In short

• SitecoreAI and Optimizely are both strong enterprise platforms. The right choice depends on how you sell, how many markets you serve and how your content and product data are organised.
• SitecoreAI tends to suit content-rich, multi-market, multi-brand estates where personalisation and AI-assisted content operations are the priority.
• Optimizely tends to suit manufacturers whose website also needs to be a place to buy, particularly through distributors and dealers.
• Whichever you choose, your data, integrations and operating model will shape the outcome more than the platform itself.

Why platform choice looks different in industrial and manufacturing

If you’ve sat through a few platform demos, you’ll know they’re designed to impress a consumer brand. Slick personalisation, beautiful landing pages, a checkout that converts in three clicks… All useful, but rarely the whole story for an industrial business.

Manufacturing digital estates have their own shape. Product catalogues can run to tens of thousands of SKUs, each with specifications, variants, certifications and downloadable documentation. Buying cycles are long and involve engineers, procurement teams and finance, often over months. Many sales happen through distributors, dealers or resellers rather than direct. And most manufacturers operate across multiple countries, languages and regulatory regimes – sometimes with several brands acquired along the way.

That means the questions that matter most are less about page templates and more about how well a platform handles product data, integrates with ERP and PIM systems, supports complex buying journeys, and scales across markets without multiplying cost and effort.

It’s also why we don’t think there’s a single “winner” here. We partner with both Sitecore and Optimizely because each is the better fit for different situations.

The two platforms in brief

SitecoreAI is Sitecore’s unified, SaaS-based platform, launched in November 2025 as the successor to XM Cloud. It brings together Sitecore’s content management, personalisation, analytics and AI capabilities. Its focus is on helping marketing teams create, manage and optimise content at scale, with AI agents increasingly supporting content operations. Sitecore’s recent acquisition of Scrunch, a platform for monitoring and improving how brands appear in AI-generated answers, signals a strong focus on visibility in AI-led search. Sitecore has long been a natural choice for large, multi-site, multilingual estates.

Optimizely brings content management, experimentation, personalisation and commerce together through Optimizely One, with AI agents running across the platform through the Optimizely Agent Platform (formerly Opal). For manufacturers, a key differentiator is Configured Commerce (formerly Insite), a B2B commerce product built for manufacturers and distributors, with capabilities such as customer-specific pricing, quoting and reordering. Optimizely is also investing in AI search visibility, including agents for GEO (generative engine optimisation) auditing and structured data. Its experimentation heritage means testing and optimisation are embedded in how many teams use it.

Both are credible, well-supported enterprise platforms with active roadmaps. The differences lie in where each one’s centre of gravity sits…

Three manufacturer types, and where each platform tends to fit

Every organisation is different, but in our experience most industrial and manufacturing businesses look broadly like one of the following three types. Many are a mix.

1. The global, content-led manufacturer

Think of a business operating in 30+ markets, with several brands, a large product range and a heavy reliance on technical content: specifications, application guides, case studies, manuals and certifications. Sales typically happen offline or through partners, and the website’s job is to educate, build trust and generate qualified leads.

The challenges here are scale and consistency. How do you keep hundreds of pages accurate across languages? How do you let local teams adapt content without breaking the brand? How do you make sure engineers and specifiers find the right product quickly, whether they search on your site, on Google or in an AI assistant?

SitecoreAI tends to fit well when the priority is managing large volumes of content across many sites, markets and languages, with strong governance, personalisation by audience or region, and AI support for content creation and localisation. Its multi-site heritage and growing focus on AI search visibility play to this type’s needs. SitecoreAI also now includes A/B/n testing through its Conversion Optimization capability, so teams can test and refine content without adding a separate tool.

Optimizely is also a strong option when the content-led business wants a tight loop between content and experimentation, or when commerce is on the roadmap and keeping content and commerce on one platform family matters.

2. The distributor- and dealer-led manufacturer

Here, much of the revenue flows through a network of distributors, dealers or trade customers, and the digital priority is making it easy for them to do business with you. That means account-specific pricing and catalogues, fast reordering, order history, stock visibility, and integration with ERP.

Optimizely tends to fit well when the website needs to become a genuine B2B ordering channel. Configured Commerce was designed around these manufacturer and distributor scenarios, which can reduce how much custom development you need to get a trade portal running.

SitecoreAI can also fit when the transactional side is handled by a dedicated commerce platform or ERP portal, and the main role of the website is marketing, product discovery and partner content. In that set-up, SitecoreAI manages the experience layer and integrates with the commerce engine behind it. That commerce engine can be Sitecore’s own. Sitecore sells an API-first commerce product, OrderCloud, separately from SitecoreAI. It covers B2B needs such as complex pricing, bulk ordering, quotes and approval workflows. Because it is headless, the storefront and integrations take more build effort than Optimizely’s Configured Commerce.

3. The mid-market manufacturer modernising fast

This is often a business moving off an ageing or heavily customised CMS, with a small marketing team, a clear need to improve lead generation, and limited appetite for a long, complex programme.

