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Optimizely Content Management System

Optimizely Content Management System

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.

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Recent Reviews

Optimizing for Success

9 out of 10
November 10, 2023
Incentivized
We manage our college website and market our programs to prospective students using Optimizely CMS to ensure that all information is …
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A Solid CMS Platform

8 out of 10
October 16, 2023
Incentivized
We use the ptimizely Content Management System to manage content on our B2B website. The product enables us to quickly and consistently …
Continue reading
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 16 features
  • Publishing workflow (125)
    8.1
    81%
  • Page templates (126)
    8.0
    80%
  • Admin section (126)
    7.9
    79%
  • WYSIWYG editor (128)
    7.7
    77%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Video Reviews

5 videos

Software Engineer doesn't mince words | Optimizely Content Management System Review
04:01
Optimizely Content Management System Review - E-Com Manager's Take
05:46
Optimizely Content Management System Review | Ultimate CMS Solution?
05:01
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Pricing

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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/

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Product Demos

Introduction to Optimizely Content Management System

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Features

Security

This component helps a company minimize the security risks by controlling access to the software and its data, and encouraging best practices among users.

8.5
Avg 8.0

Platform & Infrastructure

Features related to platform-wide settings and structure, such as permissions, languages, integrations, customizations, etc.

8.1
Avg 7.7

Web Content Creation

Features that support the creation of website content.

7.6
Avg 7.6

Web Content Management

Features for managing website content

7.6
Avg 7.3
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Product Details

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

Screenshot of SaaS CMS edit view: A drag-and-drop UI authoring and on-page editing lets marketers and content creators build content experiences.Screenshot of Content delivery: Developers can use modern GraphQL and REST APIs to query content from any source and send it to any channel or device.Screenshot of Screenshot of DAMConnector: The fully featured Optimizely Digital Asset Management can connect to Optimizely CMS to serve as the single source of truth for brand assets.

Optimizely Content Management System Integrations

Optimizely Content Management System Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux
Mobile ApplicationNo

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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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(255)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 111)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Migrated to Optimizely Content Management System from Siteimprove and have seen a significant lift in scalability across my teams in building web pages and site functionality.
  • Create templated pages
  • Reuse blocks across multiple pages
  • Allow simple changes to blocks at scale
  • Icon and image library experience
  • Intregration with analytics within the platform
  • Syncing within 3rd party apps
Amazing CMS compared to Sitecore that has allowed my team to work faster and more efficient.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The CMS is used to power our public facing Marketing website. The CMS allows us to easily create and share content with our users.
  • Easily create new page templates and blocks
  • Hosts our site as a PaaS
  • Content creation process on the backend
  • AI Features (Search & Navigation/Find, Image Tags/Descriptions)
  • Redirect Manager, needs a 3rd party tool like SEO Toolbox
  • Sitemap Generator, needs a 3rd party tool like SEO Toolbox
  • Built in options for hiding/showing properties/tabs, needs a 3rd party tool like Alloy.HideTabs
It's extremely well suited to host and manages website.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Optimizely Content Management System primarily for marketing and promotions on our Optimizely hosted website. We use this service to also manage all imported custom content that lives/lived on the website.
  • Makes it easy to add important widgets to our website such as a carousel
  • Stores and manages imported content in the content library for quick access/use
  • Rich content widget allows for deeper customization utilizing the html source code
  • Promotions could use bolstering (specifically the ability to cap a promotion at a specific $ value)
  • In my experience, sometimes the CMS glitches out and takes me to the sign on page with no way of returning to the page I was editing
  • Content widgets should include a widget for quick spacing in my opinion. This currently needs to be done via roundabout ways such as editing the html to manipulate padding, breaks, and margins
I thinkOptimizely Content Management System is perfect for people that aren't experienced in html, css, and js. It is a quick way to implement content on webpages without the need for much customization. Having a background in computer science, I believe that the CMS is lacking the ability to be customizable and therefor most content created ends up being relatively cookie cutter in nature.
November 10, 2023

