Optimizely Content Management System.... a No Brainer!
Migrated to Optimizely Content Management System from Siteimprove and have seen a significant lift in scalability across my teams in …
Overview
What is Optimizely Content Management System?
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.
Recent Reviews
How Optimizely Content Management System Differs From Its Competitors
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Popular Features
- Publishing workflow (125)8.181%
- Page templates (126)8.080%
- Admin section (126)7.979%
- WYSIWYG editor (128)7.777%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
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Optimizely Content Management System Review | Ultimate CMS Solution?
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What is Optimizely Content Management System?
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.
Entry-level set up fee?
- Setup fee required
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.optimizely.com/plans/
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- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Introduction to Optimizely Content Management System
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- Competitors
- Tech Details
- Downloadables
- FAQs
What is Optimizely Content Management System?
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.
Its tools let marketers build channel-specific experiences in a few clicks (no coding needed), while Optimizely's GraphQL service enables content delivery from anywhere, to anywhere, to meet customers where they are.
Brand-approved content can be stored and organized for easy reuse with Optimizely's fully-integrated DAM, and data-driven personalization with AI-guided insights can be applied to deliver consistent, on-brand content that's optimized for individuals, in real-time.
Optimizely Content Management System Features
Web Content Creation Features
- Supported: WYSIWYG editor
- Supported: Code quality / cleanliness
- Supported: Content versioning
- Supported: Admin section
- Supported: Page templates
- Supported: Library of website themes
- Supported: Mobile optimization / responsive design
- Supported: Publishing workflow
- Supported: Form generator
- Supported: Content scheduling
Web Content Management Features
- Supported: Internal content search
- Supported: Content taxonomy
- Supported: SEO support
- Supported: Browser compatibility
- Supported: Bulk management
- Supported: Page caching
- Supported: Availability / breadth of extensions
- Supported: Built-in e-commerce / shopping cart
- Supported: E-commerce / shopping cart extension
- Supported: Community / comment management
- Supported: Import / export
- Supported: Website analytics
Platform & Infrastructure Features
- Supported: API
- Supported: Internationalization / multi-language
Security Features
- Supported: Role-based user permissions
- Supported: Multi-factor authentication
- Supported: User-level audit trail
- Supported: Version history
- Supported: Simple roll-back capabilities
CMS programming language or framework Features
- Supported: .NET
Optimizely Content Management System Screenshots
Optimizely Content Management System Integrations
- Optimizely Content Marketing Platform
- Google Analytics
- Smartling
- LanguageWire
- Salesforce
- Microsoft Dynamics
- Marketo
- HubSpot
- Lionbridge
Optimizely Content Management System Competitors
Optimizely Content Management System Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Linux |
| Mobile Application | No |
Optimizely Content Management System Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Sitecore Experience Manager, Adobe Experience Manager, and Acquia Digital Experience Platform are common alternatives for Optimizely Content Management System.
Reviewers rate Role-based user permissions highest, with a score of 8.5.
The most common users of Optimizely Content Management System are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Reviews and Ratings
(254)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-19 of 19)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
November 10, 2023
Optimizing for Success
We manage our college website and market our programs to prospective students using Optimizely CMS to ensure that all information is up-to-date. Optimizely CMS makes it easy to manage multiple web users that update content on their respective web pages. We use the CMS on a daily basis to push out marketable information and awareness about our college and the different programs we have available to our constituents.
- Scheduling content on to display or be removed from the website
- Easy to use
- Setting up permissions and accounts is simple
- A better way to capture analytics
- Reporting broken links
- Notifications of activity within the CMS
October 13, 2023
CMS Platform for a Small Organization
We use Optimizely Content Management System for delivery of written education content and marketing materials to potential certification candidates.
- Ease of Use
- Developer Access
- Permissions
- Content Approval
- Reduce the amount of steps to make changes to multiple pages
- SEO and Redirect Tools
- User training tools Built in
October 13, 2023
Opticon 2023 Review
Optimizely Content Management System is used for content-managed public websites with my company by content authors in marketing organizations. It addresses our challenges with building, maintaining, and improving our customer experiences.
