Item: Optimizely Content Management System
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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).

Pros and Cons

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

Return on Investment

Deployment time
Faster development

Usability

As the IT or anyone with programming background, can be a bit hard at first, but it's approachable.

For business users, it's not really that good as the interface is quite dated, as sometimes ou'll find custom solutions (e.g. a frontend as a backend) to let business users manage without accessing the optimizely interface directly.

Time to Value

Personally, not applicable, as I integrated within an already built solution.

Alternatives Considered

Kontent.ai, Contentful, Contentstack and Umbraco CMS

Out of those listed, only Umbraco is applicable as it can be directly compared to Optimizely CMS (with the other 3 being Headless solutions, which should instead be compared with Optimizely Headless, which I haven't worked with)

Umbraco offers a really visual experience and far more user/developer friendly, but takes more time to set up some basic things, which depending on the project, can be cumbersome when compared to code-first approach Optimizely has.

Key Insights

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

Not sure

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

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

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Optimizely Content Management System go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Optimizely Content Management System again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Cloudflare, Azure Pipelines, GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab

Likelihood to Recommend

It depends on which version of Optimizely it's being used.

Traditional marketing-style websites can easily be made and reusing content due to how Optimizely CMS is built.

Commerce platforms can also take advantage of Optimizely products for ease of implementation.

But some of the cases relying on external Data sources, as is expected from traditional CMS leading to a need of imports, may result in duplication of content, as it'd be present on both the Optimizely DB and on any internal DB where it's imported from.

Overview from a trainee

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Optimizely Content Management System