What is Optimizely and Why Do You Need It?
What is Optimizely?
Optimizely provides software for creating, managing, and optimizing digital experiences. Its portfolio includes tools for content management, experimentation, personalization, commerce, and marketing operations. Optimizely Agent Platform, formerly known as Opal, supports creating and orchestrating AI agents across Optimizely products and connected third-party systems.
How does a DXP differ from a traditional CMS? Read DXP vs CMS: what’s the difference.
Who Is Optimizely For?
Optimizely is used by marketing, digital experience, content, e-commerce, product, and development teams. Marketing and content teams can use its tools to manage publishing, coordinate campaigns, and personalize experiences. Product and development teams can run experiments, manage feature releases, and assess how changes affect user behavior.
Optimizely reports that its products are trusted by more than 10,000 brands. Examples featured on its website include Visa, Docusign, Xerox, Yamaha, and ACCO Brands.
What Do You Get With Optimizely?
The products and capabilities below span the Optimizely portfolio. What’s included in your setup depends on the products and plan you choose, so not every feature is included in every subscription.
Optimizely CMS
Optimizely CMS supports content creation, editing, publishing, and approval workflows. Visual Builder provides visual layout editing in supported versions, including CMS SaaS and CMS 13 PaaS. Forms, experimentation, personalization, and AI-assisted workflows depend on the CMS version, configuration, and connected products.
Content Marketing Platform
Optimizely Content Marketing Platform (CMP) supports campaign planning, content production, and collaboration. Teams can manage content requests, coordinate work through shared calendars, and organize review and approval workflows.
Digital Asset Management
Optimizely Digital Asset Management (DAM) provides a central repository for storing, organizing, and sharing digital assets such as images, videos, and documents. Search, metadata, and access controls help teams find and reuse assets across content and campaign workflows.
Web Experimentation
Optimizely Web Experimentation lets teams let teams compare variations of digital experiences using A/B and multivariate testing. Results help teams evaluate how changes affect user behavior and business metrics. Exclusion groups can keep selected experiments from sharing participants, helping teams manage potential interactions between tests.
Feature Management and Experimentation
Optimizely Feature Experimentation enables development teams to test variations of application features, search results, and algorithms, and measure their effects on user behavior and business metrics.
Feature flags separate code deployment from feature release. Teams can enable or disable features, control which users receive them, and roll them out gradually. Experiment results help inform decisions about whether to expand, revise, or stop a rollout.
Personalization
Optimizely Personalization supports tailoring digital experiences to different audiences using available visitor data, behavior, and targeting rules. Teams can adapt content, imagery, and offers, and test personalized experiences to assess their effect on engagement and conversion metrics.
Content Recommendations
Optimizely Content Recommendations uses natural language processing to identify topics within content and recommend relevant items based on visitor interests and behavior. Reporting helps teams assess engagement and track configured conversion goals, informing decisions about what to create or update.
Product Recommendations
Optimizely Product Recommendations uses machine learning to suggest products based on a visitor’s browsing and purchase history, as well as patterns from other shoppers. Recommendations can support related-product suggestions, cross-selling, and upselling.
Depending on the implementation and available data, recommendations can also incorporate imported offline purchase data.
Email Product Recommendations
Optimizely Email Product Recommendations adds personalized product suggestions to email templates. These can be used in marketing campaigns, transactional emails, and automated messages such as abandoned-cart reminders, welcome emails, and order confirmations.
Personalized Search & Navigation
Optimizely Personalized Search & Navigation adjusts the ordering of on-site search results and search-driven landing pages based on visitor behavior and configured business rules. It requires the relevant service and implementation, and does not affect results in external search engines.
Optimizely Commerce
Optimizely’s commerce offerings support product catalogs, pricing, purchasing, and order management. The two solutions, Configured Commerce and Commerce Connect, provide different approaches to B2B commerce and customized buying experiences.
Configured Commerce provides preconfigured B2B capabilities, including quoting, customer-specific pricing, and self-service purchasing. Commerce Connect combines CMS integration and commerce APIs for implementations requiring more customized content and buying experiences.
In addition, Optimizely Commerce supports integration with various other e-commerce systems, payment gateways, and marketing automation tools.
Optimizely Data Platform (ODP)
Optimizely Data Platform (ODP) brings together customer data from connected sources to build unified profiles and audience segments. Teams can use these segments to support personalization, experimentation, and campaigns across integrated systems. Available capabilities depend on the data collected and integrations configured.
Analytics
Optimizely Analytics connects to cloud data warehouses to support analysis of customer behavior, product usage, and experiment results. Teams can define business metrics, explore journeys and conversion funnels, and build reports and dashboards using connected data.
Optimizely Campaign
Optimizely Campaign supports the creation and management of one-time and multi-stage campaigns across email, mobile push, print, and SMS. It can be used within an Optimizely setup or integrated with other CMS and commerce systems. Reporting and post-click tracking help teams assess campaign performance and recipient activity.
Search & Navigation and Optimizely Graph
Optimizely Search & Navigation provides search functionality for website content and product catalogs. Teams can configure filtering, guided navigation, and search-based landing pages to help visitors find relevant information or products. Search analytics provide insight into visitor queries and can inform adjustments to search relevance.
Optimizely also offers Graph, a separate service for querying and delivering content through a GraphQL API. It supports content retrieval, search, and filtering for headless and other API-driven implementations. The choice between Graph and Search & Navigation depends on the CMS version, architecture, and required search features.
Agent Platform
Optimizely Agent Platform, previously known as Opal, supports building and coordinating AI agents for tasks such as content creation, campaign preparation, and reporting. Agents can use connected Optimizely products and third-party tools within configured workflows. Permissions, evaluation criteria, and human approval steps help teams control how those workflows operate.
Optimizely has also announced Mark-1, a family of AI models adapted specifically for marketing tasks.
When Should You Consider Optimizely?
Optimizely may be relevant when an organization needs to manage content across multiple sites or channels, run experiments, personalize experiences, or connect commerce with its content operations. The appropriate products depend on the problems the team is trying to solve and the systems it already uses.
Evaluation should cover integration requirements, content migration, editorial workflows, development resources, and ongoing ownership. Costs should account for licensing, implementation, training, and maintenance. These considerations help determine which capabilities are needed and whether Optimizely is a suitable fit.
Let’s talk!
Think Optimizely could be what your team is looking for? First Line Software has been a certified Optimizely partner since 2010.
Our engineering team has completed hundreds of Web Content Management (WCM) projects, with certified engineers and architects, project managers, and quality assurance specialists on staff.
Learn more about First Line Software’s Optimizely Implementation Services, or tell us about your project and get a free consultation from our experts.
Already using Optimizely and need to update to CMS 13? Learn more about what this process takes, and request your upgrade assessment today.
Last Updated: November 2026