Item: Optimizely Content Management System
Rating: 10
Author: Ritu Madan

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

For most of our CMS clients, Optimizely Content Management System seems to fit the bill for everything the clients need, in terms of ease of content authoring and approval process, personalized content recommendations, DAM, tracking user activity for insights, and more. The new experimentation feature is an added bonus on top that allows marketers to run A/B tests and other experiments seamlessly and derive insights. The Customer insights through ODP is another benefit a lot of clients look for... from capturing leads to converting them. From a developer standpoint, having heard tales of how long other CMS frameworks take for initial setup and configuration, Optimizely Content Management System, hands down, is the easiest framework to start working with. Code setup is quick and easy, documentation is abundant, support is amazing and responsive and despite being still niche, the community is huge and very involved. There are blogs and videos and helpful addon available open source. The Optimizely team itself is very open to ideas and suggestions and keeps updating the product accordingly.

Pros and Cons

Content Authoring and approval
Asset management
Multi-language and multi-site support
Personalization capabilities
Rendering capabilities using display templates and channels
Headless capabilities using Content Delivery API

Optimizely Content Management System recently started moving features into internal namespaces, making it harder to provide custom implementations. Customization being one of the key benefits of using Optimizely Content Management System, this approach tends to be going in the opposite direction. I would love to see some of those features be added back to public APIs.
Some topics either lack documentation or have outdated documentation. Updates on those would definitely be helpful.

Return on Investment

Cost saving from switching rom older frameworks to newer ones every few years
Better performance
Better authoring experience
More capability to customize code as needed
Efficient 24X7 support
Awesome community always ready to help answer questions and solve challenging issues

Portfolio Solution

Some of our projects have used Optimizely Community API (formerly known as EPiServer Social) for comments and ratings on their website articles. A lot of clients are now moving to headless so using Content Delivery APIs a lot. Some have used Content Recommendations for personalized content and AI based recommendations. Some are starting to collaborate Feature and Full Stack experimentations and ODP into projects to avail their full benefits. We've also started exploring Content Graph offering.

Keeping things under one umbrella definitely makes it easier to manage, support is more efficient with issues as they have to look into the same suite of products now. I think it also comes with better integration because it's the same family of products. It probably also offers cost benefits.

Time to Value

Optimizely Content Management System is by far the fastest framework in terms of initial setup and configuration to be up and running. I think from scratch, a base site can be set up to be up and running within a couple of hours. DXP deployments are fast and easy as well, so deployments don't need to be scheduled off hours now, instead they can happen during business hours without impacting end users too much.

Alternatives Considered

Sitecore Content Hub (Stylelabs), Magento Open Source and Adobe Experience Manager

Optimizely Content Management System is definitely better than any of the above. Especially compared against Sitecore, Optimizely Content Management System has the fastest setup time and offers a whole lot of customizability where Sitecore needs a lot of work to achieve similar results. Magento and Adobe offer a lot of great things too, but they don't offer the level of customization that Optimizely Content Management System does. The author interface is very straightforward in Optimizely Content Management System as compared to any other tools.

Key Insights

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

Yes

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

Yes

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

Yes

Did implementation of Optimizely Content Management System go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Optimizely Content Management System again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Scenarios where content is the star of a website and the same content is rendered in different ways on different pages/sections make an ideal use case for Optimizely Content Management System. Also, sites where content authors, marketers spend their majority working hours adding, refining content, Optimizely Content Management System offers a very nice and easy to use interface as well as supports custom approval workflows to support different organizations. Scenarios where content is less or CMS isn't the source of it, and there isn't a lot of focus needed to create new, or manage existing content on a large scale, like several product based sites that just focus on selling, could be examples where Optimizely Content Management System may not be the right fit.

Optimizely Content Management System is the future of all CMS.

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Optimizely Content Management System