Optimizely Content Management System

Score8.5 out of 10

352 Reviews and Ratings

What is Optimizely Content Management System?

Optimizely Content Management System (CMS) is purpose-built for marketers, and fully composable for developers. The CMS supports the end-to-end content lifecycle, helping users to deliver on-brand, high-impact digital experiences that 'wow' audiences.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Content delivery: Developers can use modern GraphQL and REST APIs to query content from any source and send it to any channel or device.

(SaaS CMS): Visual Builder: Add an image: Optimizely Visual Builder offers a range of editing features designed to make content creation and layout building intuitive and accessible to both technical and non-technical users. A drag-and-drop system is used to add, move, and rearrange elements within the layout, for quick and flexible content organization.

(SaaS CMS): Visual Builder: Create an experience: Create an Experience functionality in Optimizely Visual Builder offers a code-free way to build and manage captivating digital experiences. It offers pre-built content blocks or elements (like text, images, buttons, forms, etc.) that can be positioned on the page layout as desired. Visual Builder offers extensive options to customize the appearance and behavior of these elements. Users can modify colors, fonts, sizes, animations, and even add interactive features providing flexibility in arranging content, accommodating various design needs and responsiveness across different screen sizes.

(SaaS CMS): Visual Builder: Publish: The Visual Builder displays changes in real-time as they are made. This includes side-by-side previews for different devices like desktops, tablets, and mobiles. Before publishing, the Interactive Preview mode can be used to test elements like forms, buttons, and other interactive components to ensure they work as expected on the live site. Changes can then be published directly from the Visual Builder interface, making them instantly available to site visitors.

the central location to manage assets, editing and publishing content.

the integrated AI Translations, along with a full DAM, available directly in the CMS.

where to create and edit dynamic experiences in the Visual Builder, no coding required.

1 / 8

Role-based user permissions
Permissions to perform actions or access or modify data are assigned to roles, which are then assigned to users, reducing complexity of administration.
Category average: 8.3
Page templates
The CMS has standard webpage templates or types of web pages (e.g. homepage, article page, interior page, blog page, etc.); users can also build custom templates.
Category average: 7.9
Code quality / cleanliness
Code generated by WYSIWYG editor is clean and validates according to W3C standards.
Category average: 8

SEO support
The CMS helps users create the right website infrastructure (pagination, page headers, titles, meta tags, url structure, etc.) to increase the site’s visibility in search engine results.
Category average: 7.6
Bulk management
Users can change an attribute on a group of documents or sites all at once through features such as global search and replace, making bulk changes easier.
Category average: 7.3
Form generator
Users can build website forms for visitors to fill out.
Category average: 7

Steve Yates

Technical Digital Marketing Manager in Marketing at Freshfields (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Website management, website optimization, contact management and campaign management.

Pros

The content management for the website optimization works really well.
The modules are easy to use.
Edit pages are really easy to manipulate, very straightforward user interface to keep everything working well.

Cons

Nothing off the top of my head that can think. Sometimes you can click on something by mistake and then you end up going back, but overall it's a more like user issue rather than system issues. So nothing I can think of off the top of my head.

Return on Investment

I think all the content in one platform, the ability to share content between pages and reuse blocks for multiple users at the same time makes it really easy to collaborate on projects and work together.

Usability

Ivickza Sanchez, MBA View profile

Global Marketing Operations Director in Corporate at GE Healthcare (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Centralized collaboration, standardization of campaign and asset processes, one source of truth for files and assets, and by integrating with other tools, it became the hub of marketing operations.

Pros

Workflow management
integrations with other tools
intuitive interface
Excellent support
A true partner

Cons

Customer Journey Reporting
Integration with Sitecore
Project Planning

Return on Investment

Centralized all content in one place
Automated manual processes
Brought stakeholders into one place/one view
provided better visibility for reporting

Usability

Other Software Used

Adobe Marketo Engage

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Optimizely CMS is used on our main marketing website: www.veritiv.com. I am the product owner of the website and lead the development team on enhancements and maintenance. We use a CMS for our Non-Product Pages, such as Insights, Blogs, Articles, Campaigns, and more. This product is our main tool to publish content on our website. We have content authors who manage the content, and we, as developers, support their need for easier, more dynamic content creation.