Here, both platforms can work well. The deciding factors are usually less about features and more about practicalities: the skills already in your team and supplier ecosystem, the systems you need to integrate, how quickly you need to show value, and the total cost of ownership over three to five years. The right answer is the one your team will actually use well.

At a glance

Five questions to ask before you choose

1. How do you sell today, and how will you sell in five years?

If direct or distributor ordering online is on your roadmap, factor it in now. Bolting commerce on later is possible with either platform, but the effort and architecture look very different.

2. Where does your product data live, and how good is it?

For most manufacturers, product information is the hardest part of any website project. Whichever platform you choose, it will depend on a PIM, ERP or both. Assess integration options early, and be honest about data quality. A great CMS can’t fix poor product data.

3. How many sites, markets and languages do you need to support?

Model the real number, including brands, regions and microsites. Then look at how each platform handles shared content, local variation, translation workflows and governance at that scale.

4. How visible are you in AI-generated answers?

Engineers and buyers increasingly research through AI assistants as well as search engines. Both vendors are investing here: Sitecore through its acquisition of Scrunch, and Optimizely through GEO agents in its Agent Platform (formerly Opal), such as GEO Auditor and GEO Schema Optimization. Ask each to show how their tools would help your products appear accurately in AI answers, and how you’d measure it.

5. What will it really take to run?

Licence cost is only part of the picture. Consider implementation effort, integration maintenance, the skills you’ll need in-house or from partners, and how much your team can realistically take on. A platform that’s under-used is the most expensive option of all.

What matters more than the platform

It’s tempting to treat platform selection as the main decision. In practice, the manufacturers who get the most from their investment are the ones who sort out the fundamentals alongside it: clean, well-structured product data; clear ownership of content across markets; sensible governance; and a team with the time and skills to keep improving after launch.

Get those right, and either platform can deliver strong results. Get them wrong, and neither will.

How Remarkable can help

As a partner of both Sitecore and Optimizely, we’re in a good position to give you an impartial view. We help industrial and manufacturing businesses assess their digital maturity, define requirements, run platform selection and then design, build and optimise the result.

If you’re weighing up SitecoreAI and Optimizely, or wondering whether a re-platform is the right move at all, get in touch for a conversation.

The post Finding the right fit, not the ‘best’ platform for B2B Manufacturers – SitecoreAI vs Optimizely appeared first on Remarkable.

Choosing a Sitecore partner is one of the biggest decisions in a Sitecore programme. The platform licence is only part of the cost. The partner shapes your architecture, your delivery timeline and how much value your team gets from the platform for years afterwards. With Sitecore moving customers from XP and XM Cloud to the AI-first SitecoreAI platform, the gap between partners who have delivered composable migrations and those who haven’t is wider than ever.

This guide is for digital, marketing and technology leaders who are shortlisting partners. It covers what partner tiers and certifications actually tell you, the criteria worth scoring, the questions to put in your RFP, the red flags to watch for, and how to decide between a specialist and a global systems integrator.

A note on where we stand: Remarkable is a Sitecore Platinum partner, so we’re one of the partners you might be evaluating. We’ve written this guide to be useful whoever you choose.

The short answer

The right Sitecore partner has four things:

1. Certified, named people who have delivered the specific Sitecore products in your roadmap, not just ‘Sitecore’ in general.
2. Recent, referenceable projects of a similar size and complexity to yours, ideally in your sector.
3. A clear point of view on your migration path (XP, XM Cloud or SitecoreAI) and on AI governance.
4. A support and knowledge-transfer model that leaves your own team stronger.

Everything else, including tier badges, awards and sales presentations, is supporting evidence.

What partner tiers and certifications tell you (and what they don’t)

Sitecore runs a tiered partner programme. Higher tiers such as Platinum reflect a partner’s certified headcount, delivery track record and commercial relationship with Sitecore. Partners and their tiers are listed in Sitecore’s own partner directory, which is the place to check any claim you’re given.

• Tier is a starting filter, not a decision. It tells you a partner has scale and a sustained relationship with Sitecore. It doesn’t tell you whether the people assigned to your project have done what you need.
• Individual certifications matter more than company totals. Ask how many certified developers and architects will work on your project, and on which products: XM Cloud/SitecoreAI, XP, Content Hub, Personalize, CDP or Search.
• Sitecore MVPs are a useful signal. The MVP programme recognises individuals for technical expertise and for sharing knowledge with the community. A partner with active Sitecore MVPs usually has people who are close to the product’s direction. Check whether those MVPs will actually be on your project or only on the pitch.
• Sitecore awards and advisory roles show a partner is trusted by the vendor. Treat them as evidence of credibility, not of fit for your project.

A scorecard for comparing Sitecore partners

Score each shortlisted partner from 1 to 5 on every criterion and weight the scores to reflect your priorities. The weightings below suit a typical replatform or migration. If you’re mainly buying support and optimisation, shift weight towards the last three rows.

Questions to include in your RFP

Generic questions get generic answers. These are designed to separate partners who have done the work from those who are pitching it.

