What is Optimizely and Why Do You Need It?
According to DataReportal’s Digital 2026 report, the average person now spends around 6 hours and 38 minutes a day on the internet — over 40% of the time we’re awake. It is not surprising that the digital space is becoming the main channel of communication for most brands. At the same time, consumer demand for highly personalized digital experiences continues to grow. In order to stay afloat and grow, companies need strong tools to build their digital presence. In this article, we will examine one of the best solutions on the DXP market — Optimizely, a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms.
What is Optimizely?
Optimizely is a Digital Experience Platform that offers marketers and other teams the ability to fully manage and optimize their digital presence and customer experience across every touchpoint. It brings together solutions for content, commerce, and real-time intelligence that drive personalization at scale, increasingly powered by Optimizely Opal, the platform’s embedded AI layer. The Optimizely platform is highly customizable, easy to use, and applicable to any market.
What is included in Optimizely?
The Optimizely (formerly Episerver) product suite has offerings for CMS (Content Management System) as well as commerce capabilities, along with a multitude of other useful tools and functionalities. You can pick and choose some of them, or implement them all for the full stack.
Optimizely CMS
Optimizely CMS (formerly Content Cloud) gathers powerful features to manage and control all your website content and support day-to-day marketing tasks.
Nowadays customers expect targeted content, created specifically for them on various channels and responding to market changes. With Optimizely CMS, your teams get Visual Builder — the platform’s drag-and-drop editing interface — along with post-scheduling, collaborative content creation, and easy tracking of approval processes. Among other features, you get multi-step web forms, A/B testing, SEO and CRO, social network integration, and personalization, with Opal AI agents available to help audit and structure content for AI-driven discovery. All this with a user-friendly, intuitive UI.
Optimizely Commerce
Optimizely Commerce (formerly Commerce Cloud) includes everything from the CMS and upgrades it with efficient features for the e-commerce market.
It equips your team with the ability to manage products, pricing, inventory, carts, and orders, as well as run promotions and discounts, with an easy-to-use UI.
Optimizely Commerce is divided into two solutions — Configured Commerce (formerly B2B Commerce Cloud) and Commerce Connect (formerly B2C/Customized Commerce). Configured Commerce is built for the flexibility, complex business rules, and integration needs of B2B and manufacturing organizations, while Commerce Connect pairs Optimizely’s CMS with headless APIs for brand-first, highly customized commerce experiences.
In addition, Optimizely Commerce supports integration with various other e-commerce systems, payment gateways, and marketing automation tools.
Optimizely Data Platform (ODP)
The Optimizely Data Platform (ODP), formerly known as the Customer Data Platform, allows you to not only understand who your customers are but also anticipate their intentions in real time and create relevant messages.
ODP collects and centralizes data about all your customers from different touchpoints, making it available to your teams and other Optimizely services in your toolbox, enabling them to provide your customers with a unified and personalized experience.
In addition, the powerful segmentation capabilities of ODP allow you to segment and target exactly the customer groups you need, whether by their origin, behavior, or their stage in the customer life cycle.
Experimentation
Optimization and experimentation are at the core of the Optimizely product suite. You don’t have to worry about speed or performance — conduct A/B and multivariate testing at any scale, on any device or channel. Now you are fully equipped to make decisions based on reliable real-world data without doubt or guesswork. What makes Optimizely’s experimentation platform so unique in the market is that you can run multiple experiments in the same space at the same time using exclusion groups.
Content Recommendations
Find out which topics and content are generating the most revenue and conversions with Optimizely’s AI-driven Content Recommendations. This feature analyzes all content in real time using natural language processing. Now you can minimize manual work and focus on creating effective content. Gain a deeper understanding of the interests of any given user profile in ODP and focus your content creation efforts on what your customers care about.
Product Recommendations
Optimizely Product Recommendations lets you apply the full power of personalized recommendations based on the history of each visitor or the actions of similar users.
