5 reasons to pick Optimizely over Sitecore as your Digital Experience Platform (DXP)

Optimizely is an enterprise level digital experience platform (DXP) with a world class content management system (CMS) at its heart.  It’s used by businesses that are passionate about wanting to innovate and invest in their digital and customer experience.

Ranked in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant as the leader in digital experience, Optimizely is becoming the go to for countless businesses looking for a platform that allows for speed and simplicity, whilst also enabling you to experiment, create and innovate without disruption. So, it’s no surprise that more and more businesses are making the move to Optimizely from other DXPs, including its biggest traditional rival Sitecore.

Whether your current website is built on Sitecore and you’re considering a move, or if you’re looking to invest in a DXP for the first time, here are 5 reasons why we believe Optimizely wins out over Sitecore:

1. Create and optimize

Optimizely is known for its ability to allow for creation and optimisation. The platform’s personalised content and commerce engine paired with its endless experimentation capabilities enables all of its users to deliver higher value conversions through the optimisation of each and every touchpoint.

A business embracing Optimizely is likely to see at least a 9% increase in the amount of revenue that they generate online, all thanks to the platform’s many benefits and capabilities. One of the main factors supporting ROI is Optimizely’s  experimentation potential which allows businesses to find new and smart ways of engaging and interacting with customers across multiple touchpoints.

At 26, we partner with Optimizely to help businesses implement customer centric strategies by utilising things such as behavioural data to drive increased engagement, lifetime value, satisfaction and repeat purchases.

2. Speed

Speed is an important factor that sways many Sitecore customers towards Optimizely due to its faster deployment time and operations.. You’re guaranteed to get the fastest payback time, the highest ROI and the most reduced switching costs – a benefit to both your business and making for happy customers.

With Optimizely, you don’t have to worry about keeping your customers waiting when using your site. You’ll spend a lot less time and money keeping your site up-to-date, and more time and opportunity to delight your customers with the latest cutting edge features available on the platform.

Optimizely is also well known for its exceptional ease of use and ability to take the weight off IT teams’ backlogs (a stark contrast to Sitecore’s complexity).

3. Simplicity

Optimizely is a platform that strives to reduce any and all complexity through automation and carefully thought-out design. As a business, you’ll benefit from a single access point across all capabilities, a simple and fair pricing model and an extremely intuitive user interface.

The platform also provides 24/7/365 support in every aspect, from capacity planning, incident management, problem management, to infrastructure and operational management. There’s also constant online presence available – which in comparison, is a feature that is only available on Sitecore if you pay an additional cost.

Not only that, but Optimizely is 100% transparent about their pricing and what customers will be paying for each and every service they require. Its pricing structure is easy to understand and you’ll know exactly what you are buying.

4. Cloud

Optimizely’s cloud platform and global content delivery network seamlessly allows each and every one of their customers to innovate without any disruption. The platform is built to serve and support IT – and not pile on more work as is often the case with Sitecore (which unfortunately has experienced many technical hitches surrounding upgrades).

Optimizely offers many benefits from a speedy CDN thanks to cloud data centres all over the world dedicated to putting computing power in close proximity to your customers, as well as high levels of security with built-in features and processes to keep everything up to date with strong mitigation features. As well as this, the platform enables you to roll back and recover from previous issues pertaining to programming or software errors, including disaster recovery with full backup and migration. 

5. Unified digital experience

As a platform, Optimizely offers a unified digital experience – bringing together content, commerce, design, search and AI capabilities surrounded by thoughtful integrations and over 800 partners.

At this time, Sitecore lacks a quality digital commerce solution, meaning its users are unable to smoothly and adequately unify their content and commerce – whereas Optimizey is dedicated to empowering businesses to deliver a seamless buying experience and customer journey.

Optimizely has an open ecosystem approach, making integration with core systems and new channels immensely easy, providing businesses with all the building blocks they need for an exceptional digital experience. This includes advanced AI-based personalisation which allows for automated, accurate and dynamic targeting of individuals based on their behaviour and intent, enabling the creation of tailored content and commerce experiences without overloading your team. On Sitecore, such features would require additional developments and upgrades which can get quite pricey and overbearing.

There’s plenty to consider when it comes to choosing a digital experience platform that’s right for you, your business, and your customers – and we understand this can be a daunting task. At 26, our expert Solutions team is on hand to help you understand your options based on your current and future requirements.

If you’re ready to make the move from Sitecore to Optimizely, Optimizely is currently running an incentive that means you won’t pay anything until you go live. As an Optimizely Platinum Partner, we’re well versed in migrations, so if you’re looking for a partner, or you’d simply like to know more, please get in touch and we’d be happy to help.