Contentstack vs. Optimizely Content Marketing Platform

Contentstack has flexible functionality which opens up a lot of possibilities for businesses with proactive web development teams to create their own website builder app to compete with 3rd party agencies. This is especially useful in a large enterprise where non-technical teams often turn to expensive outside agencies which cost more in the long run than an up-front investment into an in-house application.

Incentivized

I think it's really well suited for organizations that have either big marketing teams that are scattered across different regions and different time zones because it helps everyone be aligned in terms of what is happening at any given time. That to me is one of the best things it can offer. The second thing is the management of the processes. You are not constantly reinventing the wheel when you work in marketing, you tend to have a process for doing certain jobs. For example, if you need to do an email or if you need to do a webinar, you will know what steps you need to take in order to deliver that. If you have lots of stakeholders that need to review things and need to approve things before they can go live, the CMP is the best tool for this because it keeps track of everything that is happening. You can assign steps to your legal team or your regulatory team and they have to go into the platform, be able to review whatever it is that you need them to review or approve. It keeps track of when that happened. There's no guesswork. You eliminate having to send things by email, by teams, by smoke signals. It's all in one place and if you ever needed to go back into things, everything gets saved there as well. All your working files up to your final files are all saved within the platform. You can manage your versions, you can reuse things in the future. There's so many possibilities for it. It depends on what you're trying to do, but at bedtime, if I do anything, no matter what you're trying to do, you'll find the right application within the platform to be able to make your job alive easier.

Incentivized

• The user interface is intuitive and cleanly designed.
• The functionality is flexible which allows us to build our own application behind the CMS that meets business needs without being restricted by limitations in the CMS.
• The service we get from our Account Manager and Technical contacts is excellent.

Incentivized

• Customer Service: They'll contact you with a "we're looking at your issue" email within the hour, even on weekends and holidays. Beyond solving your issues/problems with the software, they'll also follow up later to make sure you don't have additional associated issues.
• Live Analytics: You're given a snapshot of how your blog content is doing at any point in time, since they've been tracking your posts/content. You can compare this month's traffic to last year's trafffic during this same month. Other data points include: Unique Visitors, Average Attention Time, Pageviews, Engagement Rate, etc...and you'll even get referral traffic source. There's much more that I'm leaving out here.
• CMP User Interface (UI): Love the easy to use interface to upload blog posts, to use for editing and publishing content, and broadcasting social shares. Besides easily identifiable icons, you can create/edit content in the WYSIWYG or use the html view to make sure everything looks exactly how you prefer. Another cool thing is that the CMP auto-embeds live links of social updates (like Youtube, Twitter, Instagram) for more dynamic blog posts.

Incentivized

• In my opinion it's not very intuitive. I've found its difficult to understand how to best structure entries, especially if they are related
• In my experience, entries can get difficult to understand if weren't the creator. It would be helpful to have some meta data around the entry itself and the fields within them in my opinion.
• Integration with an A/B testing platform would be nice.

Incentivized

• In my opinion, there are too many notifications, making it difficult to manage and figure out which ones are necessary and which ones are not.
• I feel workflows are over engineered.
• For medium-sized organizations, the tool is overly complicated and requires a significant investment to optimize it.

Incentivized

As a Content Operations Manager, I find the customizable task views and calendar views to be most helpful in the Plan Module. This allows me to have visibility into each team's overdue tasks, and determine where my time is best allocated to help in content production. The Library is a easy to access and highly used function as well for sharing assets across teams

Incentivized

I have not experienced any prolonged outages. From time to time there will be errors but nothing that significantly slows down production

Incentivized

Optimizely Content Marketing Platform's performance is generally good. Nothing that has impacted production. Page load speed doesn't typically lag longer than a few seconds. Reports take some time but not any longer than we're used to with other platforms. We have not experienced lag when integrating with other platforms

Incentivized

They have an in-app chat with their support team, who is always quick to respond and provide helpful answers. I've never walked away from an interaction without my issue being solved quickly and easily. They're also very communicative over email and are sure to follow up after any changes are made to ensure we're seeing the desired result. They are always very professional and easy to work with.

Incentivized

The NewsCred team is very responsive and helpful with any technical issues.

Incentivized

Training was clear and concise. It was intuitive and helped me understand how to navigate the platform. Options to dive in on each action or skip to learn about areas of regular use. Resource links available to when I had additional questions or needed more training in a specific area. Overall, the training allowed me to use the platform without interruption

Incentivized

Contentstack has better international hosting support then Contentful and we found the presales and sales support people were MUCH more responsive than Contentful. The Sitecore sales process was very very slow and overly complex. We felt Sitecore had many features that were not valuable and the cost to benefit ratio was much lower compared to ContentStack

Incentivized

I use mainly Microsoft Dynamics, CRM, customer insights, journeys for marketing, email automation or marketing automation. I use Seismic. We're looking to launch an events platform, which I'm not using yet, but that will be a tool that I will want to integrate with the other systems I'm using. Customer Insights Journeys is probably the biggest other tool that I use that I'm trying to be an SME in.

Incentivized

Optimizely is generally a reliable platform for A/B testing and digital experience management. It's helpful for it's stability, flexibility, and comprehensive features, which is helpful when managing an enterprise website

Incentivized

• We are able to prepare for large campaigns within a few days which can bel rolled our within a few clicks. This was previously never possible before we moved to Contentstack.
• We now have the tools and ability to architect in a way to take advantage of SEO and drive traffic. Our blog now serves more traffic that the rest of our website. This SEO effort wasn't possible before Contentstack.
• One of our KPI's for moving to headless was a faster website and we now deliver pages under our original target while serving more asset and content rich pages to visitors

Incentivized

• It certainly has helped. I think there is guardrails in how you use CMP, what you are putting in. It needs to be the right way of how you want to work, otherwise you're going to create a mess within CMP. So creating that framework outside and implementing it into the system I think is quite important. Again, that's our way of working, but I think it has helped us.

Incentivized