As marketing and digital teams face increasing pressure to deliver faster launches, smarter personalisation, and continuous optimisation, the platforms meant to support them are being re‑evaluated.
That’s why we’re seeing more enterprise customers moving away from Sitecore, towards Optimizely.
Why analysts rank Optimizely as a leading DXP
In the latest Forrester Wave™ for Digital Experience Platforms (Q4 2025), Optimizely was named a Leader, receiving the highest scores possible in 15 criteria, including content management, experience experimentation, AI-driven personalisation, and agent orchestration.
Forrester’s commentary notes Optimizely’s rare ability to bring together content, commerce, and data in a unified, intelligent system, not simply through integrations, but actively optimising for outcomes.
In Gartner’s 2025 Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms, Optimizely was placed highest for Ability to Execute and furthest for Completeness of Vision, outranking Adobe and Sitecore on both axes.
The message is consistent, Optimizely has not only caught up with the incumbents, it has overtaken them, helped by its innovative AI driven orchestration engine with Opal. Faster to deliver value. Easier to implement. And built for the way modern marketing is actually operating and evolving.
What Sitecore still offers and where it’s limited
With Optimizely and Sitecore commonly going head-to-head in the DXP/CMS space for many years, we also need a balanced view. It is clear that Sitecore still holds weight in the enterprise space. It has deep capabilities in content and personalisation, a loyal customer base, and strong brand equity.
For organisations with highly complex, globally distributed digital needs, Sitecore can still be a valid option, especially for those already heavily invested in their XP infrastructure that demand highly customised workflows and processes. But here’s the challenge, Sitecore is shifting away from that very XP infrastructure. Their focus now lies in Sitecore XM Cloud, a new SaaS CMS platform that, for many existing users, requires a reimplementation rather than a smooth upgrade.
Analysts are raising flags around this transition. The migration to XM Cloud is significant. It’s not plug-and-play. It comes with higher cost, planning, and risk. At the same time, teams still report ongoing frustrations around total cost of ownership, developer reliance, long upgrade cycles, and time to market.
So the question now is “Does Sitecore make it easier to deliver the outcomes we’re aiming for?” And increasingly, the answer for many is, not anymore.
Why Optimizely is staying ahead of the game
Optimizely has long been known for developing products that provide both commercial and developers with easier to use products and in recent years they have been consistently aligning more directly with how modern digital teams want to work and just as importantly, evolve.
Analysts cite its superior time-to-value, composable architecture, and marketing-friendly tools as clear differentiators. With Optimizely, your teams aren’t stuck in six-month build cycles or reliant on DevOps for every optimisation.
The platform is modular. You implement what you need, when you need it. It’s SaaS and PaaS ready. It supports headless and hybrid use cases. It integrates seamlessly with your CRM, CDP, and analytics stack, and it lets marketers launch, test, learn, and optimise with far less friction.
But here’s the real reason Optimizely is pulling ahead, it’s not just innovating faster. It’s building a completely new operating model.
The Opal advantage: AI that executes, not just suggests
This is where Opal changes the game.
Opal is not just another “AI assistant.” It brings a much bigger shift, from AI as a feature, to AI as the engine. It’s built into the core of the Optimizely One platform, and it does something no other DXP does at scale, it autonomously thinks, orchestrates, and executes.
Where other platforms use AI to suggest content variations or recommend audiences, sometimes even as separate user interfaces or products, Opal goes further. It uses specialised agents to handle complex, multi-step workflows, from campaign ideation to copywriting, A/B testing, and performance analysis, all orchestrated within the platform.
It’s the difference between a tool that helps you think, and a system that acts on your behalf. Research by McKinsey clearly shows that agent orchestration, with it’s ability to understand goals, break down problems, orchestration multiple tools and execute campaigns expotentially- content checks, compliance checks, dynamic asset updates, plus more, adds the ability to 20X output.
Imagine a world where your team sets a goal, increase conversions on a landing page, and Opal removes costly manual, time consuming tasks as it builds the hypothesis, generates multiple variations, spins up the test, monitors results, and recommends the winner. Not in weeks. In hours. Automatically, with Opal as it’s intelligent automation engine.
This is what analysts mean when they call Optimizely “visionary.” It’s not just about centralising capabilities, it’s about automating value creation across every digital touchpoint. And because Opal can also integrate with Sitecore, Sitecore users can start benefiting from intelligent orchestration today, without a full migration.
DotCentric’s as a trusted Sitecore to Optimizely migration partner
As an Optimizely Gold Partner with over 15 years of implementation experience, we’ve worked with some of the UK’s industry leading organisations to turn Optimizely from a powerful platform into a business growth engine.
That means:
- Designing low-risk migration paths from Sitecore that protect uptime and reduce disruption.
- Building modular, scalable Optimizely architectures that evolve with your business.
- Embedding experimentation and personalisation into your day-to-day marketing processes.
- Enabling your teams to work smarter, not harder, with access to intelligent agent workflows that reduce backlog and amplify strategy.
We’ve helped teams move from reactive campaign cycles to intelligent, outcome driven marketing operations. We’ve replaced months of planning with days of deployment. And we’ve seen the impact, faster launches, higher conversion rates, and teams that feel empowered instead of overburdened.
If you're considering the move from Sitecore, or even just looking to explore what’s possible beyond your current setup, we’re here to guide the way.
Choose a digital experience platform that scales with your goals
What is clear is that the Sitecore vs Optimizely debate is not about choosing a platform vendor. It’s about choosing and then implementing operational momentum more consistently.
It’s about whether your digital platform and data are actively accelerating your ability to deliver better experiences, or quietly slowing your business down behind the scenes.
For organisations still on Sitecore, there may still be a case in certain high-complexity, IT-driven environments. But if your goal is to make evidence-based, outcome-driven decisions, to act on data in real time, and to give your teams the ability to launch, experiment and personalise at scale for growth, the equation changes.
Optimizely, now with Opal at its core, enables this next level of marketing execution. It turns your strategy into orchestrated action, integrating seamlessly across your own co data, content, CRM, testing, and analytics systems. It empowers teams to do more than just manage content, it empowers them to enrich, analyse and optimise each critical touch point.
But here’s the part that often gets missed in platform evaluations: the human impact.
We’ve seen it time and again, marketing and digital teams weighed down by operational debt. Long wait times. Burnout from backlogs. System’s so complex that they force work in silos. And endless cycles of “just get it done” that leave no space for creativity, insight, or strategy.
At DotCentric, we help digital and product leaders not only navigate the technical shift, but also design for the human side of change setting your teams up for sustained, empowered, collaborative success.
if you’d like to review your current dxp set up, feel free to book time with our team.