Optimizing for Success

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
It is well suited for managing or updating a website with hundreds of web pages and tracking accountability for quality insurance.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it to build landing pages, marketing content, hundreds of content pages for campaigns, promotions, homepage, header, footer. So the challenges you're solving is equipping marketers to do their job without the need of development.
  • Enabling marketers to create content without having to go to the development team. That's what that Spire CMS really does for you.
  • 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.
It's well suited for commerce customers. So if your business is focused on selling things, that's your general funnel. It's a good CMS for that because the core of your site is to sell product and marketing content is kind of secondary, maybe even tertiary to that. So that's a good fit. It would be a bad fit if you were building a lifestyle website where maybe you're not trying to monetize product or even get quote requests, you're like a blog or you're creating lots of content. It would not be a good fit for that
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it to maintain our 9 e-commerce websites, and we use the content management system to provide blog posts and the latest content for SEO purposes and for distributing marketing initiatives to all of our users.
  • Managing many websites, it does very well. The scalability, managing content between 9 websites and reusing content, it does that really well. And I would say it specializes and does good in those areas.
  • I think the standardization around terms and user experience across the platform overall. From what I understand, the platform has grown and added a lot of features through acquisitions and so some of the UI and terms for different features can be different depending on where you are within the system. So more cohesiveness, which we've experienced by upgrading to CMS 12 from CMS 11. They've done a lot of that, which is good. But I would say that's one area where our team has had a larger learning curve.
Very well suited for content management and for marketing initiatives. I think the integrations that it has with third party platforms are very usable and good for marketing teams. Less appropriate, I would say for just static websites that don't do much blog posts and don't require much content. So for just smaller scale websites it might be a little bit too complex or overdone in those cases.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use the Optimizely Content Management System to manage content for our external facing website and application member portal application.
  • One thing that we have started doing that I think does well is the personalization of content based on visitor groups. The previous product we had did nothing like that. It was a very static-only type of content management system. So we've had good success with that aspect of it.
  • We also have the Optimizely Data Platform and I do not find that to be very user-friendly. I cannot figure out how to use it properly and we haven't had access to good training on how to use it.
I would recommend it. I don't have any drawbacks that I've had with it at all. I can't update my website without it.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Stream lining content management for customers websites that allow marketers to make changes to websites without always needing the help of a developer.
  • WYSIWYG Editor
  • Search Functionality
  • Openness to integrations
  • There is a large development lift for an initial site build.
  • The time to launch is fairly long, but worth it if done right.
  • Not all products are integrated into the CMS interface.
Mid market and enterprise organizations where there is some development team that can help support the site. Also, if the company has a lot of content and a robust content calendar, Optimizely Content Management System is a good fit. If the site can be static because updates are not being made often, Optimizely CMS is not the right fit.
October 16, 2023

A Solid CMS Platform

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use the ptimizely Content Management System to manage content on our B2B website. The product enables us to quickly and consistently create and manage our site content. We use page templates and assets that our team created in the system to enforce the structure and voice that we use for our brand.
  • Web content management
  • versatile page templates
  • resource pages
  • content search
  • clunky interface
  • building templates too technical
The system is well suited for companies with basic requirements for content management that may not have a large IT department, but still want the flexibility to create their own templates and manage a large number of pages, assets and resources. The general structure and features that are available out of the box provide a great starting point for any company.
Brian Hill | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Ease of use for marketers to create content without having to get technical teams involved. It's intuitive interface allows even the most non technical people to create and publish pages.
  • Ease of User
  • Many out of the box features
  • Reliable
  • Overall cost
  • Too many confusing add ons
  • Clear path on search
It's enterprise level software that feels that way. It's ease of use and reliability make it a strong contender for any client we work with. Being a leader in the space makes Optimizely an easy recommendation!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it to build hyper-personalized content for our customers. One of our customers was struggling with reaching GenZ and was looking for highly personalized content for GenZ with a focus on user journeys.
  • Personalization
  • Experimentation
  • Content Marketing
  • Composability is good, but make it easier and more configurable
If you need hyper-personalization at an affordable price - Optimizely Content Management System is the go-to option.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it to provide our customers with an easy/fast way to update/create content and publish that content to the live website. Low turnaround time from request to creation to promotion on the website.
  • Content creation and updates
  • User workflow
  • Data Import/export to new environment
  • Easy set up of initial start up implementation
  • Editor performance
  • Easier way to find content that is referencing items that has been deleted
  • Easier way to manage project
Not sure at this time.
Jeshua Unger | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
I work with smaller organizations, and it is frequently out of budget for smaller businesses, so I have to recommend other CMSs.
October 13, 2023

