Optimizely Introduces New SaaS CMS with Visual Builder for Marketers

Optimizely is gettin’ SaaSy with us.

Along with its growing spade of enterprise-focused digital experience products – including its industry-leading content management system – the company just added a new SaaS CMS to its empire of offerings. 

That might be enough of a game-changer, but the plot thickens: The package also includes its new Visual Builder – a dynamic feature that further expands the DXP's capabilities in the direction of marketers.

Bottom line: Optimizely’s users and teams can now leverage a PaaS or SaaS option based on their organizational needs and goals and dig into a super-slick, easy-to-use visual tool that's purpose-built for marketers.

Destination: SaaSification.

It’s no shocker by any means. Optimizely has proven adept and resourceful at cracking the eggshell and seeping into multiple layers of the marketing ecosystem. Not only does it enjoy a top-tier position on Gartner’s MQ for DXPs, but it also rules the roost on Gartner’s sister grid for Content Marketing Platforms (CMP). 

According to the company’s press release, the new offering is built on Optimizely’s foundational legacy of category leadership, amplifying the company’s user base by offering customers greater choice and flexibility. As the gem in the crown of its new SaaS CMS, Optimizely’s Visual Builder also provides a wide range of capabilities designed with creatives in mind. 

“We wanted to build the best CMS for marketing teams,” said Rupali Jain, Chief Product Officer at Optimizely. “By simplifying the front-end design and content creation experience, we give marketers the creativity, speed, and independence they have desired.”

Great news for marketers, who often get the less-than-desirable end of the stick in a headless-leaning, composable world. But with Optimizely, developers can reap the benefits as well: there are no language dependencies, so users can build in the framework of their choice and choose traditional or headless options for architecting their experiences.

Let’s peel back a bit of the Optimizely onion and explore the SaaSy highlights. 

A new vision for visual building in a SaaS CMS

As stated, Optimizely’s new Visual Builder is keenly tuned toward marketers, enabling them to easily create personalized experiences. The tool offers a new UI, customizable elements, and even an interactive preview – all designed to bolster engagement and drive conversions. 

At the same time, the new CMS offers flexibility to developers who want to customize within the platform. In this sense, it’s providing a happy medium to a broad set of users and delivering it all in a SaaS CMS wrapper – one that allows for greater extensibility and choice around frameworks and architectures. 

“Our CMS is now language-agnostic, allowing developers to get started quickly, whether they prefer a traditional or headless architecture,” Jain said. “With painless upgrades and extensive capabilities, our new SaaS CMS and market-leading Visual Builder already stand out in today’s increasingly competitive landscape.” 

Beyond drag-and-drop features

One of the new Visual Builder's big promises is its ease of use, which resonates with low-code/no-code creators who crave greater control over the visual experience. It endeavors to remove technical friction – a noble cause for any marketing-centric tool – streamlining the process of creating dynamic content and encouraging content reuse. This, in turn, drives greater efficiency and accelerates content velocity.

Perhaps the biggest (and most obvious) selling point here is the Visual Builder’s drag-and-drop features. On its face, this kind of interactive capability sounds sweet, enabling almost anyone to customize on-brand layouts without the hang-ups of code and complexity.

On the CMS side, Optimizely has juiced the simple visual building with advanced content modeling to help easily structure and configure content experiences. With this feature, users can shape more engaging journeys and deliver compelling messages to the right audiences. There are also template management features that make content reuse easier and more efficient by leveraging content blueprints.

From an administrative perspective, enhanced multi-channel management helps centralize control over an organization’s websites and apps, allowing them to manage everything in one place. You can also tap the platform’s customizable workflows to meet your team’s project needs within the system – a must-have for any CMS worth its salt. 

There are also clear benefits to the SaaS posture of the new platform, specifically around automatic upgrades and scaling. Teams have greater freedom by removing the burden of managing versions while eliminating the pain and cost associated with constant updates. It also ensures that users have access to the latest features and innovations without lifting a finger in IT.  

Here’s a snapshot of the product’s BETA program on YouTube, featuring a demo deployment of the SaaS CMS. It provides a quick overview of the experience, enough to get a sense of how the UI is unfolding and the underlying CMS functions. It also reflects Optimizely's investment in its budding Vercel partnership (more on that later):
 

If you’re looking to go deeper, you can register for an upcoming webinar on July 25th called “Next Generation Optimizely CMS.”

Expanding the API fabric with Optimizely Graph

Along with the new SaaS CMS and Visual Builder, Optimizely also introduced its new Optimizely Graph – a set of APIs that enables digital teams and organizations to easily access and repurpose content from multiple sources and deliver it everywhere. 

Much like a search engine crawls the web to build a graph-based index of content, Optimizely Graph literally transforms your CMS content into a source you can query – and then searches and manipulates content using the GraphQL standard.

The solution now offers faceted and fuzzy search functionalities, improving how users explore and find content within the integrated CMS SaaS platform. With content delivery served at the edge via CDN, Optimizely Graph also makes content globally available at blazing-fast speeds.

