This article breaks down the most important elements to consider when assessing long-term costs, ROI, and is intended to help you understand where Optimizely outperforms competitors in delivering measurable business impact.
TCO goes beyond just licensing fees. If you are looking at the true cost of supporting your CMS/DXP a true assessment should include the following.
Don’t limit yourself to like for like. Look carefully at what other features you can access in a new platform and how that can bring benefit to your teams.
And ensure you don’t leave platform training to the tail end of the migration process. Including your team in the early stages can help ensure that any configurations support your team’s workflows and processes.
Consider those costs associated with expanding features and capabilities, and ultimately of decommissioning your platform in the future.
How much of your previous investment in UI can be ported into any follow on platform?
These areas will give you an understanding of where you sit with your core platform costs,
Many of our clients have found there is sound financial justification to make the shift purely by assessing these costs over a three or four year term.
Competitor platforms often require extensive ongoing developer support due to rigid architectures. Optimizely’s capabilities empower marketers and content teams, reducing developer reliance and long-term maintenance expenses.
Explore how your platform can empower your marketing and content teams without developer support, before you make your platform decision.
The Optimizely One Platform provides unparalleled opportunities to build Personalisation and content accountability into your content marketing endeavours.
Optimizely Experimentation can facilitate A/B and multivariate testing of content or features. This enables you to test and evolve your content presentation and ability to nurture your customers and prospects, confident in the knowledge that you are moving forwards.
The personalisation tooling, either rule based or AI enhanced, enables you to deliver direct 1 to 1 content and journeys for your site visitors.
By empowering your team to drive business growth, through AI-driven personalisation and A/B testing, Optimizely empowers organisations to increase conversion rates and customer engagement more effectively within a single platform solution.
With modular architecture and seamless integrations, Optimizely accelerates project delivery. Businesses leveraging Optimizely launch faster and benefit from a faster time to value.
Long, costly implementation cycles, move all the value to the rear of a project and front-load all of the investment. Faster build times enable you to deliver value faster.
Talk to your build partner to structure your DXP migration in a way that ensures you target key areas of business opportunity first, ensuring you reduce cost and improve effectiveness whilst building capability.
Managing multiple brands or global sites?
Optimizely’s unified architecture and business model allow enterprises to scale without the duplicated licence or ongoing costs of maintaining separate solutions for different regions or brands.
Optimizely’s editor controls facilitate a workflow to support compliance. Optimizely’s DAM (Digital Asset Management) empowers you to have the same controls over your imagery and other assets.
With the addition of Content Marketing capability, the platform can support management of the entire supply train.
Managing consent and user profiles are features baked into the platform ensuring your organisation can manage compliance with legal obligations.
Customer Profiles and Content Intelligence unified into a single reporting dashboard can empower marketers to make informed choices when refining customer journeys. Data from third party tools can be integrated to further illuminate your insights and deliver enhanced experiences to website visitors.
As Marketers strive to understand the opportunities for scaling that AI can bring, Optimizely have ensured AI is at the centre of delivering marketing efficiency and effectiveness.
This includes using AI to:
When it comes to making the decision, as to which leading DXP is the right fit for your business, ensure you have understood the following factors to be confident you are making the right choice.
Does your platform support headless or hybrid content delivery?
Headless UI can safeguard investment in features, keeping them platform agnostic. If you are exploring a fully composable stack, make sure that your content editors get the support they need, effectively creating and editing content. Some PAAS platforms are still unable to support headless content delivery.
If your platform is dependent on third party software to support testing and user journey optimisation, beware of limitations. Ensure you have the right level of platform integration to support your aspirations. Experimentation is tightly integrated in the Optimizely Platform.
Ensure you have the hosting scalability to cope with your traffic patterns. In either PAAS or SAAS format, Optimizely comes with scalable hosting on Azure.
If your requirement is for a low level of customisation, a SAAS solution may insulate your organisation from ongoing upgrades.
Note that Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is only suitable for PAAS delivery.
Investigate the level of personalisation tooling you receive within the platform.
Try to understand where your personalisation journey will take your team - and what that means for your customers. Ensure your platform has extensible solutions that can continue to support you without the need for extensive enhancement.
Working with our clients, we have often explored the total cost of ownership (TCO) they would achieve across a range of DXP platforms.
And we repeatedly find that when considered in its entirety. Optimizely continues to provide the lowest TCO against competitors, SitecoreXP or SiteCore XM Cloud, or AEM.
When considering the speed in which you can realise savings or revenue growth, maps to the speed with which Optimizely be delivered, the time to value is invariably decreased against platforms such as AEM.
A 2022 report published by Forrester, and commissioned by Optimizely, found that Companies that leverage Optimizely’s experimentation features can see an average conversion rate uplift of up to 60% over three years.
And if experimentation is key component of your digital roadmap, we recommend reading our detailed guide on building a test and learn culture.
With Optimizely, Marketing teams can execute changes without relying on developers, saving thousands annually in IT support costs compared to legacy platforms.
The same Forrester report claimed that time savings can be as much as 75% over 3 years, as Optimizely streamlines workflows. Bringing compelling reductions in your content time-to-market.
In our experience, Optimizely offers the best balance of cost vs. value in the DXP market. And this is exemplified by it's leadership position in Gartner's 2025 Magic Quadrant for DXPs.
The long-term benefits of reduced maintenance costs over other DXP’s or complex composable architectures, alongside its revenue-driving capabilities are significant in driving the business case for an Optimizely investment.
These factors make it a clear choice over competitors like Sitecore or Adobe Experience Manager.