• Team: Who, by name and role, will work on our project? What are their Sitecore certifications, and what proportion of their time will we get?
• Migration: How many XP to XM Cloud or SitecoreAI migrations have you completed in the last two years? What went wrong on one of them, and what did you change as a result?
• Architecture: What would you keep, rebuild or retire in our current estate, and why? How do you handle front-end frameworks, integrations and search in a composable build?
• AI: How do you approach AI governance and brand safety with SitecoreAI? Which AI features have you put into production, and what results did they deliver?
• Discovery: What does your discovery phase produce, how long does it take, and can we buy it separately before committing to a full build?
• Delivery: What methodology do you use, how often will we see working software, and how do you manage scope change and keep costs transparent?
• Security: How do you handle security testing and access control during the build, and how do you keep our front-end application and integrations secure once we’re live?
• After launch: With Sitecore running the SaaS platform, what does your support actually cover? How do you help us adopt new features as Sitecore releases them, and what are the SLAs?
• References: Can we speak to two clients with projects similar to ours, including one that has been live for more than a year?

Red flags when evaluating Sitecore partners

• The ‘bait and switch’: senior experts in the pitch, with no commitment that they’ll work on the project.
• Case studies with no detail: logos and outcomes, but nothing on the technical challenges or how they were solved.
• A fixed price before discovery: a detailed quote for a complex migration before anyone has looked at your estate usually means the risk is hidden in the change requests.
• Only one answer: a partner who recommends the same architecture to everyone, or who can’t explain when not to move to SitecoreAI yet.
• No plan for your team: no structured training or handover, which leaves you dependent on the partner for routine work.
• References they won’t share: or references limited to projects that went live recently.

Specialist partner or global systems integrator?

Most shortlists end up as a choice between a Sitecore specialist and a global systems integrator (SI). Neither is better by default; the right choice depends on your estate and your organisation.

• A specialist partner usually offers deeper, more concentrated Sitecore expertise, senior people on the project and more flexibility. It suits mid-market and enterprise estates where Sitecore is the centre of the digital experience, and teams that want a close working relationship.
• A global SI brings scale, round-the-clock coverage and the ability to bundle Sitecore with ERP, data or cloud programmes. It suits very large, multi-region estates where Sitecore is one workstream in a wider transformation, though Sitecore expertise can be spread more thinly across a big organisation.

Whichever route you take, apply the same scorecard. Judge the team you’ll get, not the size of the organisation behind it.

If you’re still on Sitecore XP

For many organisations the partner decision now comes down to the migration. Moving from XP to a composable, SaaS-based Sitecore is a re-architecture, not an upgrade: content models, front-end, personalisation and integrations all change. It also changes what you need from a partner afterwards. On SitecoreAI, Sitecore runs the platform, so there are no platform upgrades or patches for your team or partner to manage, and support shifts to optimisation, new-feature adoption, your front-end and your integrations. Prioritise partners who can show you completed migrations, a phased approach that protects your existing SEO and personalisation, and accelerators that reduce risk. Ask them to explain when staying on XP for a while longer is the right call. A good partner will give you an honest answer. For more on the options, see our Sitecore upgrade services and our guide to Sitecore costs.

Don’t overlook sector experience

Sector knowledge shortens discovery and reduces risk. Regulated industries such as financial services, insurance and healthcare need partners who understand compliance-aware content workflows, accessibility and audit trails. B2B manufacturers need partners who understand complex product data, technical documentation and distributor journeys. Ask for references in your sector, and ask what the partner learned there that applies to you.

Frequently asked questions

How many Sitecore partners should we shortlist?

Three is usually enough to compare approaches properly. More than five makes it hard to evaluate each one in depth. Include at least one partner whose approach differs from the others, so you test your own assumptions.

Should we pay for a separate discovery phase?

For a migration or replatform, usually yes. A paid discovery phase gives you an architecture, a roadmap and a reliable estimate. It also lets you see how a partner works before you commit to the full build.

Can we change Sitecore partner part-way through?

Yes, and many organisations do. A well-documented solution, code you own and a clear handover plan make the change much easier. Ask any new partner how they approach inheriting an existing Sitecore estate.

Where Remarkable fits

If you’re putting together a shortlist, we’d welcome the chance to be scored against these criteria. Remarkable is a Sitecore Platinum partner with 100+ implementations delivered, more than 30 Sitecore MVP awards across our team and a seat on Sitecore’s Global Partner Advisory Council. We work across the full platform journey, from XP upgrades to SitecoreAI migrations, and our Sitecore Academy trains in-house teams to run the platform themselves.

See how we work as a Sitecore partner, or talk to our team about your shortlist.

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Optimizely doesn’t publish its prices. Every plan is quoted individually, based on which products you need, your traffic, the number of sites and the support you want. The one exception is a free Feature Experimentation plan for feature flags. Independent benchmarks put a typical annual Optimizely contract at around £60,000, with deals ranging from about £20,000 to £200,000 a year. AI through the Optimizely Agent Platform (formerly Opal) is charged in usage credits, beyond a small free monthly allowance, and implementation is a separate cost on top of the licence.