Hosting frontend experiences with Vercel or Netlify

Appealing to composable builders looking to deploy static sites, Optimizely also allows users to create their own sites using Visual Builder and leverage a partner like Vercel or Netlify to host their frontend experiences. 

According to the press release, Optimizely has recently strengthened its partnership with Vercel – the leading frontend Cloud platform – to provide developers with a comprehensive suite of tools that include advanced deployment capabilities, seamless scaling options, and robust performance monitoring. 

Why it matters

“Outexperiment. Outperform.” It sounds a bit like the intro to the Survivor TV franchise, but Optimizely’s messaging is a winning combo. Users and brands are hungry for more testing, personalization, and optimization, and many want these features to be easily accessible in a single ecosystem. Optimizely is covering all these bases with a foundational focus on marketing.

Over the last year, the goliath has maintained multi-category leadership by doubling down on innovation. This includes its Optimizely One platform, which presents itself as a unified operating system for digital and marketing teams. It connects everything from planning, content creation, layout and publishing, testing, personalization, and analysis — all in one place.

When you consider the scope and reach of its CMP capabilities, it’s clear how Optimizely is focusing on a unified marketing toolbox as a key component for success. These features help reduce complexity, and in my recent discussions with both marketing leads and CIOs, simplicity is becoming a more attractive beachhead in a rising sea of applications. 

At the same time, the market is becoming increasingly competitive at all levels as organizations look to assess, reduce, and optimize their IT costs. To that end, the introduction of a SaaS CMS is logical, expanding the breadth and reach of Optimizely’s core solutions into new segments and downstream use cases, including more composable ones. Additionally, a cozier relationship with Vercel speaks volumes about the company's intention to provide more modular solutions to the market. 

One might say that we’re at the peak of “visual builder exuberance,” where every platform – monolithic or composable – is entering the fray with a fancy drag-and-drop tool or experience. While this might feel somewhat commoditized, or present a “me too” parity moment, Optimizely’s route is delivering a more complete vision around its quest to rule the ecosystem. That means delivering tools that are easier to use for marketers and content creators, while still expanding the capabilities for developers to build omnichannel experiences. 

The introduction of a SaaS CMS with a visual builder certainly begs comparisons with other platforms that offer both – some with a greater emphasis on the CMS tooling, others with a penchant for the builder experience. With the latter, Webflow comes to mind, leaning on its rich building features while offering an onboard CMS with platform-centric capabilities. I don’t see Optimizely endeavoring to compete toe-to-toe with that kind of Photoshop-level UX, but its Visual Builder and CMS certainly provide an alternative at the right level of the market.

And let’s not forget: This is the company that Episerver helped evolve, infusing its best-of-breed heritage of enterprise CMS philosophy and capabilities into its SaaS offering. In a market flooded with options, there’s a distinct advantage for Optimizely to leverage its experience and trust.

The “race to the middle” continues

No assessment would be complete without examining how this reflects the “race to the middle,” which we’ve been discussing since late last year. This was a cornerstone subject during my keynote interview with Deane Barker at the Boye & Company CMS Kickoff this past January. Since then, a lot has happened to codify this shift; heck, even Gartner has waxed about the growing composable posture of DXPs.

At the same time, headless CMS platforms have evolved and repositioned as “content platforms” and “composable DXPs,” introducing their own visual builders and expanded toolsets. In part, they’re delivering more enhancements and AI features to customers – but they’re also increasing stickiness and multiplying value to meet investment expectations. 

Providing a counterpoint to MACH solutions has also been an unstated goal for DXPs, but even the MACH Alliance is shifting its strategy to allow for more individual products to enter the hallowed MACH ecosystem. So yes – the race to the middle continues, and Optimizely’s new SaaS offering with headless extensibility is a direct reflection of this increasing velocity.

What's the “universal” truth?

If you're not aware, there's a conference happening in Montreal at the beginning of August called the Universal CMS Summit. It’s sponsored by dotCMS and chiefly driven by its VP of Product, Preston So. 

The event boasts a bench of great speakers – representing everyone from Optimizely to Hygraph – and I suspect we’ll hear how all roads have led to this terminus of universality (we'll unpack more of this in a future article). There's even a session called “No More Gaps: A New Era of Universal Visual Editing.” As I said, all routes seem to be converging to solve many of the key problems facing CMS.

We can all agree that more choice is generally good for the market, but only if we mitigate confusion. Categories are becoming increasingly difficult to maneuver, and buyers are still challenged with making sense of it all. 

By offering both PaaS and SaaS in a single place, Optimizely is broadening its reach and expanding opportunities – becoming more universal, if you will. But it would do well to focus on making it easier for customers to determine what products make the most sense for their use case. In a world with so many choices (even under one roof), this could be a critical differentiator. 

Good marketing can make those choices clearer. And marketing is something Optimizely knows a thing or two about. 

It might be what makes them extra SaaSy. 

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