Optimizely Web Experimentation vs. Sitecore Experience Manager

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Optimizely Web Experimentation
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Optimizely Web Experimentation empowers teams to conduct experiments (without having to rely on developer resources) in order to test various user interactions, make website changes backed by data, and personalize customer experiences.N/A
Sitecore Experience Manager
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
Sitecore Experience Manager is an enterprise-grade CMS competing with Oracle WebCenter, IBM Web Content Manager and Adobe. It presents a fairly wide and comprehensive swath of inbuilt features. In Sitecore WCM editing takes place from within the page with its inline editor, allowing editors and authors to create display rules and content within the context of the page in an integrated process. It allows the creation of blogs, wikis, polls, integrates with social media, and is mobile…N/A
Pricing
Optimizely Web ExperimentationSitecore Experience Manager
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Optimizely Web ExperimentationSitecore Experience Manager
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Optimizely Web ExperimentationSitecore Experience Manager
Considered Both Products
Optimizely Web Experimentation
Chose Optimizely Web Experimentation
While they all do the same thing, I felt, and still feel, that Optimizely does it better. I felt like the other tool were too simple in format and analytics for the prices being charged and they also lacked reliable word-of-mouth. When talking to other professionals, Optimizely …
Sitecore Experience Manager
Chose Sitecore Experience Manager
Sitecore provides and enterprise grade CMS over WordPress and allow us to do the customization we need for our unique environment. Optimizely might be better for AB testing.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Optimizely Web ExperimentationSitecore Experience Manager
Testing and Experimentation
Comparison of Testing and Experimentation features of Product A and Product B
Optimizely Web Experimentation
8.0
92 Ratings
7% below category average
Sitecore Experience Manager
-
Ratings
a/b experiment testing9.392 Ratings00 Ratings
Split URL testing8.574 Ratings00 Ratings
Multivariate testing8.877 Ratings00 Ratings
Multi-page/funnel testing8.272 Ratings00 Ratings
Cross-browser testing7.450 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile app testing7.638 Ratings00 Ratings
Test significance8.584 Ratings00 Ratings
Visual / WYSIWYG editor8.076 Ratings00 Ratings
Advanced code editor7.568 Ratings00 Ratings
Page surveys7.017 Ratings00 Ratings
Visitor recordings8.418 Ratings00 Ratings
Preview mode8.082 Ratings00 Ratings
Test duration calculator6.956 Ratings00 Ratings
Experiment scheduler8.154 Ratings00 Ratings
Experiment workflow and approval6.537 Ratings00 Ratings
Dynamic experiment activation7.434 Ratings00 Ratings
Client-side tests9.250 Ratings00 Ratings
Server-side tests9.119 Ratings00 Ratings
Mutually exclusive tests8.437 Ratings00 Ratings
Audience Segmentation & Targeting
Comparison of Audience Segmentation & Targeting features of Product A and Product B
Optimizely Web Experimentation
8.6
86 Ratings
2% below category average
Sitecore Experience Manager
-
Ratings
Standard visitor segmentation8.985 Ratings00 Ratings
Behavioral visitor segmentation8.365 Ratings00 Ratings
Traffic allocation control9.481 Ratings00 Ratings
Website personalization7.957 Ratings00 Ratings
Results and Analysis
Comparison of Results and Analysis features of Product A and Product B
Optimizely Web Experimentation
8.3
84 Ratings
3% below category average
Sitecore Experience Manager
-
Ratings
Heatmap tool9.113 Ratings00 Ratings
Click analytics8.733 Ratings00 Ratings
Scroll maps8.017 Ratings00 Ratings
Form fill analysis8.326 Ratings00 Ratings
Conversion tracking8.744 Ratings00 Ratings
Goal tracking8.473 Ratings00 Ratings
Test reporting8.176 Ratings00 Ratings
Results segmentation8.048 Ratings00 Ratings
CSV export7.648 Ratings00 Ratings
Experiments results dashboard8.049 Ratings00 Ratings
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Optimizely Web Experimentation
-
Ratings
Sitecore Experience Manager
9.0
19 Ratings
12% above category average
Role-based user permissions00 Ratings9.019 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Optimizely Web Experimentation
-
Ratings
Sitecore Experience Manager
8.0
17 Ratings
4% above category average
API00 Ratings8.016 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language00 Ratings8.014 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Optimizely Web Experimentation
-
Ratings
Sitecore Experience Manager
8.4
19 Ratings
10% above category average
WYSIWYG editor00 Ratings8.019 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness00 Ratings9.018 Ratings
Admin section00 Ratings9.018 Ratings
Page templates00 Ratings8.016 Ratings
Library of website themes00 Ratings8.06 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design00 Ratings8.016 Ratings
Publishing workflow00 Ratings8.017 Ratings
Form generator00 Ratings9.017 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Optimizely Web Experimentation
-
Ratings
Sitecore Experience Manager
8.4
18 Ratings
14% above category average
Content taxonomy00 Ratings9.016 Ratings
SEO support00 Ratings8.014 Ratings
Bulk management00 Ratings8.012 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions00 Ratings8.017 Ratings
Community / comment management00 Ratings9.014 Ratings
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User Ratings
Optimizely Web ExperimentationSitecore Experience Manager
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(177 ratings)
9.0
(27 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.5
(45 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(57 ratings)
7.3
(4 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(7 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
7.3
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(16 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Online Training
3.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.0
(11 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Configurability
6.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.0
(89 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Optimizely Web ExperimentationSitecore Experience Manager
Likelihood to Recommend
Optimizely
This is our second testing platform, and is by far the best we have leveraged. Its intuitive in how you are able to build tests. Tracking is easy to set up within the visual editor or as a capability in URL tracking. The reporting tab does need more filtering capabilities for custom metrics.
