Is it time to migrate from Contentful to Optimizely?

Common challenges enterprise businesses face with Contentful (hands up of any of these sounds familiar 🙋)

Contentful’s headless solution has long been a popular option for enterprise brands who are looking for a content management system that can scale across different channels.

However, it does come with certain limitations that can, over time, pose some significant, costly hurdles, especially for customers who are seeing their content volume and complexity increase.

1. Contentful doesn’t come with many features out of the box

   Contentful customers frequently complain of having to rely on costly third-party integrations and custom development to bring more advanced features directly into the CMS.
   
   Historically, even more basic experimentation capabilities like A/B testing, as well as more advanced features like personalization and analytics have not been natively built into Contentful. This means that Contentful customers been forced to dedicate costly development resources to build some of these capabilities into the CMS, all which slows down time to market and escalates costs.

2. Contentful’s Ninetailed acquisition has fallen flat

   While Contentful are clearly aware of this gap and have made some strides to address the issue with the recent acquisition of Ninetailed, the platform’s personalization capabilities remain simplistic and limited, offering experimentation at the content block level only, rather than across the entire customer journey.
   
   This means Contentful customers continue to lag behind, juggling multiple third-party personalization, experimentation, and analytics tools, often leading to an unnecessarily disjointed digital experience and more time wasted on over-engineered processes.

3. Contentful is as developer heavy as ever

   While Contentful’s headless architecture offers flexibility, it places a heavy burden on developers for even routine content updates. Marketing teams often struggle to operate independently, leading to bottlenecks and slower campaign rollouts.
   
   Contentful Studio, Contentful’s version of a WYSIWYG editor, was rolled out in an attempt to address this, but it still requires significant developer involvement and is currently available as a paid product add-on only.

4. It comes with a steep learning curve

   Even for highly-skilled developers, Contentful’s setup is not exactly intuitive. Non-technical users like content editors and marketers, especially, complain of needing to spend countless hours getting to grips with the platform and needing developer support for content changes.
   
   The end result? The platform’s complexity creates a constant drain on team resources that could otherwise be spent on more strategic initiatives or campaign launches.

5. And significant price hikes as you grow

   Contentful’s base pricing is just the beginning. What starts off as a reasonably priced CMS can quickly balloon with expensive add-ons required for even basic personalization and analytics features. This drives up costs significantly for Contentful customers as their needs expand.
   
   

How does Optimizely DXP compare to Contentful?

A common limitation that floats to the top for Contentful customers revolves around the need for extensive IT and development resources to build, customize, manage, and optimize the site. This is a key point of difference between an API-only, pure-headless solution and Optimizely’s DXP offering.

• Intuitive UI for marketers: Our DXP is designed to vastly reduce the ongoing need for dedicated web admins, IT and dev support once your website is pushed live.
  
  One of our newest features, Visual Builder, comes with drag-and-drop functionality, live previews and content blocks, all of which make it easy for market-facing teams to work collaboratively and streamline the content creation process. Visual Builder empowers marketers to move quickly in response to changes in the market and last-minute campaigns (because is there any other kind?)
  
  
  
  
• Lower total cost of ownership: While the initial setup with Contentful might have been cheaper, the platform comes with additional costs that often go unnoticed until they’ve already impacted your business.
  
  The developer team productivity drain, the ongoing costs associated with site maintenance, like maintaining multiple integrations, custom development, and paying for additional third-party tools as workarounds for deficits in the platform, all quickly add up to an unexpectedly high TCO for Contentful customers.
  
  Optimizely, on the other hand, doesn’t come with any of these hidden costs, and offers a more predictable pricing model as your business grows.
  
  
• Less reliance on third-party tools: With Optimizely, many of the features that Contentful customers are forced to cobble together from external vendors, like personalization, analytics, and A/B testing, come prebuilt into the platform.
  
  Again, the aim here is make it easier and more cost effective to optimize your digital experience. Plus, the integration of these features natively within the platform helps ensure a more cohesive experience for both your internal teams and your target audience.
  
• Faster time-to-value: Optimizely’s composable architecture and hybrid-headless setup is specifically designed to get businesses up and running on the platform quickly.
  
  Unlike Contentful, which calls for more developer time and resources to configure and manage various tools, Optimizely’s integrated approach to its feature set ensures your digital experience can go live and be optimized in less time.

How does migrating from Contentful to Optimizely work?

Making the decision to move from Contentful to Optimizely can feel daunting. Luckily, you won’t need to go it alone. If you’re considering a CMS migration — from Contentful or otherwise — we’re more than happy to chat through your business objectives and answer any questions you have about the overall process, timeline, and what sort of return on your investment you can expect.

Let's get started!