A Comparative Guide - Sitecore vs. Acquia vs. Adobe vs. Optimizely

The competition for the best digital experience is already going on. The brands thriving and winning customers today are those delivering impeccable and unforgettable digital experiences (DX). But that's not the only common aspect in these brands - they've meticulously and carefully selected their competition-beating problem solver.

If you are also ready to beat your competition in a long run and beyond, then you need to interact with your customers in unique and personal ways. You have to be an expert in forecasting their desires to shift the present transactional relationships to long-term ones.

So, if you want to lay the groundwork now, let's start with best dxp comparison to find the ideal solution for your business –

A Quick Overview of DXPs

A digital experience platform or DXP provides a place to create and manage personalized customer experience across all the channels and touchpoints throughout the customer journey. A DXP technology has a dynamic set of tools and features to create responsive apps. Additionally, it offers an integrated view to all its users across several apps and powers an immersive flow of systems for the users. Developers can create interactive, rich, and responsive web experiences with its modern technology.

Mostly, DXP technology has a set of content-related capabilities such as –

• Features of a CMS (content management system) to gather, organize, and keep plenty of digital content that can be of different types.

• Technical intelligence and rich insights to personalize the content delivery process to any individual or audience utilizing AI & ML infused technologies and features.

• Functionalities for synthesizing customer data by selecting and organizing information in several repositories.

• The capacity to create several types of content - images, haptics, sounds, written documents, and videos.

• Ensuring content delivery happens for different channels - mobile, kiosks, websites, smart speakers, and digital signs.

The DXP technology marketplace is rapidly evolving, and it is essential to know the breadth of each solution. Here we bring you the insights on the best dxp comparison –

Best DXP Comparison:  Sitecore vs. Acquia (Drupal) vs. Adobe vs. Optimizely (Episerver)

The DXP marketplace is rapidly evolving, and it is essential to know the breadth of each solution. Here's a comparison of four DXPs from different enterprise software partners –

Acquia (Drupal)

Acquia is an open DXP with built-in evaluation and performance tools created specially to cater the non-technical users. It has all the tools and features to create, operate, and optimize your apps, mobile, websites, and any other digital experiences. Some well-known products of Acquia dxp are - Acquia Commerce, Acquia Cloud, Acquia Lightning, Acquia Cloud Site Factory, and Acquia Journey.

One of the best things about Acquia dxp is it is quite easy to understand which makes it great for businesses that need their teams to get familiar with the nuances of digital content management and DX delivery.

Some of the strengths of this platform are

Open flexibility - Acquia's open DXP is flexible and future-proof. Its API-first architecture is known for connecting easily with any built solution. Enterprises can benefit from such future-proof architecture as it can easily connect with new features and tools without much effort.

No steep learning curve – Acquia dxp has greater autonomy for non-technical users by offering low-code tools to simplify authoring and publishing. Business users no longer have to rely on any IT experts for any new change or updates which means projects can be completed in lesser time and smaller budgets.

Extensive offering - The Acquia Open DXP consists of the Acquia Marketing Cloud and Acquia Drupal Cloud, combining their functionalities - AgilOne, Mautic, and Cohesion to create an all-inclusive DXP offering. This gives it strong capabilities to create new websites, marketing campaigns, and applications with modular components.

Caution - Acquia’spersonalization functionality can be a drawback as it is not as advanced as other CMSs. Also, the overlapping capabilities between its Drupal Cloud and Marketing Cloud have created some major confusion.

Adobe Experience Cloud

Known as a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant, Adobe DXP is named as Adobe Experience Cloud. It has several functionalities like customer data management, content management, campaign management, analytics, and personalization. Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) also offers a dynamic cloud-native service and the tenets for businesses to handle content and store customer data.

The major components of Adobe Experience Cloud are - Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Analytics Cloud, and Adobe Advertising Cloud. The benefits of Adobe Experience Cloud are such as –

Provides a richer end-to-end experiences delivery - Adobe Experience Cloud uses intelligent systems such as Sensei to improve the journey of customers and enterprise. This platform is about designing for the future while blending content data in a common interface.

A single gateway to blend data and content - Adobe Experience Cloud has a single gateway for an organization for implementing throughout to measure, streamline, and personalize customer journeys. It comes with other tools that enable a company to extend the subscription to fit their unique needs.

Provides Real-time data for strategic decisions - Adobe Analytics provides enterprises with the data and insights that they require to make the right decisions. This is quite helpful in running the most effective campaigns and creating relevant content for target audiences.

