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.
Likelihood to Recommend
Every solution can be implemented in Optimizely CMS, but it's not done by default. It should be customized by developing the solution that our marketing partner needs. One thing that can also be improved is the ability to have a DAM built into Optimizely, so we won't have to integrate a DAM platform into our website.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
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
Likelihood to Recommend
They have closely partnered with us to help us solved our business needs and challenges. Offered many opportunities to connect with other users to share experiences and learnings. Big core value is continuous improvement - they are always looking at ways to make their products better leveraging customer's feedback.
We are currently building out our website structure into Optimizely Content Management System from Drupal and combining what is 35 different websites into one mega structure built on variable design modules to keep branding consistency across the board. We currently suffer from platform updates and keeping brand guidelines across changing materials. doing so is allowing us to translate and update things quicker and easier in a more manageable way
Pros
Ease of use and navigation
Organization of assets
The builder is one of the better versions on the market
Cons
Integrations with 3rd parties
More in-depth SEO capabilities
Variable content types are a bit scary to start
Likelihood to Recommend
If you want to build a website quickly there are plenty of ways to do so with some great examples and plenty of support both from the company and in the forums. if you want to build a more complex structure you can but be ready to spend the time to build exactly what you need as a solid foundation goes a massive way before building out content and making those choices early and sticking with them helps
Optimizely Content Management System powers the corporate websites and allows complete control of content across the board. We utilize Optimizely Content Management System v11 and 12 and soon all websites will be on 12.
Allows for quick and easy spool up of new SEM pages using templated design blocks and then additional custom blocks for specific use cases.
Pros
Management of pages
Management of assets
Integrates well with other third party tools
Cons
One really has to buy the entire tech stack to get maximum benefits
Some third party tools will require custom integration
While extremely full featured; one could always ask for more
Likelihood to Recommend
I’ve found it works well for sparse sites as well as for significantly larger sites with multiple subthemes along with the primary theme. It also offers the perfect mix of WYSIWYG and code level manipulation. Also full featured and allows for the ultimate in customization when it comes to marketing needs.
It helps us solve for more personalized website experiences. It is user friendly, adaptable, and easy to use. We leverage it for creating positive on site experiences for our customers and prospects. We customize web pages and design by persona which has helped us acquire new customers and satisfy existing customers.
Pros
Enables scalability
Strengthens design
Enhances digital experiences
Cons
Integrations
SEO best practices
Training
Likelihood to Recommend
It is well suited for content driven organizations. It works very well for marketing and content teams as well as web dev teams. The variety of use cases is wide, but the benefit of leveraging a tool that offers structure, design, and creativity is always a win.
VU
Verified User
C-Level Executive in Marketing (5001-10,000 employees)
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
We use it for website management, website optimization, so it's a perfect system for website management and collaboration within the team for other people that work on projects simultaneously.
We use this website to use as the CMS platform to manage our website real estate. We are migrating websites over from our internal old CMS system into Optimizely, which is part of a large web migration project, which is due to take place for another year, maybe year and a half, maybe so for quite a long time.
Pros
It enhances the contact experience for our users.
It also enables the content marketers and digital people that we work with, the ability to deliver better website experiences for our users.
Cons
I think Optimizely is great. I'm trying to think of one. I'm struggling. I can't think of one at the moment, I'll be honest with you.
Likelihood to Recommend
It enables us to manage our content of our websites a lot better. It enables content editors and our users better, more streamlined ways of working and provides more efficiency of scale.
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
Very much if a business is doing a rebrand, for example, or a digital transformation, the DXP product is super competitive. The managed services that provided around the infrastructure and all of the moving parts really, really works well. It just makes life as a developer very easy when ultimately you just have to do the code and deploy it out and don't worry about the environment infrastructure. I think it's really, really well and fits in really well with that. Areas where it's not so great in my experience, I would say, well, I've already mentioned kind of the CMS to SaaS product, but also just in general it feels like we're going through a bit of a transition period with the documentation at the moment. So when new features are rolled out or the product catalog expands, the documentation isn't always the best or streamlined. That can make life as a developer a little bit work at the times.
We use this product to update the firm's website and promote the firm's thought leadership and lawyers. Mainly their profiles are on the website, so it's to promote what we do.
Pros
It's very user-friendly.
It's very easy to update web pages
We also work with Optimizely CMP, and that's very well linked with the CMS and allows us to streamline updating the website in that way.
Cons
That's a hard one. I think sometimes it can be a bit inflexible and doesn't always allow for styling in certain ways, like injecting code in certain ways, which should be avoided anyway. But in some circumstances you do need to do that, so it can just be a bit inflexible at time. But overall, it's a great system.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is well suited for our needs in terms of website management and adding content to the website. I don't know how suited it would be for all industries, but I've not used it in a way where it would be B2C, so it probably is suited. I just don't see that side of it.
We use the CMS product to publish our core website and an event portal. Our core website caters to all our B2B and B2C audiences to deliver relevant and essential content and signpost our services, and generates over 1 million page views per annum
Pros
Secure
Fast
Dependable
Flexible
Cons
Back-end updates are difficult to complete
Search and findability of content assets is very slow
Restrictions on amount of connectors is frustrating
Likelihood to Recommend
Optimizely is by far the best enterprise level CMS system on the market today. It delivers on so many important pillars of any large organizations key IT and web policies, for security, performance, compliance, and level of support. Optimizely would not be appropriate for most small to medium enterprises, with limited need to scale and develop beyond more than 2 platforms or website properties