- User Experience
- Extensibility of PaaS Core
- Integration with Digital Asset Management
- Role based permissions
- Workflow integration, specifically the previewing functionality
October 12, 2023
Optimizely Content Management System offers unique value, but still needs work clearly explaining features->purchased item
We are replacing our legacy website which is hand coded .NET with Optimizely DXP + Commerce. It handles our whitelabeling for our educational partners with minimal custom config.
- Centralized web management functions
- access control and permissions
- Built in Commerce system
- Integration with acquired companies is rough
- Explaination of product capability map to purchaseable items (intentially?) unclear
October 12, 2023
Early indications are good but more information is needed.
We use Epi to manage content for our core marketing and authenticated sites - this includes three marketing sites and fifteen authenticated sites. We have a complex permissions chassis that underlies our sites to ensure that users of the sites only see content on the products and solutions that are approved for their organizations. Our sites include several of our transactional tools that allow our customers to submit business to us electronically.
- Allows marketing content managers to quickly and easily adjust content, add pages and sections, and manage the main aspects of the site.
- Provides flexibility with the use of the content blocks, graphics, and media across sites.
- Our instance of Epi does not allow content authors to see thumbnails of graphics when building content blocks and pages.
- Our instance of Epi is fairly inflexible in the way the content blocks and pages were developed - if a business need has changed since the original scope of the page or block, we can't easily make adjustments.
We use Optimizely Content Management System to host our external website for the university. It helps us market and sell the university. It allows us to effectively tell the unique story of our university and convert site users to applicants.
- Allow for many users with different workflows and permissions
- Store content and data an an organized manner
- Allow for effective taxonomy and information sharing across a wide range of pages
- Spelling and grammar check integrated into the system
- More clear and robust reporting mechanisms for things like data sync and automated jobs
- Better monitoring and alert functions of potential issues out of the box
October 11, 2023
A game changer when it comes to website management
Optimizely Content Management System enables our global marketing digital strategies supporting more than 5 websites in different languages. Our main use case revolves around B2B content marketing.
- Available across the globe
- Easy to manage content
- Enables cross organization collaboration
- Expansion within China territory
- Unification of UI for all the various products
- Examples of how to execute personalization and content recommendation for marketers
July 06, 2023
Ease of Use, Peace of Mind
We are using to revamp/rebrand our external-facing .org site.
Business problems: outdated look/functionality, less responsive to mobile needs
Scope of use: wholesale change/redo on entire site. It is a massive undertaking.
Future state: we will be using to redo our intranet site (only visible to employee)
Business problems: outdated look/functionality, less responsive to mobile needs
Scope of use: wholesale change/redo on entire site. It is a massive undertaking.
Future state: we will be using to redo our intranet site (only visible to employee)
- Rapid changes
- Ease of use with content blocks
- Easy to learn/implement
- Optimizely Academy classes were outstanding
- Faster time to preview changes
- An onscreen indicator of any changes ... for example: I accidently click in a body of text and accidentally create a type or unintended deletion.
January 05, 2023
Overview from a trainee
Fully featured traditional CMS, in which having a code-first approach benefits the speed of developers work greatly.
Current use cases have been supporting and extending previously built solutions, or upgrading them to more recent Optimizely CMS / Content Cloud versions, both using only CMS or CMS + Optimizely Commerce platforms (with deployment on Optimizely DXP).
- Code first approach
- Very easily integrated with its own Optimizely Commerce platform
- The roles & permissions have a great amount of flexibility
- The visual CMS editing experience doesn't feel as polished as some of its competitors
- Most of present information and documentation you'll find isn't relevant to the newest CMS 12 version, which is considered by Optimizely as the next version to adopt as it's built on more recent .NET Core version
September 30, 2021
Having Spent Many Years With the Product, Can You Believe I Still Speak Highly of It?