Has a streamlined and accelerated creative workflow - Adobe Experience Cloud has provided a new approach to whole creative workflows with Creative Cloud which can be used to create and deliver personalized emails.

Offers paperless customer experiences - Adobe Sign and Adobe Experience Manager remove the cost and effort of paper-based manual processes for different purposes such as enrolling or customer onboarding.

Caution - However, the cost of ownership (TCO) of Adobe DXP still remains the highest. Also, the learning curve for using Adobe DXP is quite steep, and the implementation can be complex.

Sitecore

Known as the leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant report, Sitecore's DXP product is the Sitecore Experience Platform which is also available as a PaaS. Sitecore is often deployed for B2C and B2B in several industries like manufacturing, travel, healthcare, and retail.

With a special focus on marketing departments, Sitecore caters to large to mid-sized firms -- especially those that depend on Microsoft applications and Azure. This DXP has a plethora of technologies and integration services for handling content, personalization at its core, implementing e-commerce, and monitoring results.

What's best about this platform is that it offers marketers everything they need! Be it machine-learning generated insights or a complete view of customer data - Sitecore DXP has it all to create personalized experiences across channels. The four powerful capabilities of Sitecore are –

Omnichannel delivery and intelligence - This platform delivers personalized experiences through every channel be it on social media or mixed reality. With Sitecore JSS which is available in Sitecore XP 10, brands can enable the tracking of engagements across several headless applications and developments.

Scalable content management - Sitecore XP offers extensive features and frameworks to manage all brand-related content easily across hundreds of sites.

Rich data, smart insights - Sitecore XP enables the user to gather and connect real-time customer data and interactions from omnichannel engagement and campaigns. Then it stores them in the Sitecore® Experience Database™ (xDB); then provides real-time insights with Sitecore Experience Analytics, powered by native machine learning (Sitecore Cortex™) for advanced intelligence.

Versatile and personalized digital marketing - Sitecore XP can be used as a complete digital marketing platform as well or it can be integrated with other solutions. It offers greater flexibility and speed to effectively engage customers with impeccable experiences.

Caution - Some of the limitations of Sitecore is its cost which can be rather expensive for a company with basic requirements. However, it is a great option for most large-scale organizations interested in its add-on dynamic functionalities.

Optimizely (Episerver)

This renowned DXP technology is called the Episerver Customer-Centric Digital Experience Platform. Some of its incredible capabilities consist of personalization, analytics, content management, and customer data management. Mostly used in B2C and B2B use cases, Episerver is available in the cloud as PaaS initially. In October 2020, Episerver acquired Optimizely, and later in 2021, it was rebranded as Optimizely. It is a great solution for developers to set up and run A/B tests on websites to reduce the conversion rate optimization efforts.

With Optimizely, the range of benefits can look like this –

Flexible functions - Optimizely makes it quite simple to handle the content management system as the enterprise pursues new markets and expands services. It connects to the processes that drive the business, like - Marketing Automation, CRM, & Analytics. Plus, there is a wide range of verified third-party connectors and extensions that can be used to access unique functions without any extra development.

Integration with external systems - Optimizely delivers integration with external systems - PIM, MAP, and ERP which can complement businesses by managing the content-related workflows. This reduces the workload of creating content that already exists and also helps in creating a better pipeline-based approach for website-related processes.

Better collaboration and online experience - This platform is known for its solution of creating and editing region-specific campaigns of any product. Also, several features of any eCommerce site can be built upon by dragging and dropping blocks into specific areas.

Caution - Through Optimizely’s dynamic experimentation feature, brands can create a range of experiments for their web pages. However, like Adobe’s DXP, Optimizely has a steep learning curve. As this CMS has several features, it gets quite tricky for learners to grasp the platform quickly. There's also an issue of feature bloat which means - this platform comes with many features which can be integrated later on, but you'll still need to pay for it, which makes the CMS challenging to use. 

Select a DXP Foundation to Beat Your Competition

Brands that can lay a stable and robust foundation of strategy, culture, and technology today will be the winners of the digital experience of the future. New York based contemporary art gallery leveraged Sitecore to improve their personalization and engagement which helped them to garner -

• higher brand engagement

• 500 million in revenue

• 10x increase in their digital sales

Based on your organization's digital maturity assessment, a digital experience platform (DXP) is an essential ingredient for successful growth.

Want to find the solid DX foundation in place? Schedule a call with our Sitecore specialists here.