Digital Experience Platforms: a comparison

A Digital Experience Platform (DXP) helps businesses manage digital touchpoints, streamline customer journeys, and gain valuable insights, with Adobe Experience Cloud, Sitecore, and Optimizely being top options, each suited to different needs and budgets.

A large part of your customers’ relationship with you takes place online. Today more than ever, they engage with you through an increasingly larger number of digital channels: website, mobile apps, email campaigns, social media, and so on. A Digital Experience Platform (DXP) helps you keep track of your digital touchpoints. Below, you’ll find the pros and cons of some of our current favorites: Adobe Experience Cloud, Sitecore and Optimizely.

A Digital Experience Platform (DXP) helps you streamline your customers’ digital experience, all the way through their customer lifetime journey. You’ll stay on top of content management while also keeping track of user behavior and decisions. Those data are a source of valuable insights to improve your customers’ experience even more. A win-win cycle!

Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms

Gartner positions Adobe as the category, industry, and market leader for Digital Experience Platforms. Closely followed by Optimizely and Sitecore.

Adobe Experience Cloud: Best for large enterprises

Adobe Experience Cloud offers you all the capabilities you can dream up and then some, from content management to analytics, personalization, customer journey and customer data management. It’s one of the most sophisticated tools on the market.

Pros: Comprehensive suite with advanced analytics, marketing, and advertising features. Strong in content management and personalization.
Cons: Can be complex and expensive. You’ll need to invest in training and implementation.
Best for: Large enterprises with diverse marketing needs.

Sitecore Experience Manager Great marketing capabilities

Sitecore is moving from more of a Content Management System (CMS) to a Digital Experience Platform in its own right. It’s a very composable tool that plays well with third-party extensions.

Pros: Robust content management with strong personalization and multichannel marketing capabilities. Great onboarding and training.
Cons: Can be costly and complex, and require a lot of development. The learning curve can be steep.
Best for: Medium to large businesses looking for a powerful CMS with advanced marketing and personalization features.

OptimizelyVery user friendly

Optimizely gets its name from its primary goal: to help you optimize your customers’ digital experience. It lets you tweak, test and evaluate experiences to find out what works best for your audiences.

Pros: Known for experimentation and A/B testing capabilities. User-friendly interface and integration with many other digital tools. Transparent, scalable pricing.
Cons: Less comprehensive compared to Adobe and Sitecore in some advanced marketing functionalities. Analytics can be difficult to navigate, making it harder to find the insights you need.
Best for: Businesses of any size focusing on website optimization and customer experience testing.

The big question: how do you choose?

Feeling stuck? Reach out. We’re happy to look into your best options.

Note: This article is not sponsored by any of the 3rd party organisations that were mentioned. The contents are based on personal experiences or viewpoints and endorsed by Digitalum as a best practice at the time of writing.