How Optimizely (Episerver) compares 3 years later
Updated July 20, 2023

How Optimizely (Episerver) compares 3 years later

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Episerver Content Cloud

Overall Satisfaction with Optimizely Content Management System

We deliver engaging actionable content and experiences for our membership. It enables us to strengthen, grow our brand authority, develop new digital solutions, and increase global growth.
  • Develop and build new website content
  • Organize website architecture
  • Identify issues and resolve them rapidly
  • Manage media assets effectively
  • Provides an agile, dynamic means to deliver an experience
  • Enables the end user/customer to create new layouts or templates
  • Excessive developer costs are needed to support any changes to blocks, templates, functionality.
  • Free training to offset high support costs and unlock community of developers.
  • Specialized Agencies and Developers are needed at a high cost to build or create new functionality.
  • No efficient means to manage URL redirects automatically or generate batch redirects for major architectural improvements.
  • Language translation is extremely cumbersome if translating an existing website. Manual block by block, page by a page process.
  • Increase retention
  • Increased growth
  • Increase brand
  • Improve Competitive advantage
  • Increase Conversions
I found the CMS relatively easy and intuitive to learn and use. However, I'm coming from a background having mastered several Enterprise-grade CMS solutions. I was put into a situation where I had to learn and manage on the fly with zero training. The training was available but it's unrealistic when you're also expected to keep an entire organization moving forward. Where I see most of the complaints come from are those who are not technical enough and preach they know it all. Specifically, those who come from a wordpress background. They rely mostly on what they have survived day to day on from a google search for most of their career and tend to struggle to understand the benefits of managed services, security, or the impacts and dangers that enterprise solutions can protect against. Experience in front-end coding is essential to unlocking more potential from the CMS but not necessary if the expectation of the individual is to just take orders and do simple edits or tasks. Training is required for those that are not familiar with Enterprise CMS solutions. Training resources do not teach out-of-the-box thinking or innovative approaches to solving problems and overcoming roadblocks. I would be interested in throwing someone with no enterprise-level CMS experience into Optimizely without training and seeing if they sink or swim.
At this level, you are in the big leagues. Unless your organization is prepared to hire an Optimizely experienced development team, you cannot just buy the platform and suddenly be a content wizard. You most likely will need to partner with a digital experience agency to undergo a discovery review. Determine what problems as an organization you need solving. Through this collaborative discovery process, that agency (if they have an Optimizely dev team and should) will work with all stakeholders throughout the organization to develop a solution that solves those major problems for your users external and internal. You're looking at roughly 6 months end to end to do this right. 3 months if you have a stellar dev team or many experienced resources. Trying to shoehorn out an MVT solution in a shorter time frame without that stellar team typically leads to greater costs post-launch to cover all the shortcomings of the CMS that should have been included for launch, angered senior leadership, and unhappy users.
I've used Opentext's Teamsite, Sitecore, Orchestra, Sharepoint, Adobe Experience Manager, and wordpress. All CMS solutions have their pros and cons. There is no perfect solution. Optimizely happened to align perfectly with our Organizations needs in 2018. It has seen a considerable transformation in the past 3 years. Decide and evaluate which solution aligns well long-term with your organization's needs and is scalable for growth.

Do you think Optimizely Content Management System delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with Optimizely Content Management System's feature set?

Yes

Did Optimizely Content Management System live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of Optimizely Content Management System go as expected?

No

Would you buy Optimizely Content Management System again?

Yes

Develop content rapidly for marketing initiatives. Landing pages, or lead generation. Manage SEO effectively. Easy to understand site structure. Easy to manage assets, files, images, etc. Easy to manage access rights and permissions. Easy to assign personalization for various content pieces.

Optimizely Content Management System Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG editor
9
Code quality / cleanliness
8
Admin section
9
Page templates
7
Library of website themes
2
Mobile optimization / responsive design
9
Publishing workflow
6
Form generator
1
Content taxonomy
7
SEO support
8
Bulk management
7
Availability / breadth of extensions
1
Community / comment management
6
API
1
Internationalization / multi-language
6
Role-based user permissions
9

Using Optimizely Content Management System

5 - Content contributors
2 - Website Manager and Full Stack Developer
  • Provide global standards and guidelines
  • tools and resources
  • market and grow the global community
  • digitize print ip
  • allow for ip to be indexed through search engines
  • test and understand how to improve the member/user interaction with the content.
  • Leverage Ai to solve problems for global community through our content
  • advance the practice of business analysis through interaction with our website.