Increase conversions, cross-sells, upsells, and maximize cart value with minimal manual configuration. The recommendation mechanism runs on machine learning, and now includes Opal chat directly in the portal, letting teams configure widgets and interpret performance reports conversationally.
Moreover, Product Recommendations allows you to create suggestions not only based on website behavior but also taking into account other points of interaction (offline or in-store).
Email Product Recommendations
Shoppers today expect not just a personalized experience, but a seamless one. This means you need a personal touch not only on the website but also in other touchpoints, including your email communications. Optimizely’s Email Product Recommendations let you include personalized offers in your email marketing campaigns, as well as transactional and trigger emails — abandoned carts, welcome letters, order confirmations, etc.
Feature Experimentation
Feature Experimentation (formerly Full Stack) extends content and marketing experimentation to feature rollout and coding. Experiment with each new feature and measure the effectiveness of each release for your customers. With Feature Experimentation, you can test everything from content to search results and algorithms.
Flag features to separate code deployment from release, easily turn them on and off to gradually roll out new features, and choose who gets access to them. Measure results and deploy without risk.
The results of the experiments are presented in real time, based on a statistical engine developed jointly with Stanford University. Your teams instantly get validated insights enabling them to make decisions at scale.
Optimizely Visitor Intelligence
Creating an outstanding customer experience depends entirely on how you understand your client. Use Optimizely Visitor Intelligence to get data, analyze, and segment your customers. Create groups based on various criteria — demographics, online and omnichannel consumer behavior (including those who have made purchases in online and offline stores). You can then use the created segments for your omnichannel marketing campaigns.
Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation is a powerful editor for creating marketing campaigns, usable as part of your Optimizely stack or as a standalone product integrated into other CMS and e-commerce systems. Create one-time or complex multi-stage campaigns across channels: email, mobile push, print, and SMS. Analyze results with reports on key metrics and post-click tracking.
Search & Navigation
If visitors can’t find what they need on your site, they leave. With a growing volume of content and product offerings, a navigation menu alone is no longer enough. You need powerful search functionality.
Optimizely Search & Navigation gives you that, based on visitors’ search behavior and website statistics. Using this information, you can add automatic landing pages, responsive navigation, and guided search to increase website traffic and conversion rate.
Personalized Search & Navigation
Personalized search and navigation enhance your search experience further. Results and landing pages are customized based on each visitor’s previous activity and your business rules. Relevance becomes unique — you guide users to exactly where they need to go, reducing the number of steps between start and conversion.
Who’s Using Optimizely?
Optimizely’s services are used by and benefit more than 9,000 brands worldwide.
Marketing teams are empowered to continuously improve customer experience, have key questions answered by data-driven analysis, and achieve strong returns on marketing efforts. Development teams use Optimizely’s experimentation tools to test feature rollouts and pre-launch redesigns.
Whatever goals you set for creating your customer experience, you can achieve them with Optimizely, and its capabilities apply across industries. Here are just a few examples of brands that have found success with Optimizely:
High Tech: IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft; CPG and Retail: The Gap, Pizza Hut, Royal Canin; Healthcare & Pharma: American Physical Therapy Association, EPG Health, American Academy of Pediatrics; Manufacturing: Yamaha, Dura-Line, ACCO Brands; Financial services: Visa, Metro Bank, Swinton Insurance; Technology: Xerox, DocuSign, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Why Do You Need Optimizely?
Above, we talked about the features and benefits of various Optimizely products. But what else makes it so special?
All Optimizely tools are designed to be easy and intuitive for end users. Behind a simple, friendly UI lies powerful, complex technology — increasingly AI-driven through Opal — that automates tasks and pushes personalization to a new level.
The pricing model of Optimizely’s services is variable and adapts to your requirements and business goals.
In addition, the company continues developing educational materials and events through Optimizely Academy to help its users grow and learn, not only within the company’s products but also around current questions of content management, e-commerce, personalization, and experimentation.
Let’s talk!
Thinking of using Optimizely for your team?
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 first consultation from our experts.
Last Updated: August 2026