MODX vs. Optimizely Content Management System

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
MODX
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
The MODX Digital Experience Platform provides everything you need to build, host, and maintain amazing websites your way. The vendor says that with MODX CMS and cloud hosting, users have complete control over their creative vision and the experiences they deliver, without restriction or compromise. They can focus more on building great digital experiences, and less on hosting and maintaining. If you ever need help, MODX Professionals are available worldwide and direct support from…
$0
Optimizely Content Management System
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Optimizely Content Management System (CMS) is purpose-built for marketers, and fully composable for developers. The CMS supports the end-to-end content lifecycle, helping users to deliver on-brand, high-impact digital experiences that 'wow' audiences.N/A
Pricing
MODXOptimizely Content Management System
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
Base
$39
per month
Pro
$99
per month
Business
$349
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
MODXOptimizely Content Management System
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalRequired
Additional DetailsPAYMENT FORMS MODX Cloud accepts major credit cards and PayPal for your hosting subscription. We can only accept check (cheque) payments on the Enterprise Plan, annually. CANCELLATION You may cancel your MODX Cloud account at any time. Before you cancel you'll be reminded to backup and remove all your live websites and then follow the instructions for cancellation. If you cancel within the first month, we'll provide you with a full refund. REFUNDS If you cancel within the first month, we'll provide you with a full refund. All other cancellations will be effective at the end of your current billing period. We do not provide refunds for remaining days or months on monthly or annual billing.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
MODXOptimizely Content Management System
Considered Both Products
MODX
Chose MODX
After having built sites with wordpress, joomla, drupal, october cms, craft cms, magento, presstashop, opencart, os commerce and more it is my number 1 (october cms is 2).