Great product

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have over 50 agencies and around 100 sub-sites, and Optimizely Content Management System has been instrumental in helping us maintain our website.
  • Ease of use for the end users
  • Ease of development
  • Personalization
  • Projects are difficult - It's difficult for users to know they are in a project, and it can cause confusion.
It is a great system, easy to develop and is extremely fast and powerful compared to other CMSs I've used.
October 13, 2023

Opticon 2023 Review

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Optimizely Content Management System is well suited for businesses that highly value consistent branding, varied content author experience, and a need to deliver timely content.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it to host our 7 websites including ours. We have lot of scope to achieve the high level of Digital Maturity as an organization but Optimizely Content Management System provides the system which is easy to use for Marketers and content can be updated without the help of developers. In my opinion, UI can be a bit better , but we like the support from their team.
  • Super easy deployment
  • Easy to make code changes
  • Simple UI
  • Better UI for Languages
  • CMS 12 has lot of header space up top
  • Dojo is so hard to fix or debug
I think it's best suited for organizations with non-tech marketers. Blocks provide flexibility to update them as per the customer needs, which is great. Personalization is a great feature. In my opinion, UI is not very intuitive and sometimes users struggle to update content and require training. In my opinion, Nested blocks are not great for new users and sometimes users would get lost that where they were at the lifecycle of a page
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Optimizely Content Management System provides us an easy to use user management system, page publishing interface and tools for content creators to update our site on a regular basis. It connects to Optimizely's Commerce system to integrate ecommerce and static page content into one platform. As a developer, we have full flexibility to create every customization that we require for our business.
  • Easy administration
  • Content Page creation
  • User Management
  • A view of current features missing from current code implementation
  • Alerts of critical errors
  • Metrics on server performance issues that can be improved
Having code backend access, Optimizely Content Management System gives more control than strict Saas solutions like BigCommerce/Shopify for ecommerce websites. There is enough documentation and examples of common use-cases to get started from an amateur or unfamiliar perspective. Optimizely Support is excellent and responds to complex issues quickly and professionally. Highly recommended.
October 12, 2023