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Sitecore
Great for companies that are looking to create customized, tailored content solutions and be willing to put in the hard work and effort to maximize the value out of the tool. If your company is just looking for very basic content management without all the bells and whistles, I'd recommend looking elsewhere for less [money].
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Pros
Optimizely
  • Considers every kind of experiment from simple code change, code additions, code removal, javascript functions, CSS changes, and split landing redirects.
  • Very friendly UC interface for easy navigation of implementation of pages, click events, experiment set up, and metric set up.
  • The ability to let me know when something has reach stat sig without having to do complicated math on my own
  • ability to carry UTM parameters through landing page redirects with a click of a button.
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Sitecore
  • Personalisation of advertising banners based upon knowledge of the customer, like location or previous searches enables us to target customers with products and offers that they are more likely to engage with, which has been done to good effect.
  • The use of Sitecore for content management enables the business and design team to perform changes to things, like images, content and page structure, which would otherwise have required a code release, which is costly in terms of man power.
  • The A/B testing in Sitecore is good because it allows us to statistically verify minor changes to the site - like advert changes or component ordering on the page - as to whether or not they positively impact conversion.
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Cons
Optimizely
  • Hard to use extensions without some knowledge of HTML/CSS
  • Inconsistent user counts between GA & Optimizely when it comes to calculating MAUs, hard to be able to forecast budget and overages when our source of truth (GA) differs from our testing platform (Optimizely)
  • Impressions model doesn't support scaling personalization experiences - hard to run a serious data driven testing program when you have to cut tests short before 14 days (ideal length to get to any statistical read) in order to save on impressions
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Sitecore
  • Sitecore is Customer Engagement Platform. It comes with lots of features (e.g. Authoring, Analytics, personalization, A/B Test, Webforms for marketers etc), But, most of them are not being used by many clients. If you are really looking for just CMS (only authoring and publishing), then I don't think Sitecore is a way to go.
  • You need to have a strong Sitecore certified developer base to manage the Sitecore platform (if you are using all features). It's the same case with others. But, finding a Sitecore certified (costs $$) developer is tough in the market. Now the market is growing (thanks to Sitecore promotional events) and Sitecore is gaining popularity, It may be easy to find such developers in the future. If you want to leverage most out of the Sitecore community you need to be a Sitecore certified developer.
  • Sitecore comes with lots of built-in features and marketplace components. I feel this puts in a little tricky situation. It gives an opportunity for a normal developer to use some of the free marketplace module, which may or may not be supported in a future version of Sitecore. which may put the entire platform in risk to upgrade to latest Sitecore version. You need to have a proper process to control and validate the marketplace components before using them.
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Likelihood to Renew
Optimizely
Because it's an incredible and essential tool for my line of work as a conversion optimization specialist. Really couldn't do my job nearly as effectively without it. It's paid for itself many times over and I feel like I'm only beginning to unlock the tools potential.
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Sitecore
Sitecore has proven that it can deliver on its promise of a robust, reliable enterprise CMS solution with plenty of features. Also, they keep updating it with more and better features. Now that we are highly trained on it we have started on getting the most out of it and we plan to keep doing more of that in the future.
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Usability
Optimizely
Usability is mostly great. I like the WYSIWYG functionality and adding in real code is simple as well. It's easy to target specific pages or audiences. I've knocked a couple of points off because of how difficult it is to set up URL redirect experiments, confusion around creating pages, and lack of data that can be further analyzed.
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Sitecore
With any platform that offers so much capability, usability will naturally be more challenging. Sitecore does an admirable job and made massive strides in version 8, but at some times offers too many ways to achieve the same task allows users to sometimes take a path less efficient than the preferred path.
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Reliability and Availability
Optimizely
I would rate Optimizely Web Experimentation's availability as a 10 out of 10. The software is reliable and does not experience any application errors or unplanned outages. Additionally, the customer service and technical support teams are always available to help with any issues or questions.