Chose MODX
The other company that we looked into was Wordpress and all of the features that it offered our organization. What MODX offered to us from development to everyday use just made more sense for our organization as a whole. Wordpress is still a great CMS platform, just not exactly …
Chose MODX
As said before, MODX is a coder's dream because of the flexibility it provides to own your code and has true creative freedom. Because of that, there is a bigger learning curve when it comes to a non-developer trying to iterate on the CMS with content additions and changes. To …
Optimizely Content Management System
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
Optimizely Content Management System is much more functional and robust out of the box
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
Optimizely Content Management System is much more feature rich, and less complex that the other CMS platforms we have used. Optimizely Content Management System is more intuitive in how the content is structured and how easy it is to pull blocks of content to create the layout …
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
It does feel a bit more legacy, but sometimes legacy can be good for companies. For both the companies we mapped against, it was clear the idea of server maintenance was out of question for us and we wanted a service that would provide uptime and us just doing the work of …
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
None quite like this, but I have had experience with HTML sites and CSS and WordPress and Wix, but nothing quite on the level of what Optimizely produces.
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
I think Optimizely does well connecting tools and processes into one ecosystem.
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
The best compared to Sitecore.
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
We chose Optimizely (at the time Episerver) after rigorous evaluation and due to overall impression that it was the right long term fit.
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
Optimizely stacks up by offering a more well-rounded and user-friendly experience. Especially with it's integration into the rest of Optimizely's offerings, this CMS opens the door to letting marketers manage their entire marketing experience on one platform where its …
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
We love that non technical people on our marketing team, can easily use and update pages and promote content.
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
I truly headless system and the ability to edit this platform over others gave Optimizely Content Management System this edge when it comes to creating a future-proof e-commerce solution. There are lots of other systems out there, but there has been great success with utilizing …
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
Being able to keep one catalog source that can spread to our multiple business units and being able to have our development team create custom widgets for new functionality.
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
I didn't see Konakart in the dropdown options, so I want to make sure we compare against this platform as well. With other platforms, the features are either so basic that you can't get very advanced in your site UX, or the interface is so unfriendly to it's users that it's …
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
Optimizely Content Management System fits our needs best being fully customisable and modular.
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
We’ve not evaluated other solutions following the launch.
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
Much better
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
We feel that Optimizly is a better solution, however, we like that contentful offers a lower price plan for testing our mobile app.
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
We as a business wanted to have ecomm built into the CMS website and we have looked into the options of WordPress and SiteCore and decided to go to Optimizely Content Management System the way it brings ease and also with out comprising on the security
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
I think is the features that Optimizely Content Management System provided that it fit what we are looking
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
Optimizely Content Management System is a much better system that allowed the customization that Adobe Connect did not offer.
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
Optimizely Content Management has more content marketing features
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
We selected Optimizely Content Management system for their ease of use and their other offerings like content marketing platform which helps us to keep everything under one roof.
Chose Optimizely Content Management System
We found we have more freedom with creating content and updating content was easier as we were able to build blocks and pages much quicker and easier than we were previously able to.
Features
MODXOptimizely Content Management System
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
MODX
9.9
Ratings
20% above category average
Optimizely Content Management System
8.5
Ratings
5% above category average
Role-based user permissions9.90 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
MODX
8.0
Ratings
5% above category average
Optimizely Content Management System
8.0
Ratings
5% above category average
API6.10 Ratings8.10 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language9.90 Ratings7.80 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
MODX
9.4
Ratings
20% above category average
Optimizely Content Management System
7.9
Ratings
2% above category average
WYSIWYG editor9.80 Ratings7.80 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness9.90 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Admin section8.90 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Page templates9.90 Ratings8.40 Ratings
Library of website themes7.00 Ratings7.50 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design9.90 Ratings7.90 Ratings
Publishing workflow9.90 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Form generator9.90 Ratings6.90 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
MODX
9.5
Ratings
26% above category average
Optimizely Content Management System
7.6
Ratings
3% above category average
Content taxonomy9.90 Ratings8.20 Ratings
SEO support10.00 Ratings7.20 Ratings
Bulk management9.00 Ratings7.10 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions8.90 Ratings7.50 Ratings
Community / comment management9.90 Ratings8.00 Ratings
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User Ratings
MODXOptimizely Content Management System
Likelihood to Recommend
9.9
(0 ratings)
8.6
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.6
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
8.5
(0 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.2
(0 ratings)
Performance
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(0 ratings)
6.4
(0 ratings)
Configurability
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
MODXOptimizely Content Management System
Likelihood to Recommend
In my opinion, MODX is usually the choice of a developer who wants to build out custom designs that create really interesting web pages, but when it comes to being easily used and edited by your marketing team, you can run into a lot of issues and end up making simple changes a more involved process.
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Very much if a business is doing a rebrand, for example, or a digital transformation, the DXP product is super competitive. The managed services that provided around the infrastructure and all of the moving parts really, really works well. It just makes life as a developer very easy when ultimately you just have to do the code and deploy it out and don't worry about the environment infrastructure. I think it's really, really well and fits in really well with that. Areas where it's not so great in my experience, I would say, well, I've already mentioned kind of the CMS to SaaS product, but also just in general it feels like we're going through a bit of a transition period with the documentation at the moment. So when new features are rolled out or the product catalog expands, the documentation isn't always the best or streamlined. That can make life as a developer a little bit work at the times.
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Pros
  • Custom design capabilities.
  • Works well with plugins.
  • Permission systems for users.
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  • Folder structure - I was on Magento 1.x & 2.x for 10 years, which had no folder structure for blocks or images - it was very difficult to find things. We couldn't keep anything straight without it.
  • The fact that it knows what block or image is being used and links to where it's being used is pure gold. It prevents deletion of needed elements.
  • I like that I can drag a block or image somewhere new and it doesn't break anything.
  • Our search of blocks and images is now working, that's very helpful.
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Cons
  • Content Blocks - I mentioned this as a strength, but it also has its quirks. There are times that things do not function properly within the content blocks we have set up.
  • More Customization - The ability for the average user to customize more without having to know a ton of code.
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  • promo types, several have been released that do not work as they are advertised/labeled which has caused us to make custom promos for just about all of them where we've actually fixed the functionality. The OOB types are completely unreliable
  • promo exclusions/sorting -- this is very buggy, and some of this would normally be "out of the box" like no two order discounts should ever be able to stack. This gets incredibly difficult to manage when you have 75 active promos at a time.
  • asset management - replacement files with same name aren't recognized even when the first version is deleted, this creates a mess in asset folders - nothing can be successfully deleted from epi asset library
  • html automatic edits -- issues when typing in either content page links or asset links, epi always adds random characters to the end (?"Epieditmode=false,6789" for example, which doesn't break content, but does make it more difficult for the team to use non-epi html tools to build or edit
  • auto dimensions on images -- when adding an image in the html, you have the address exactly, but any other way causes the editor to put width and height dims on the code, making the image warp in mobile, this is adding steps to undo the automatic edits, they are completely unhelpful
  • blogs - we are running a blog in Opti that is compeltely manual, every "related article" and every "articles about x topic" block is hard coded, there is nothing dynamic in the content library which is frustrating, and creates a huge time suck for articles across the site, every time there is a new one, that's 10+ manual page updates
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Likelihood to Renew
It is the CMS we use the most, not because we know it well but because we literally tried many of other CMS and this one did it for us.
However having said we really do not like the one shoe fits all approach. E..g for eCommerce we usually use PrestaShop etc. if a specialized CMS can do a task rather use that.
However for a general CMS [MODX] is hard to beat.
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Since I work on the implementation side of things, and do not directly own licensing for Ektron CMS, I have to base this rating off of how I think it will be received or presented to customers looking to start a new site deployment. I try to remain CMS agnostic, though my specialty is with the .NET and Microsoft stack. Because of the experience I have working with Ektron, I tend to be more forgiving with the shortcomings as I am familiar with how to work around them or past them from experience. Being familiar with the community available also helps, as you become familiar with the best approaches to find solutions to your issues. Each product has it's ups and downs and all of them are only going to be as good as the company or development team implementing them can make them. This is EXTREMELY important to remember when choosing a CMS, as it can make or break your expensive investment.
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Usability
Great and easy to use for both the coder and the end user. Especially if setup correctly by the coder.
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From our editors perspective they find the CMS system easy and to clear to use. Our developers find it very easy to design on and appreciate the level of service support available. It's also always evolving and getting better every year. We find this investment reassuring and encourages us to try keep pace and see how we can continue to push the envelope and continue to improve all aspect of our websites and online touch points.
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Reliability and Availability
We have not had it go down due to bugs etc. especially when comparing it to other cms out there.
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Unplanned outages or errors are fairly rare in our instance. And when there are issues, they're usually fixed fairly quickly
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Performance
Damn its fast. really good page speed out of the box.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Great community support on slack.
If you have a paid plugin great support also esp from modmore
If you have cloud hosting MODX support is fast and all servers are optimized for MODX
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I attended multiple trainings/tutorials early in the process. The vendor-supplied content about Optimizely was engaging for users/attendees (I often analyze training content, compliance programs, governance plans), which helps our OCM people by having good "word of mouth" about the product long before a rollout ever happens. I actually when the user-focused portion of the Optimizely Academy twice in 2022 to ensure I had a grasp on operability and to be able to support the training and OCM efforts
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Online Training
No answers on this topic
Ektron is one of the best solution for .Net platform. Over the years have improved the performance issues that the previous versions had. My only complain is right now you can't do Page builder pages if you choose to have a MVC architecture
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Implementation Rating
Good system
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I was not fully involved.
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Alternatives Considered
The other company that we looked into was WordPress and all of the features that it offered our organization. What MODX offered to us from development to everyday use just made more sense for our organization as a whole. WordPress is still a great CMS platform, just not exactly what we were looking for.
Read full review
Optimizely Content Management System takes the best bit of previous platforms and simplifies them without removing the more advanced features but not making the necessary to get things going. allowing for any user to jump in and start working is a massive help but empowering power users to take advantage of all its features.
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Scalability
Very scalable. e.g. in the [MODX] manager you can manage multiple websites at once without having to login else where. it is very convenient and this way resources and be easily managed and shared.
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No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
  • The positive impact that MODX has had on our organization is that it has allowed us to generate more organic traffic to our site.
  • We are also able to push more paid advertisements to our site on our lead generation landing pages.
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  • Flexibility with design that allows us to work towards our mission of 'Tennis Opened Up'
  • Speed of deploying content, meaning users can really on us for the most up-to-date content on tennis in Britain
  • Ability to have different logged-in areas for different user groups, allowing us to create more bespoke and personalised experiences
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ScreenShots