Dependable CMS

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Optimizely Content Management System for some of our clients digital experiences. We leverage the CMS to increase conversion rates and other business objectives for our clients. The ability to customize and extend the platform to be meet the unique business requirements of the customer make Optimizely Content Management System an ideal platform to develop on.
  • Extensibility
  • Performance
  • Ease of use
  • In my opinion, the interface feels dated in some areas
  • In my opinion, it's Slow to enter headless space and not many customer examples
  • Support challenges at times getting resolution to issues
  • In my experience, there have been some nasty bugs in recent releases
Traditional deployment with the CMS can provide quick time to market and provide excellent ROI by coupling the content management and delivery. Great for smaller teams who want to move fast. Need to see more customer examples of headless sites before recommending it in those scenarios. Would also like to see more integration between the different products of the suite.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Optimizely Content Management System to render content on our 3 different websites. B2B, B2C , and Static website for donations. Optimizely Content Management System built along with Optimizely has given us the cutting edge technology to leverage personalization based on variety of user types. Now the users when coming to our site see what they need to see which enables them to convert better than before. We have seen a huge increase in our conversion rates since the implementation of optimizely CMS and Commerce. Optimizely Content Management System and/or Commerce can be easily integrated with many new innovative technologies in the market. Highly recommend this product to anyone who is looking for a more future proof technology to help grow their business.
  • Personalized Content
  • Able to integrate with most other innovative tools
  • Authoring workflows are great to review the contents are different level and approve before it goes live
  • The website is highly performant
  • Geographic visitor groups: It would be really nice to see if they could use another tool for this which does not use the space on our DXP hosting
Optimizely Content Management System can pretty much be used for any business. It is a great platform that can add value to any business with its personalization reach features
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use the DXP to manage our business-to-business website and its related content.
  • Page creation
  • Page editing
  • Site administration
  • Needs more customer service portal functionality out of the box
  • More visibility to SEO properties
  • Better content search
Optimizely Content Management System is well suited to run any website for a medium to large sized enterprise. It has many of the features necessary to enable content editors (non-technical users) to be able to administer a website without IT involvement.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our website runs on Optimizely Content Management System, and the speed and efficiency that we can make and publish changes on our site has been a game changer. It's allowed us to focus less on meticulously publishing content on our site and more on our visitors. The DAM has also been very helpful in organizing our digital assets, allowing us to quickly find files and use them in the right places.
  • Easy site management with quick turnarounds on updating and publishing content
  • Adding digital assets and organizing them for quick and easy access
  • The search functionality is much better than we had before, allowing us to find search terms that are frequently used, and others that aren't delivering the right results, allowing us to prepare for those search terms.
  • Training videos could be helpful for all the tools that I have available to me. I love the potential of them all, but I worry I don't understand how to fully take advantage of all the capabilities there.
  • Some tools feel more buried than others, making it hard to get the most out of the CMS.
  • I wish I had some more developer tools so I could make quick and easy fixes rather than reaching out to our developers to do it for me. I have skills in that area, and I feel like I can't take advantage of them anymore.
It's been great for our small team as we've been able to streamline the content creation and publishing processes, allowing us to branch out into other important areas such as user testing.

However, I do wish I had more access to the development side, as we don't have our own dedicated development team. Instead we've outsourced that, and they've done a great job! I just wish I had the ability to take care of some of the development work rather than having to wait on their busy timetable.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it to build amazing CMS websites for our customers. We help our clients to build user friendly websites.
  • Easy Content Management
  • Good Media Services
  • Visitor Group Feature
  • SAAS, across the board
It is best suited for companies who wants to build websites faster and maintain it for longer term
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are still in the "crawl" stage, to be honest. Very basic usage of product attribution and layout management. We are working with a 3rd Party to overhaul the platform as well as implementing an MDM to better manage our product content.
  • Well laid out UI and intuitive UX
  • Ability to easily select and deselect specific content or rules
  • Ability to see what you changed and review before publishing
  • Would like better mass change tools
  • For a novice user, having "everything" available can be overwhelming vs. giving the user a "recommended" set of things to manage and then opting in and enhancing as they learn and can do more.
I'd say appropriate for a somewhat mature marketing/eComm organization with at least one dedicated FTE running just the CMS.

Less than that, and it could be, as my son would say "OP" and require a lot of prioritization if it's just "part of someone's job".
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our use case involves a need to create a core default website, along with numerous "franchise" websites. Each franchise website can inherit content from the base site, or have unique and distinct content. The Optimizely Content Management System solution has helped us be able to manage this implementation easily and seamlessly. We tried a number of other CMS products prior to the purchase decision, and no other product came close to meeting our very specific needs.
  • Ability to manage users in the environment
  • Allow inheritance models
  • Flexible implementation options
  • Able to separate our presentation layer from underlying APIs built separately
  • In my opinion, the interface is dated (we're implemented on version 11)
  • In my opinion, upgrade path to version 12 is unclear
  • Hosting costs are high
The product is most appropriate in situations of varying dynamic degree. Is able to integrate with external security and authentication providers.

Might be overkill for a more static site with little to no change over time.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it for Franchising model. We use it as a National level website (corporate) and local level (franchising.)
  • Approval process
  • National local relationship
  • Better visual interface
  • Speed
Well suited for complex business needs including workflows, approvals, experimentation. Not well suited for basic website creation.
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