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Sitecore
No answers on this topic
Performance
Optimizely
I would rate Optimizely Web Experimentation's performance as a 9 out of 10. Pages load quickly, reports are complete in a reasonable time frame, and the software does not slow down any other software or systems that it integrates with. Additionally, the customer service and technical support teams are always available to help with any issues or questions.
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Sitecore
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Optimizely
They always are quick to respond, and are so friendly and helpful. They always answer the phone right away. And [they are] always willing to not only help you with your problem, but if you need ideas they have suggestions as well.
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Sitecore
Sitecore Support is very knowledgeable and helpful. We have raised a number of issues with them and they rarely fail to come up with an acceptable solution.
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Online Training
Optimizely
The tool itself is not very difficult to use so training was not very useful in my opinion. It did not also account for success events more complex than a click (which my company being ecommerce is looking to examine more than a mere click).
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Sitecore
Sitecore captures and remembers every single interaction your customers and prospects have in any part of the system, allowing you to build comprehensive, ever-learning profiles of each individual. From email marketing, to social media, to online shopping, Sitecore remembers where each interaction left off so you can automatically continue the conversation. Sitecore helps you manage your content for each and every experience your customers enjoy. Customize what content you want and the system will take care of how it's displayed.
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Implementation Rating
Optimizely
In retrospect: - I think I should have stressed more demo's / workshopping with the Optimizely team at the start. I felt too confident during demo stages, and when came time to actually start, I was a bit lost. (The answer is likely I should have had them on-hand for our first install.. they offered but I thought I was OK.) - Really getting an understanding / asking them prior to install of how to make it really work for checkout pages / one that uses dynamic content or user interaction to determine what the UI does. Could have saved some time by addressing this at the beginning, as some things we needed to create on our site for Optimizely to "use" as a trigger for the variation test. - Having a number of planned/hoped-for tests already in-hand before working with Optimizely team. Sharing those thoughts with them would likely have started conversations on additional things we needed to do to make them work (rather than figuring that out during the actual builds). Since I had development time available, I could have added more things to the baseline installation since my developers were already "looking under the hood" of the site.
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Sitecore
Make sure you work with a partner that can help you take advantage of the entire platform. Specifically we see a lot of customers not taking advantage of Sitecore DMS and thus missing a huge opportunity. Sitecore is a platform that is meant to be constantly optimized and improved upon.
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Alternatives Considered
Optimizely
Overall, the tools we compared against were great, but we went with Optimizely because it has all the features we needed and has the market leadership that gave us trust we would be successful in our experimentation efforts.
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Sitecore
The decision to select Sitecore was not ultimately mine, but the fact that we were able to leverage in-house Microsoft .Net (C#) experience on a platform that had a library of extensions, but also allowed us to customize and keep private our confidential IP has been a big help. When you see a SharePoint site or a Drupal site you can usually tell "oh this is a MS SharePoint site", but with Sitecore the ability to customize and have different views even different components based on device type makes Sitecore a clear winner.
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Scalability
Optimizely
While granted, I am not the one making the changes to deploy the software; it seems basically as simple as placing the optimized snippet on your site. If you place it in the header, it should reach across your entire site easily. I do think the test setup can be a bit temperamental at times, and having too many cooks in the kitchen can lead to errors. So, I would caution how many people have the access needed to make actual changes.
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Sitecore
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Optimizely
  • Customer retention: We've reduced subscription service client churn by 20%+ using optimized unsubscribe flows.
  • Risk mitigation: Testing into full site redesigns has saved clients millions of dollars.
  • Feature prioritization: Identifying what painted door changes add value has allowed developers to focus on changes that add hundreds of thousands or even millions to the bottom line.
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Sitecore
  • ROI depends so much on implementation. Its would be difficult to comment in a positive or negative regarding CMS product to direct ROI. A non-technical user would be surprised at what a basic installation of Sitecore looks like. "Hello World" comes to mind. With that in mind we can look at two things, Sitecore Support and Sitecore Partners.
  • Certified Internal Developers and Sitecore Support: This depends on the qualifications of your existing departments regarding implementing a enterprise CMS. No experience to some experience, this is a no brainer, rigorously vet top and middle partners and hire one to lead this effort. If your experienced still hire a partner and vet them but hire a middle to small partner and have them help, not lead.
  • "Sitecore Window": You could equate Sitecore in some implementation as throwing expensive parts at a car problem. If your business requirements and data consumption needs are not within this cost window then in the end on paper it will be difficult to see ROI or that there just wasn't a return. Then it will be time to look at other lower cost alternatives The initial cost is just the start. Over engineering and expensive horizontal integration partners can cost someone a promotion or job.
  • If your content workflows are complex, sites rendering data requirements are large and performance and scalability are paramount. Sitecore should be in your top 3.
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ScreenShots

Optimizely Web Experimentation Screenshots

Screenshot of the visual editor, used to make changes to the appearance and layout of a website.Screenshot of the results dashboard that displays experiment results.Screenshot of the integrations page, where integrations can be enabled.