There are two main ways to A/B test content in Contentful: Contentful Personalization, the platform’s own experimentation and personalisation product, and Optimizely Feature Experimentation, connected through the Optimizely app in the Contentful Marketplace. Contentful Personalization suits marketing teams that want testing and targeting inside the CMS they already use. Optimizely suits organisations running a wider experimentation programme across content, product features and other channels. The right choice depends on who runs your tests, what you want to test, and which licences you already hold.
Optimizely’s app for Contentful connects a Contentful Space to an Optimizely Feature Experimentation project. It is the upgraded successor to the original Optimizely app, and it still supports experiments set up in Optimizely’s older Full Stack product.
How it works:
Once the integration is in place, editors can set up and change most content experiments themselves. A developer connects the front end to Optimizely’s SDK, and some changes, such as new tracking events or new variation containers, still need code updates.
Contentful Personalization is built into the platform. It lets teams create A/B tests and personalised experiences directly in Contentful, segment audiences using multiple data points, and measure performance without a separate tool. All tiers include an allowance of AI suggestions for experiences and audiences. Higher tiers add AI-generated variants, component-level insights, multi-armed bandit traffic distribution and connections to data sources such as Salesforce CRM, Segment and Shopify.
It is available only on Contentful Enterprise plans, priced as an add-on in three tiers: Start, Core and Scale. The tiers are mainly set by monthly active profiles (100,000, 500,000 and 1 million respectively) and by how many Spaces you enable. Our Contentful pricing guide covers the tiers in more detail.
| Contentful Personalization | Optimizely Feature Experimentation | |
|---|---|---|
| Where tests are set up | Inside Contentful | In Optimizely, with content chosen in Contentful |
| What you can test | Content and experiences managed in Contentful | Content, product features and server-side logic across any channel |
| Personalisation | Built in, with audience segmentation and AI suggestions | Audience targeting within experiments |
| Licensing | Add-on to a Contentful Enterprise plan | Separate Optimizely licence |
| Developer effort | Initial front-end integration | Initial SDK integration |
| Best for | Marketing-led testing and personalisation of content | Organisation-wide experimentation programmes |
Choose Contentful Personalization if your testing is mainly about content and messaging, your marketing team wants to run tests without leaving the CMS, and you want personalisation and experimentation in one place. It is also the natural route if you are consolidating around Salesforce, which completed its acquisition of Contentful on 1 September 2026, and want to use CRM data to drive audiences.
Choose Optimizely if you already license Optimizely, if product and engineering teams test features as well as content, or if you want one experimentation platform and one set of results across several systems, not just Contentful. Optimizely’s statistics engine and feature flagging are built for running many tests in parallel across a large estate.
Running both is possible, but rarely sensible. Two tools testing the same pages will compete for traffic and produce conflicting results. If you have both, decide which one owns content testing.
Remarkable works with both Contentful and Optimizely, so we can help you choose the right approach for your team and set it up properly. For more on running a testing programme, see our guides to Optimizely experimentation and the best A/B testing platforms.
Yes. Contentful Personalization lets you create A/B tests and personalised experiences directly in Contentful on Enterprise plans. You can also run content experiments through the Optimizely app, which connects Contentful to Optimizely Feature Experimentation.
No. Contentful Personalization is an add-on available only on Enterprise plans, priced in Start, Core and Scale tiers. The Free and Lite plans don’t include it.
Mainly at the start. A developer connects your website or app to the Optimizely SDK. After that, editors can set up most content variations in Contentful themselves, though some changes still need a developer.
Yes. The current app is built for Optimizely Feature Experimentation and is backwards compatible with experiments created in the older Full Stack product.
You can, but it is rarely worth it. Two tools testing the same pages compete for traffic and can produce conflicting results, so decide which one owns content testing.