This guide explains how Optimizely pricing works, what drives the cost of each product, what to budget beyond the licence, and how to get an accurate figure for your organisation. It also covers Episerver pricing, for organisations still running Episerver-era platforms.

How Optimizely pricing works

Optimizely’s pricing page doesn’t list plans or prices. It asks you to request a quote, because each plan is packaged for the organisation buying it. Prices are agreed annually, usually on contracts of one to three years, and each product is licensed separately. Buying several products together as part of Optimizely One is usually cheaper than buying them one at a time.

As a guide to the scale of investment, the procurement platform Vendr reports a median Optimizely contract of around £60,000 a year across more than 100 deals, with a range of roughly £20,000 to £200,000 (converted from US dollars). Treat those figures as a benchmark rather than a quote: your price depends on what you buy and how you use it.

What drives the cost of each Optimizely product

Across all products, the factors that move a quote most are the products you choose, your traffic, the number of sites, brands and markets, contract length, the support level you need and, for CMS, whether you run on Optimizely’s SaaS platform or the PaaS version.

Is there a free version of Optimizely?

Only for feature flags. Optimizely’s free Feature Experimentation plan includes feature flags, controlled rollouts and one experiment at a time. There is no free version of Optimizely CMS, Web Experimentation or Commerce. Our guide to whether Optimizely is free explains what the free plan includes and when teams outgrow it.

AI: the Agent Platform (formerly Opal) is an extra cost

Optimizely’s AI is sold separately from its products. In September 2026 Optimizely renamed Opal: it is now the Optimizely Agent Platform, and its AI assistant is called Mark. Optimizely has also announced its own marketing-trained Mark AI models, which it says are coming soon. The Agent Platform adds AI agents, chat and automated workflows across the suite, from content creation and translation in the CMS and Content Marketing Platform to test ideas and analysis in experimentation and agents for commerce. It is charged in usage credits. Each instance gets 200 free credits a month until 31 December 2026, and heavier use needs a paid credit plan, so budget for it on top of your product licences.

The costs beyond the licence

The licence is only part of the total cost of ownership. Budget for:

• Implementation: design, build, content migration and integration with your CRM, analytics, search and other systems
• Upgrades: moving older platforms to current versions such as CMS 12 or CMS 13. See our Optimizely upgrades service.
• Ongoing support and development once you have launched
• Experimentation resource: someone to plan, build and analyse tests, so the experimentation licence pays for itself
• Training for editors, marketers and developers

Implementation often costs as much as, or more than, the first year’s licence, so price the two together when you compare platforms.

Episerver pricing

Episerver became Optimizely after Episerver acquired Optimizely in 2020 and took on its name in 2021, so Episerver CMS, Commerce and DXC are now sold as Optimizely products. There is no separate Episerver price list any more. Organisations still running Episerver-era platforms renew on Optimizely’s current packaging, and older versions usually need an upgrade before they can use newer features. If you are on an Episerver platform, the most useful first step is a review of your current licence and version, so you know what renewal and upgrade will cost before you negotiate.

How to get an accurate Optimizely quote

1. List the outcomes you need: a new website, ecommerce, experimentation, personalisation or a combination.
2. Work out which Optimizely products those outcomes require, and which you could add later.
3. Gather your traffic, number of sites, brands and markets, and the systems Optimizely must integrate with.
4. Agree hosting, security and support requirements with IT.
5. Price the implementation and ongoing support alongside the licence, so you compare total cost of ownership.

As an Optimizely Platinum Solution Partner, Remarkable can scope the right products and package with you and provide a combined estimate for licence and implementation. Get an Optimizely quote.

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Contentful has three platform plans: Free ($0), Lite ($300 a month) and Enterprise (custom pricing). Free and Lite suit learning, prototypes and single small sites. Almost every organisation running Contentful at scale ends up on Enterprise, because that is where you get unlimited API calls, single sign-on, uptime SLAs, more than one Space as standard, and access to Contentful Personalization, Studio and AI Actions. Personalization and Studio are priced as add-ons on top of an Enterprise plan. AI Actions comes with an allowance of AI credits on Enterprise, and extra usage is charged.

This guide sets out what each plan includes, the costs that catch teams out, what shapes an Enterprise quote, and what Salesforce’s acquisition of Contentful means for your budget. Prices are in US dollars, as Contentful publishes them, and were checked against Contentful’s pricing page in October 2026.

Contentful plans at a glance

What each plan is for

Free is a sandbox for learning Contentful and building proofs of concept. Its usage limits are hard caps, so you won’t be billed for going over them, but the site simply stops getting more capacity once you reach them.

Lite is aimed at smaller businesses running a single project or website. It adds scheduled publishing, comments and tasks, and live collaboration. There is no plan between Lite and Enterprise, so the jump to the next tier is a big one.

Enterprise is built for organisations running several brands, markets or teams. It includes custom numbers of users, roles and locales, single sign-on and advanced permissions, EU data residency options, dedicated customer success and professional services, and the governance and security features that procurement and InfoSec teams usually require.