We have set up content authoring teams with different permissions. There are people whose job it is to simply curate content, but they need to have it reviewed and do not publish themselves. There are people who approve the work of content authors and also schedule the publishing of content when it makes sense to do so. Then, there are people in the viewers' group. They can see content before it's published and can give opinions on legal-speak, etc. Other groups are assigned specific permissions for special parts of the site. We also have multiple sites. This means additional teams are responsible for their own complete site content. They can run A/B tests, use shared content blocks between sites, or have custom functionality built for them specifically for their needs. Older static sites are easily migrated into the CMS, leveraging the power of the CMS and freeing up developers from having to maintain basic site content on behalf of the business stakeholders. This means they can be more focused on solving real business problems.
- It's easy and fun to use. You can take someone with no experience in content management and they pick it up very quickly.
- It is capable of managing multiple sites in multiple languages.
- It has good uptime. Deployments are easy and with hot-swapping, you would never know the site was being updated in the background.
- The searching capabilities are excellent. Not only can it index your own site but other content as well.
- The user guide could be fleshed out more.
- Its out-of-the-box functionality isn't always truly out-of-the-box. You are given a working skeleton and left to flesh out much more than would be preferred.
- The user interface is extendable, meaning it can be changed and customized. However, it is difficult and tricky.
July 20, 2021
An great simple solution with room to grow
Optimizely Content Cloud [(formerly Episerver Content Cloud)] is currently utilized as a CMS primarily by our Marketing and IT departments in our organization. It handles the managing of users, customer accounts and integration jobs.
- Managing Users
- Managing Customers
- Order Management
- Job Integration - it's very easy to find and edit jobs if the pre-requisited skills are available.
- Product Line vs Brand vs Manufacturer delineation, the website is built mainly to support brands and doesn't really differentiate when it comes to features (such as brand supplier pages) which is challenging especially when it comes to brand vs manufacturer. You might want to have both a manufacturer page and a brand page for a product which isn't really supported.
- With a very large database (over 1.5 million products), there can be some unique bugs, such as slowness or freezing when searching for products. There are workarounds such as by using the filter button instead.
- Could really use a "Product List" feature, so that products can be added to a list and then a customer landing page can be built for that list and email campaigns targeting that list can be used.
It maintains 75% of our company websites with the plan to convert all the websites to Episerver. It is being used by our Marketing and Merchandising departments.
- Ease and ability to make changes to Website content.
- Easy to maintain.
- Non-technical staff are able to understand the how the website is configured.
- A better explanation of Security/Permissions for Functions. It was a trial by fire to determine which area each Permission controlled. I had to create a spreadsheet turn off and on specific areas and document what was taken away as access. It was very time-consuming.
- Speaking of permissions for functions, the design could be better. The EDIT button does not align properly to the given permission.
May 28, 2019
A good, easy-to-use CMS for large organizations
Episerver Web Content Management System is used by our organization to manage content on our public facing website. It is used across the whole organization, with users in each department that has a public facing web page trained on updating content in the system. It assures that the public is aware of relevant information on the website.
- Easy-to-use interface
- Permissions setup
- Back-end website map
- Internal link mapping
- Mobile editing
- Email notifications
November 12, 2015
Ektron CMS400: Great Bang for the Buck
We use Ektron CMS400 for our organization's public-facing web site. It it used across the entire organization. Sometimes we use it for limited B2B and intranet purposes. As a smaller institution of higher education, financial resources are always a concern. Ektron CMS400 provides a wealth of power, flexibility, and features for an affordable price vs. the competition. Great bang for the buck. It addresses our business need for a central web content management system, including versioning, workflow, and permissions.
- From a developer perspective, Ektron CMS400 is powerful and flexible. All the features and functionality of the system are accessible to the developer through a well documented API.
- The system has had great backwards compatibility through numerous upgrade cycles. Security patches have been problem-free.
- Ektron CMS400 is great for working with structured data. I feel this is a key strength. It is simple to build smart forms for authoring content with structured data. The data is then available in XML format as individual items or collections of items, and may be displayed or applied as desired.
- The evolution of the product has focused on architecture and functionality that is of value in large distributed installations, but less so for smaller 1 or 2 server implementations.
- Development of the back end authoring and administrative interface has lagged. It has received a cosmetic face lift over the years, but has received little attention in regards to ease-of-use and usability. To some degree, it has poor discoverability with many idiosyncratic UI conventions.
