Optimizely review: enterprise CMS, A/B testing, personalization, and commerce platform. See features, custom pricing, company history, and alternatives.
Optimizely is an enterprise digital experience platform (DXP) that brings together content management, A/B testing and experimentation, personalization, commerce, and analytics under one brand. The company's current form is the result of a 2020 acquisition and 2021 rebrand: Episerver, a Stockholm-founded CMS company dating back to 1994, acquired the original Optimizely (an A/B testing company founded in San Francisco in 2010 by Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen) and adopted its name for the combined business.
Optimizely has been a privately held portfolio company of growth equity firm Insight Partners since 2018, when Insight acquired Episerver for approximately $1.16 billion. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with a global workforce estimated between roughly 1,000 and 1,700 employees depending on the data source.
Optimizely's product suite spans a Content Marketing Platform / CMS for building and managing digital content, an Experimentation product for server-side and client-side A/B and multivariate testing plus feature flagging, and Personalization tools for tailoring content and offers to individual visitors.
The platform also includes Commerce, Data Platform, and Asset Management products, and the company has recently introduced AI-driven 'Agentic CMS' and 'Agentic Experimentation' capabilities that use AI agents to assist with content creation and test design and analysis.
Optimizely does not publish standardized pricing tiers. As the company states, every plan is individually packaged based on a prospect's specific digital needs, requiring a demo request or direct sales conversation to receive a quote.
This custom-quote model is standard for enterprise DXP vendors and typically reflects factors like traffic volume, number of products bundled (CMS, experimentation, personalization, commerce), and contract length.
Yes. Episerver, a CMS company founded in 1994, acquired the original A/B testing company Optimizely in 2020 and rebranded the entire combined business as Optimizely in January 2021.
Optimizely is privately held and has been owned by growth equity firm Insight Partners since 2018, when Insight acquired Episerver for approximately $1.16 billion.
Optimizely does not publish pricing. Every plan is individually packaged based on a customer's needs and requires a demo or sales conversation to get a quote.
Optimizely offers a CMS/Content Marketing Platform, Experimentation (A/B/multivariate testing and feature flags), Personalization, Commerce, a Data Platform, and Asset Management, plus newer AI-driven agentic tools.
The original Optimizely, an A/B testing company, was founded in 2010 in San Francisco by Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen, both former Google employees.
Key competitors include Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Target, Sitecore, Contentful, VWO, AB Tasty, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
Optimizely is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with additional offices globally and an estimated 1,000-1,700 employees.