Spaces: the cost that catches teams out

Contentful organises content into Spaces, roughly one for each project or site, and each Space has its own limits. Every plan includes one Starter Space, with 25 content types, two environments and 10,000 records. That is enough for a simple site, but a well-modelled enterprise website can outgrow it quickly.

On the Lite plan you can add a Lite Space for $850 a month on top of the $300 plan. It raises the limits to 50 content types, four environments and 50,000 records, adds up to five workflows, and brings an extra 2 million API calls and 750 GB of bandwidth a month. This is why some pricing sites quote $850 as Contentful’s price: it is the add-on, not the plan. A Lite customer who needs the larger Space is paying $1,150 a month, or $13,800 a year.

Enterprise plans use Premium Spaces in three types: Standard for a single site, Enterprise for coordinating teams, brands or regions, and Templated for large numbers of similar microsites. How many Spaces you need, and of which type, is one of the biggest drivers of an Enterprise quote, so it is worth getting your content architecture right before you negotiate.

Usage and overages

On paid plans you can go over your included limits and pay for the overage: $5 for each additional million API calls a month and $0.15 for each additional GB of asset bandwidth. Contentful waives the API overage on some Enterprise plans. For most sites these charges are small, but a busy site serving large images, or an app polling the API heavily, can add up, so model your expected traffic before you choose a plan.

Add-ons: Personalization, Studio and AI Actions

Contentful’s newer products are only available on Enterprise plans and are priced separately:

• Contentful Personalization comes in three tiers. Start includes 100,000 monthly active profiles and one enabled Space; Core includes 500,000 profiles, feature experimentation (currently in early access) and up to five Spaces; Scale includes 1 million profiles, shared audiences and unlimited Spaces. Each tier includes an allowance of AI suggestions, with upgrades available.
• Contentful Studio, the visual drag-and-drop experience builder, is sold on a custom annual plan.
• AI Actions for translation, rewriting, alt text, SEO metadata and similar tasks includes a set number of AI credits on Enterprise plans. You can pay as you go for extra usage, or pre-pay at a discount.

If personalisation is part of the business case, include it in the first negotiation rather than adding it later. Monthly active profiles are the main variable, so estimate them from your actual traffic.

What shapes an Enterprise quote

Contentful doesn’t publish Enterprise prices. Quotes are built from your use cases and the architecture they need. The factors that move the number most are:

• the number of sites, brands and markets, which determines how many Spaces you need and of which type
• the number of users, roles and locales, especially for multilingual and multi-region estates
• expected API calls and bandwidth
• governance and security requirements such as SSO, custom roles, EU data residency and PCI DSS
• the support level and uptime SLA you need
• which add-ons you take, and at what tier
• contract length and timing, since longer commitments and well-timed negotiations usually bring better terms

The costs beyond the licence

Contentful is a headless platform, so it doesn’t include a website. The licence is only part of the total cost of ownership. Budget for:

• Implementation: content modelling, front-end build, integrations and migration from your current CMS
• Front-end hosting on a platform such as Vercel
• Marketplace apps and integrations for DAM, localisation, search or commerce, some of which carry their own fees
• Ongoing support and optimisation once you’ve launched

A well-designed content model often does more to control long-term cost than the licence negotiation itself, because it determines how many Spaces, content types and records you will actually need.

Does the Salesforce acquisition change Contentful pricing?

Salesforce completed its acquisition of Contentful on 1 September 2026. As of October 2026, Contentful’s published plans and prices are unchanged, and it still sells as a standalone platform that works with any CRM or front end.

Over time, expect more bundling with Salesforce products such as Data 360 and Agentforce, and new packaging options at renewal. If you are approaching a renewal, or comparing Contentful with other platforms, ask directly how pricing and packaging will evolve, and whether there is any incentive for combining it with Salesforce licences you already hold. We’ve written about what the acquisition means for your roadmap in more depth.

How to get an accurate Contentful estimate

1. List every site, brand, market and channel the platform needs to serve.
2. Sketch the content model and Space architecture before talking to sales.
3. Estimate users, locales, API calls, bandwidth and, if relevant, personalisation profiles.
4. Agree your security, compliance and support requirements with IT.
5. Price the implementation and front-end hosting alongside the licence, so you are comparing total cost of ownership, not just licence fees.

Get the right Contentful plan first time

As a Contentful partner, Remarkable helps organisations scope the right plan and Space architecture, model content so it scales without surprises, and implement Contentful alongside Salesforce, Sitecore, Optimizely and Vercel. New to the platform? Start with our guide to what Contentful is today. Already running it and approaching renewal? The Digital Estate Diagnostic shows what your content platform costs, what it returns and where value is leaking.

The post Contentful Pricing 2026: Plans, Costs and What to Budget For appeared first on Remarkable.

Optimizely has two commerce products. Configured Commerce is built for B2B: manufacturers, distributors and suppliers selling to business buyers. Commerce Connect is built for B2C and content-led commerce, running alongside Optimizely CMS. Both connect to the rest of Optimizely One, so content, experimentation, personalisation and customer data can work across your storefront. Which one fits depends mainly on who you sell to and how complex your pricing and ordering are.