- Our authors complain about learning and retaining the knowledge for using the authoring interface. In Ektron's usage model, it is a skilled role. We would prefer the authoring be more intuitive. I don't feel Ektron necessarily lags behind the competition in this area, but there is lots of room for improvement and differentiation here if they chose to make this a priority.
September 30, 2015
Ektron system serves non-profit
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Ektron CMS serves as the platform for seven of the organization's websites. The sites include a main, general organization identity website, and six smaller sites that support annual events and special interest campaigns. Sites are administered and updated by marketing staff, and a few other line department staff within the organization. The organization adopted Ektron CMS (at version 4) because it was cost-effective, and relatively easy to set up and manage.
- The system has been very stable and dependable - up-time has been nearly 100%.
- Content editing is relatively simple and flexible, and it's easy to include images and video in page layouts.
- In user management, security and permissions are flexible and easy to administer. Content approval chains are simple to set up.
- The system includes advanced features such as manual or rule-based content aliasing, widget-based page layout, blogging, content rating, and integrated analytics.
- Ektron support staff are prompt and helpful when we encounter problems. Unlimited support is offered to licensees.
- The system integrates seamlessly with our organization's customer management system for e-commerce.
- Content editing has become challenging as new browser versions are released. Some operations of the content editor in v8.6 are unstable with recent versions of IE, Firefox and Chrome, and can cause loss of work if the user is not careful. We hope this will be addressed in the next upgrade. Only other option would be to lock down browser upgrades in our shop, but that doesn't seem safe.
- The upgrade process has become more difficult with each new version. We used to perform upgrades and any needed cleanup in-house, but Ektron now recommends having this work done by a partner re-seller, adding significant cost.
- Site search was based on index-server until v8.0. It was simple to set up, very reliable and met all our needs. Newer versions are much more complex to setup and require more resources.
July 17, 2015
William Shatner screaming "Ektrooooohhhhnnn" instead of Khan sums up our experience with Ektron
The Ektron Web Content Management System is being used throughout the organization for an external, marketing website and for an internal website used by staff and students. The content for the external website is primarily input by one department with about a dozen contributors across the organization. Everyone within the organization has permission to edit content for the internal website. Ektron allowed distributed content editing, thus avoiding a bottleneck of content editing.
- Ektron does provide the ability for developers to program additional features, widgets, and apps utilizing both .NET components and Ektron components.
- It allows an organization to use their LDAP/AD system to automatically create user accounts and permissions.
- By utilizing the pagebuilder module, non-developers can create new pages with a unique content structure by dragging widgets onto a page and selecting content for each widget. Some of the prebuilt widgets allow for the addition of content from YouTube, Brightcove, news feeder, calendar, blogs, flickr, etc
- The work area is not very user friendly and is based on a file folder system similar to a Windows based system which can cause some user problems with people who use a Mac.
- Ektron's support system works as a ticket-based system. Your ticket may sit in a queue for a day before you hear from someone.
- The Ektron system doesn't lend itself well to responsive design.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I used to support Ektron CMS for customers of the product, and then I specialized in integrating solutions using Ektron CMS as the primary system to power intranets and public facing websites. It used to power our personal website at a past job, but my primary interaction with it was to build solutions for customer's needs. Organizations implementing Ektron CMS on the public facing side were looking to empower marketers to manage the content on the website. Most companies I worked with were managing their website through the IT department and most IT departments did not want to continue to manage email requests for small HTML changes. For internal implementations, organizations were looking to create a social atmosphere with their intranet to serve documents to employees and provide a way for internal employees to connect to one another or access important information.
- It's an all in one solution that can be built to suit your needs. From the simple job of managing content and resources like images and documents, to social components like activity boards, messaging services, and eCommerce.
- The interface provides a solid structure to configure components of the application to allow quick and easy content entry and management. Smart Forms, for example, provide a nice way to structure content entry for marketers and non-technical users so they are limited to the scope a developer needs, but are allowed flexibility to the degree the author might need.