MODX Screenshots

Screenshot of MODX Manager InterfaceScreenshot of SEO Management - page levelScreenshot of Screenshot of Easy editing landing pageScreenshot of Edit files directlyScreenshot of Create & edit custom fields

Optimizely Content Management System Screenshots

Screenshot of Content delivery: Developers can use modern GraphQL and REST APIs to query content from any source and send it to any channel or device.Screenshot of User roles and permissionsScreenshot of (SaaS CMS): Visual Builder: Add an image: Optimizely Visual Builder offers a range of editing features designed to make content creation and layout building intuitive and accessible to both technical and non-technical users. A drag-and-drop system is used to add, move, and rearrange elements within the layout, for quick and flexible content organization.Screenshot of (SaaS CMS): Visual Builder: Create an experience: Create an Experience functionality in Optimizely Visual Builder offers a code-free way to build and manage captivating digital experiences. It offers pre-built content blocks or elements (like text, images, buttons, forms, etc.) that can be positioned on the page layout as desired. Visual Builder offers extensive options to customize the appearance and behavior of these elements. Users can modify colors, fonts, sizes, animations, and even add interactive features providing flexibility in arranging content, accommodating various design needs and responsiveness across different screen sizes.Screenshot of (SaaS CMS): Visual Builder: Publish: The Visual Builder displays changes in real-time as they are made. This includes side-by-side previews for different devices like desktops, tablets, and mobiles. Before publishing, the Interactive Preview mode can be used to test elements like forms, buttons, and other interactive components to ensure they work as expected on the live site. Changes can then be published directly from the Visual Builder interface, making them instantly available to site visitors.Screenshot of the central location to manage assets, editing and publishing content.