Configured Commerce vs Commerce Connect at a glance

Optimizely Configured Commerce (B2B)

Configured Commerce came to Optimizely (then Episerver) with the acquisition of Insite Software in 2019. It is designed for organisations whose buyers expect the same ease as consumer shopping, but need the things only B2B requires:

• Customer-specific pricing and contracts, so each account sees its own prices and terms
• Quoting and negotiated deals alongside self-service ordering
• Account hierarchies and user roles, with approvals and spending controls
• Fast reordering through order history, lists and quick order pads
• Large, technical catalogues with search and product recommendations tuned to account and role
• ERP integration, so stock, pricing and orders stay in step with the back office

Because it is delivered as SaaS, Optimizely handles hosting and platform updates, so your team can focus on the buying experience rather than infrastructure.

Optimizely Commerce Connect (B2C)

Commerce Connect pairs Optimizely CMS with a full commerce engine, so content and products are managed in one place. It suits brands that sell through storytelling as much as through product listings, and teams that want complete control of the storefront design, including headless builds. It covers catalogues, pricing and promotions, carts and checkout, orders and customer accounts. Read our full guide to Optimizely Commerce Connect.

What the rest of Optimizely adds to commerce

• Experimentation: test pricing, promotions, journeys and checkout changes to prove what drives revenue
• Personalisation and recommendations: tailor products and content by segment, account or behaviour
• Optimizely Data Platform: a single view of customers across channels
• AI through the Optimizely Agent Platform (formerly Opal): agents for product descriptions, campaign content and merchandising tasks, paid for in usage credits

From Episerver Commerce to Optimizely Commerce

If you are running Episerver Commerce or Episerver Commerce Cloud, you are on the platform that became Commerce Connect. Episerver became Optimizely in 2021, and Episerver B2B Commerce, from the Insite acquisition, became Configured Commerce. Older Episerver Commerce versions usually need an upgrade to benefit from current features such as Optimizely Graph and the latest CMS. Our Optimizely upgrades team can tell you what that involves.

How to choose

Choose Configured Commerce if most of your revenue comes from business accounts with negotiated pricing, repeat orders and complex catalogues. Choose Commerce Connect if you sell mainly to consumers, want content and commerce in one CMS, or need a fully custom or headless storefront. Organisations that do both sometimes run the two side by side. Our guide to Optimizely pricing explains what affects the cost.

Work with an Optimizely Platinum Solution Partner. Remarkable became the UK’s first Optimizely (Episerver) partner in 1995, and our team has won more than 10 OMVP awards over the years. Find out how we help on our Optimizely partner page, or get an Optimizely quote.

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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.

Option 1: Optimizely Feature Experimentation with the Optimizely app

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:

1. You install the Optimizely app from the Contentful Marketplace and connect it to your Feature Experimentation project.
2. The app adds a “variation container” content type to your Space. Editors use it to choose which Contentful content appears in each variation of a test.
3. The experiment itself, including audiences, traffic allocation and success metrics, is configured and launched in Optimizely.
4. Your website or app uses the Optimizely SDK to decide which variation each visitor sees, and serves the matching Contentful content.

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.

Option 2: Contentful Personalization

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 vs Optimizely: how they compare

Which should you choose?

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.

What makes content testing work, whichever tool you use

• A content model built for variation. Tests are easiest when pages are assembled from reusable components that can be swapped independently.
• Clear hypotheses and success measures agreed before a test starts, not after.
• Enough traffic. Low-traffic pages may need longer tests, bigger changes or a bandit approach to reach a reliable answer.
• Joined-up analytics, so test results connect to leads, revenue and other outcomes the business cares about.
• A regular rhythm of testing, reviewing and rolling out winners, so experimentation becomes a habit rather than a one-off project.

Get help with experimentation on Contentful

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.

The post Contentful A/B Testing: Contentful Personalization or Optimizely? appeared first on Remarkable.

Optimizely Commerce Connect, previously called Customized Commerce and before that Episerver Commerce, is Optimizely’s commerce engine for B2C and content-led ecommerce. It runs alongside Optimizely CMS, so marketers manage content, products and campaigns in one place, while developers get full control of the storefront through APIs, including headless builds. The current version is Commerce Connect 15.

What Commerce Connect includes

• Catalogue management for products, variants, bundles and categories
• Pricing and promotions, including campaigns, discounts and market-specific prices
• Carts, checkout and payments, with customisable order pipelines
• Order management and reporting
• Customer accounts and organisations
• Multi-market, multi-currency and multi-language selling from one platform
• Content and commerce together: product pages, campaigns and editorial content edited in Optimizely CMS
• Headless delivery through APIs and Optimizely Graph

Who it suits

Commerce Connect suits brands where content drives sales: considered purchases, rich product storytelling, and campaigns that change often. It also suits teams that want a distinctive storefront rather than a template, and organisations already using Optimizely CMS that want to add commerce without a separate platform. For B2B selling with customer-specific pricing and quoting, Optimizely’s Configured Commerce is usually the better fit. Our guide to Optimizely Commerce compares the two.

