COMPARISON

Optimizely vs. Contentful

Give your marketing team the autonomy they need to deliver exceptional digital experiences, faster.  

Discover why leading brands choose Optimizely over Contentful.

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Faster time to market, at less cost. 

Optimizely and Contentful are both popular choices for dev teams. Unlike Optimizely, though, Contentful lacks the key capabilities your non-dev stakeholders need.  

Oh, and it comes with some unexpected costs.  

Explore how our customers benefit and how we compare. 

Learn why Optimizely is the better choice 

With Optimizely, you can give your marketers the independence they need to build, personalize, experiment, and reuse content, and speed up your time-to-market.

Contentful requires almost constant handholding from your developers. Optimizely, on the other hand, provides the planning, authoring, and delivery tools needed to produce content for any channel — minimizing the need for developer support.

 

 

Optimizely

Contentful

Time to market
Marketers can move faster by deploying and iterating on content themselves. 

Project timelines are heavily dependent on developer resources. 

Who it’s for

Designed for your entire digital team, from content editors, designers and developers. 

Steep learning curve. Built primarily for developers, leaving marketers on the sidelines. 

CMS Type

Flexibility in terms of SaaS and PaaS, headless or hybrid options for enterprise teams, both UI and API-based. 

Headless-only, API-only, with nascent visual authoring. 

User experience

Intuitive authoring experience via Visual Builder, available as part of the core platform, allows marketing and editorial teams to seamlessly build and publish content. Next-gen visual builder is based on 15 years of expertise in content authoring, and purpose-built for marketers.

Complex adaptation for non-technical teams. 
Contentful Studio, Contentful’s version of a visual builder, continues to have a high dependence on IT. Contentful Studio available only as a paid add-on.

Governance

Ensures each team member has the right mix of guardrails and permissions for greater workflow efficiency and team collaboration. 

According to analysts, lags behind the market in workflows, versioning, and approvals.
Personalization and experimentation 

Individualize the experience at every stage of the customer journey and optimize the performance of your content. 

Ninetailed by Contentful offers limited personalization and experimentation at the content block level only. 

Pricing

Pricing comes with more features included and fewer pricing levers to drive up costs as customers scale.

Costs can quickly balloon as customers trigger more pricing metrics above the standard offering. 

 

Why Optimizely wins 

Discover why top companies trust Optimizely over Contentful with their digital experiences.

Empower your marketing team

With Optimizely, marketers and creatives have the freedom to build what they want, the way they want. Quickly and easily create, manage and optimize content, driving engagement and conversions across channels — all with minimal dev resources. 

Enjoy speedier time to market

Optimizely’s Visual Builder is designed to empower marketing teams to launch engaging digital experiences at lightning speed, and rapidly accelerates your time-to-market compared to Contentful.

No more dev bottlenecks

Optimizely empowers marketers to build and edit pages themselves and on their timeline, streamlining the content management process and freeing up your IT team to innovate further — rather than focusing on content grunt-work.

Count on fair, transparent pricing

Optimizely’s pricing plan is loud and clear, with more features for the same price as Contentful. And unlike Contentful, there are no hidden costs to drive up that monthly invoice

Built on Optimizely CMS

Zoom
Dolby
NEW ERA
Mazda
RAKBANK
Zoom
Dolby
NEW ERA
Mazda
RAKBANK

Hear what the industry experts have to say

Optimizely has been lauded by top analyst firms, with a total of seven leadership positions in CMS and DXP.

Gartner

2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Experience

A leader

Get the Gartner report > 

The Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms, Q4 2023 | The Forrester Wave™: Content Management Systems, Q3 2023 

A leader

Get the Forrester report >

Not only do analysts love us, but our customers do too.

But don’t just take our word for it check out what they’ve got to say. 

 

Optimizely is an ideal tool for us as it provided an easy-to-use platform for content authors while allowing developers to focus on integrations and add-ons rather than constant customization. The lack of infrastructure management and seamless upgrades were huge benefits, making it a great solution for our MarTech needs and integration with other systems.

Tahmina Choudhury

Head of Client Journey Management Technology, Allspring Global Investments

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We went from an online brochure to a mobile-driven, data-driven immersive platform… If I was being asked to recommend Optimizely, I wouldn't have a hesitation. The technology backing the project was flawless.

Ben Rounsefell

Sr. Manager, Digital, Customer Engagement, Mazda

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A true enterprise-level CMS, with all the support and flexibility that goes with it. Easy to integrate with anything out there… A very active community ensures any issues you might have are quickly resolved. Easy to work with for content managers, especially compared with some of the enterprise-level competition. Complete control over the customer0facing UI. Constant updates and innovation to the platform.

Arjan P.

Optimizely enterprise customer, G2 review

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From a developer standpoint, having heard tales of how long other CMS frameworks take for initial setup and configuration, Optimizely CMS, 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… The Optimizely team itself is very open to ideas and suggestions and keeps updating the product accordingly.

Ritu Madan

Solutions Architect, Perficient, TrustRadius review

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Leading reviews across major review platforms  

Optimizely consistently outperforms Contentful on major review platforms, boasting an 8.7/10 score on Trustradius vs. Contentful's 8.1/10. 

Trustradius comparison 

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