Pros

Localization for all the available languages.
Visitor Groups can be set up, and all imaginable groups can be served according to their respective needs.
Version History - can always revert back to the previous version.
Preview Mode.

Cons

Optimizely Forms can be improved so we won't need to create our custom one.
Exporting and Importing pages and blocks are always failing for us.
If there's a way to improve copy-pasting pages and decide which languages can be carried over.

Return on Investment

Multisite is our biggest ROI because we can deploy an unlimited number of websites using a single code base.
All content is being served to stakeholders; we just need to customize it to their needs with the development team.
Publishing content is instant no turnaround time needed to develop a content change.

Usability

Other Software Used

inriver PIM, Atlassian Jira

James Wilkinson

Software Developer in Information Technology at Wilkinson Digital (1-10 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I typically do the development. I'll either suggest some requirements for a particular deliverable or sometimes they might be fed to me and I'll either advise in terms of whether Optimizely is being used in the correct kind of way, if we're following best practices for what the features are and the set of implementation details. And then from there, then I typically take care of the delivery, so I'll add to do the coding or if I'm working with another development team, I'll do the discovery, the user stories and hand it over to them.

Pros

I think the user interface for content admins is very good and very competitive. And compared to other providers, the technology that CMS in particular has. So the way it integrated the net ecosystem is very well because it follows the MBC pattern. So basically it just allows really simple implementations for what would normally be complex components on any other sort of vendor that's out there.

Cons

The SaaS product, I had mixed experiences using CMS SaaS just because I used it at time and it's very much in its infancy. Some of the features I think are still being defined. I've done a CMS SaaS implementation using the, it was sort of a hybrid sort of approach where it had some reliance on the past product because I think it was still being rolled out at the time. The documentation, for example, left a lot to be desired. I had to do quite a lot of complex GraphQL queries and realized that actually all of the schema then changed after we sort of fine tune the queries. It just felt like the SaaS product went to market a little bit prematurely. It would've been nice if it was sort of wait until a more refined version was produced and then the documentation and stuff was there to match it. I had trouble learning about SaaS and writing those queries and working with the documentation a little bit just because it was within its infancy.

Return on Investment

Positive return on investment in every business I've ever waived on has been huge. There's always been a very healthy ROI
negative can be the implementation details, so sometimes things can be a little bit over complicated with what areas that the business is looking for basically.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Umbraco CMS, Sitecore Content Hub and WordPress

Other Software Used

Salesforce CMS, Umbraco CMS

Pär Wissmark View profile

Consultant Manager, Solution Architect in Professional Services at Knowit Experience Linköping (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are developing Episerver solutions for our customers. It's usually used by the whole organization but represented by a small group of editors. We allways work from a user perspective. We want to increase KPI, increase ROI, and have happy users for our customers. The problems or possibilities depend on our customers' business areas, but we always feel that we can tune Episerver to solve our problems.

Pros

Content management, versioning, publish workflows
Language handlring, setup for enterprise companies
Continues product updates
Active community

Cons

SEO features
Support for enterprise companies that are using bulk publish with "Projects"
Redirect support, 301
Accessibility features

Return on Investment

The freedom in Episerver and the creativity developed by the partners generates great solutions
Episerver can be modified almost in any way that the customer demands
There could be more standard functionality in the base product. All websites should support accessibility, SEO, rewrites etc. At the moment its up to the partner to solve this.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

WordPress, Sitecore Web Content Management, Joomla!, Umbraco CMS, MS SharePoint, Drupal and SiteVision

Other Software Used

JetBrains Rider, GitHub Copilot

Adobe Experience Manager

Acquia Digital Experience Platform

Contentful

Contentstack

Optimizely Content Management System

What is Optimizely Content Management System?

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Key Features

Top Performing Features

Role-based user permissions

Page templates

Code quality / cleanliness

Areas for Improvement

SEO support

Bulk management

Form generator

Reviews

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Return on Investment

Usability

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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Return on Investment

Usability

Other Software Used

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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Return on Investment

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Other Software Used

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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Alternatives Considered

Other Software Used

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

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Return on Investment

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Other Software Used

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