- Page Builder allows a developer to set up various templates for the website to be flexible enough for a marketer to be able to add content and create "pages" on the website that suite the needs of the department or user. Ektron's "widgets" are similar enough to standard .NET user controls that a developer familiar with them can create custom ones for Page Builder pages pretty successfully.
- Recent updates have added support for SOLR as a search engine allowing you the freedom to move away from the strong licensing structure of Microsoft Search Server and FAST if your organization is more familiar with the APACHE offering.
- The Document Management System (DMS) built-in provides the ability to add typical office documents into the system complete with search, versioning, and permission and privacy control.
- The API is pretty powerful and flexible when you become familiar with all the levels and features available through it.
- Some users feel the management interface (Workarea) feels a little dated or confusing with a typical Windows-like folder tree on the left and a right pane that changes based on the section of the Workarea you are in. Visual cues for buttons and components are not always obvious.
- While the interface enables you to structure the site and add content with faster and easier setup than some other competing products on the market, as with many the competition, the implementation is only as good as the administrator configures it, and over the years I have found this to be one of the biggest complaints and problems with the system.
- The CMS has many features packed in for marketers, developers, administrators, and users, and it has a great deal of potential to be a powerful system because of them. But many of them feel half-baked into the system more to serve as keywords for a sales pitch or a checklist as opposed to being a solid and usable addition to the system. That's not to say that many of these features are not usable, but they are not as usable or great as they could be. For example, the eCommerce component tends to feel clunky or confusing for users managing products in it. The intranet components, like activity boards or messaging, are difficult to manage in the Workarea because of the interface and lack of access to features that exist and are otherwise hidden from the Workarea or are available only through a front-end widget.
- The API can be very powerful, and I find most of the time I leverage that to build custom components and controls, but the documentation, though much better now than it has been in past years, is still struggling to provide the level of detail to the various methods and libraries available through the product. This is one area where some of the competition outshines. With someone who has many years of professional experience with the product this is not as big an issue as the API is fairly easy to remember, but for new developers this can be a challenge.
- Support used to be more of a hit-or-miss roller-coaster ride, and while it has improved in the past years, it's still bumpy for some people. The positive side of this is they have a solid group of community users that are willing to help answer questions and provide samples or demo code where they can to enable new and existing users and developers.
- While the community is very helpful and willing through various social spheres, like Stack Overflow, Twitter, and Ektron's Developer Forums, Ektron's own Developer Forums are a bit rough to use, making that piece more challenging than it should be. As mentioned, however, they have very helpful and active community members that patrol, and a few internal users that are fairly "hell-bent" on making sure that questions are seen by anyone who might be able to assist. I always recommend Tweeting about something after posting it, for optimal exposure.
- Ektron's support for MVC is probably it's biggest, obvious weakness currently. While the competition has moved on to solid support for MVC, Ektron's strength is still with Webforms. The three-tier architecture Ektron has built provides a similar approach, but it still cannot compete with true MVC support. If your organization is dedicated to an MVC implementation, a different solution might suit you better.
February 25, 2014
The best CMS for .Net customization
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Ektron to manage content, create dynamic pages, create widgets, and templates.
- Manage user security and roles
- Manage content and rollback
- .Net inetgration
- Ektron sometimes tries to clean up javascript and HTML that we enter with code for specific enhancements that we need to do. Ektron tries to clean some of this code up when it saves the content, thereby removing our intended implementation.
February 25, 2014
Ektron CMS is good.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
My company is an Ektron integrator and partner. Ektron's Content Management System is used by clients to maintain their websites. Typical clients are associations that have an Association Management System that plugs into the Content Management System. They manage the permissions of content, create workgroups, set up notification alerts for administrative users and members.
The system is typically used throughout an organization as it is user friendly and intuitive. The business problem it addresses is disseminating content online in an efficient and effective manner.
The system is typically used throughout an organization as it is user friendly and intuitive. The business problem it addresses is disseminating content online in an efficient and effective manner.
- Content creation
- User and workgroup creation with AMS
- Permissions and control of information
- Admin dashboard should have a default setup
- Integrate videos into Help component of Admin