Versions and upgrades

Commerce Connect has moved through versions 13, 14 and 15. Commerce Connect 15 runs on CMS 13 and .NET 10, so upgrading to it means upgrading the CMS at the same time. It also requires Opti ID and Optimizely Graph, and no longer supports Search & Navigation. Each major version includes breaking changes, so upgrades need planning and testing. If you are still on Episerver Commerce or Commerce 13, our Optimizely upgrades team can scope the move.

Getting more from Commerce Connect

• Experiment with promotions, product pages and checkout steps using Optimizely Experimentation
• Personalise content and recommendations using Optimizely Data Platform audiences
• Use AI through the Optimizely Agent Platform (formerly Opal) to generate product descriptions, translations and campaign content, paid for in usage credits. The product description and catalogue translation agents need Commerce Connect 15.
• Keep the catalogue clean with a PIM, so product data stays consistent across markets and channels

Work with an Optimizely Platinum Solution Partner. Remarkable became the UK’s first Optimizely (Episerver) partner in 1995, and our team has won more than 10 OMVP awards over the years. Find out how we help on our Optimizely partner page, or get an Optimizely quote.

The post Optimizely Commerce Connect (formerly Customized Commerce): A Guide appeared first on Remarkable.

In the space of a few months, the platforms most enterprise brands run their digital estates on stopped calling themselves digital experience platforms.

Contentstack became an “agentic experience platform” in June. Optimizely retired the DXP label at Opticon on 1 September and now calls itself “the AI platform for marketing”. Acquia repositioned as an agentic content platform on 14 September. Sitecore got there first, launching SitecoreAI last November with 20 agents in its Agentic Studio.

Salesforce finished buying Contentful on 1 September. It started switching Agentforce on by default in eligible orgs that same week. A fortnight later, at Dreamforce, it announced AIforce, a layer that brings Salesforce data and workflows into Claude, Slack and other AI tools. (We covered what that means for Salesforce customers here: Salesforce just turned the agents on.)

That is a lot of new names. For anyone who owns a digital estate, the real question is what it changes about the platforms you already pay for.

The product underneath has not changed. Your exposure has.

Take away the branding and these are largely the platforms you bought. What has changed is the pitch. Vendors are now selling agents that act on your content and customer data, not just tools that store and publish them.

That matters for one reason. An agent works with whatever it can see. If your content is duplicated across three systems, your customer records disagree with each other and nobody owns the integration between web and CRM, an agent will not fix any of that. It will act on it, faster and at greater volume.

The vendors say the same thing in their own words. CMSWire’s summary of the rebrands is that every one of them argues agents are unreliable without governed content and customer context to ground them. Contentstack put it more bluntly: agents without governance are just expensive guesses.

The early evidence points the same way. At Opticon, KPMG Americas described 22 custom agents and 4,278 agent executions in 90 days on Optimizely. Building the agents was not the hard part. Running them at that volume collided with the team’s capacity to review the work. Forrester’s Joe Cicman has described agentic tools as “a forcing function on the operating model”, and says adoption, not innovation, is now the market’s real bottleneck.

Why the estate question comes first

Most enterprise estates were not designed. They built up over time. A platform was bought for a relaunch, a CRM was added for sales, a search tool came with an agency, and a personalisation module was licensed and never switched on. Each made sense at the time. Together they rarely add up to a number anyone can defend.

The licence cost is easy to find. The return is not. That gap becomes a real problem when a vendor rebrands, reprices or starts bundling agent features into your next renewal. You are being asked to decide the future of a stack you have not fully measured.

I set out ten signs of this in August: capability you pay for but do not use, content that takes too many hands to publish, data split across systems, AI pilots that do not change daily work. The point was that the visible symptom is rarely where the cause sits. A slow campaign looks like a platform problem, but it is often a process or ownership problem.

If this sounds like your estate: our Digital Estate Diagnostic is a fixed-price, three-week review of Sitecore, Optimizely, Contentful, Salesforce and Dynamics estates. It ends with a score and a roadmap your board can act on.

Five questions to answer before your next renewal

You do not need a transformation programme to get started. You need honest answers to five questions.

1. What do we actually run, and what does each part cost? Every platform, integration, licence and support contract in one view, with a named owner for each.
2. What are we paying for but not using? Personalisation, experimentation, DAM and search modules are the usual suspects.
3. Where does our customer data disagree with itself? If web, CRM and commerce hold different versions of the same customer, any agent built on top will inherit the argument.
4. Who is allowed to approve what an agent does? If the answer is “the same people who approve content today”, you have found your next bottleneck.
5. What would we stop doing? Most roadmaps are lists of things to add. The best ones also say what to switch off.

If you can answer all five with evidence, you can judge SitecoreAI, Optimizely’s agent platform or Agentforce on your own terms. If you cannot, that is the work to do first, and it is cheaper before the renewal than after.

