspot, Magento, email services, etc. Read full review The key positive impact on my overall business objectives is how simple Squarespace sites are to implement new information. Whenever our services change, we can quickly update pages or even change how the website flows, in a very short window of time. This allows me to get back to more urgent work sooner. Our Squarespace site for Club Swim Show helped present our web series to potential partners; Club Swim Show went on to partner with a popular swimming magazine and reach a larger audience through that magazine's hosting thanks to the professional design of our original website. Squarespace does not bring in customers to my storefront, which is fine for me, since I sell things infrequently and it is not my main business, but might work against someone who is expecting a Shopify or Etsy level connection with buyer markets. Read full review ScreenShots Optimizely Content Management System Screenshots