The label is the least interesting part

Whether we still call it a DXP matters far less than whether the estate underneath is ready for software that acts on its own. The vendors have made their bet. The organisations that benefit will be the ones that know what they own, what it costs and what it returns before they switch the agents on.

Want an independent answer for your estate? The Digital Estate Diagnostic scores your estate across platform, data, process, people and operating model, and gives you a prioritised roadmap, in three weeks for a fixed fee from £18,000. Tell us what you are running and we will say honestly whether you need it.

The post Every DXP is now an agent platform. Is your estate ready? appeared first on Remarkable.

Contentful isn’t an ecommerce platform. It is the content layer in a composable commerce stack. A commerce engine such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Shopify, commercetools or SAP Commerce Cloud handles products, pricing, baskets and checkout. Contentful manages everything around them: campaign and landing pages, editorial content, product storytelling, and content for every brand, market and channel. The front end then brings the two together. Organisations choose this set-up when their commerce platform’s built-in content tools can’t keep up with how often marketing needs to change the site.

How Contentful works with an ecommerce platform

In a typical composable commerce set-up:

1. The commerce platform is the source of truth for products, categories, prices, stock and orders.
2. Contentful holds the content: homepage and campaign layouts, buying guides, brand stories, rich product content and promotional banners.
3. A connector app from the Contentful Marketplace lets editors search and select products or categories from the commerce platform and reference them directly in Contentful entries, so a campaign page can feature live products without copying data across.
4. The front end, often a modern framework hosted on a platform such as Vercel, requests content from Contentful and product data from the commerce platform, and combines them into the page the customer sees.

Each system does what it is best at. Merchandisers manage products in commerce, marketers manage content in Contentful, and neither has to wait for the other or for a developer to publish a change.

Which ecommerce platforms work with Contentful?

Contentful is API-first, so it can work with almost any commerce engine. Several have ready-made connectors:

• Salesforce Commerce Cloud, through the Salesforce Commerce Cloud Connector app, which brings B2C Commerce products and categories into Contentful entries. Contentful also offers an app for Salesforce Composable Storefront on the AppExchange.
• Shopify, through Contentful’s Shopify app, so editors can reference Shopify products in their content
• commercetools and Commerce Layer, both headless commerce engines that suit fully composable builds
• SAP Commerce Cloud, through a dedicated connector
• BigCommerce and other API-led platforms, through apps or custom integration

What Contentful adds to an ecommerce site

• Faster campaigns. Marketers can build and change landing pages, seasonal campaigns and promotions from reusable components, without development work for each change.
• Richer product storytelling. Editorial content, buying guides and video can sit alongside product data from the commerce platform rather than being squeezed into a product description field.
• Multiple brands and markets. One content platform can serve several storefronts, languages and regions, with shared content reused and local content managed separately.
• Every channel from one source. The same content can feed the website, apps, marketplaces, in-store screens and AI assistants.
• Personalisation and testing. On Enterprise plans, Contentful Personalization can target and test content, and its Core and Scale tiers add data connections such as Shopify and Salesforce CRM. (See our guide to A/B testing in Contentful.)
• AI-assisted content operations. Contentful’s AI Actions include templates for translation, SEO metadata and product description generation, which help when you are managing thousands of products across markets.

Contentful, Commerce Cloud and the Salesforce acquisition

Salesforce completed its acquisition of Contentful on 1 September 2026, so Contentful and Salesforce Commerce Cloud now sit under the same roof. For Commerce Cloud customers, that makes Contentful the obvious choice for a modern content layer, and closer integration with Commerce Cloud, Data 360 and Agentforce is likely. Contentful still works with any commerce platform, though, so a move to Contentful doesn’t commit you to Salesforce Commerce. We’ve written about what the acquisition means for your roadmap.

Is Contentful right for your ecommerce site?

Contentful is usually a strong fit if you:

• run several brands, storefronts or markets
• change campaigns and content frequently, and marketing is held back by development queues
• sell considered or high-value products where content influences the decision
• are moving towards a composable architecture, or already have one

It may be more than you need if you run a single store with modest content needs, and your commerce platform’s built-in content tools already do the job. A composable stack adds a licence, an integration and a front end to maintain, so the benefit has to justify the cost. Our Contentful pricing guide sets out what the licence involves.

Getting a Contentful commerce build right

• Agree who owns what. Decide which data lives in the commerce platform, which in a PIM if you have one, and which in Contentful, and avoid duplicating product data.
• Design the content model first. Reusable components and clear references to products make campaigns quick to assemble and easy to localise.
• Plan preview and publishing. Editors need to see content and live products together before a campaign goes out.
• Protect performance. Caching, image optimisation and a fast front end matter more in a composable stack, because several systems feed each page.
• Don’t forget search and personalisation. Product search, recommendations and targeting all need data from more than one system.

Work with a Contentful commerce partner

Remarkable designs and builds composable commerce experiences with Contentful, Salesforce and Vercel, from content modelling and integration through to launch and optimisation. New to the platform? Start with our guide to what Contentful is today.

The post Contentful for Ecommerce: How It Fits Your Commerce Stack appeared first on Remarkable.