Acquia DAM (Widen) vs. Optimizely Content Marketing Platform

Acquia DAM is well suited for large companies that need to organize and control the flow of assets being used by their teams and vendors. It provides much better control than file storage sites like Dropbox, where there's little control over what goes where and almost non-functional search functionality. If you're a smaller company, you may be able to get by or have someone dedicated to doing so, but for larger companies, it really takes a lot of the manual work out of it!

Incentivized

I think it's really well suited for organizations that have either big marketing teams that are scattered across different regions and different time zones because it helps everyone be aligned in terms of what is happening at any given time. That to me is one of the best things it can offer. The second thing is the management of the processes. You are not constantly reinventing the wheel when you work in marketing, you tend to have a process for doing certain jobs. For example, if you need to do an email or if you need to do a webinar, you will know what steps you need to take in order to deliver that. If you have lots of stakeholders that need to review things and need to approve things before they can go live, the CMP is the best tool for this because it keeps track of everything that is happening. You can assign steps to your legal team or your regulatory team and they have to go into the platform, be able to review whatever it is that you need them to review or approve. It keeps track of when that happened. There's no guesswork. You eliminate having to send things by email, by teams, by smoke signals. It's all in one place and if you ever needed to go back into things, everything gets saved there as well. All your working files up to your final files are all saved within the platform. You can manage your versions, you can reuse things in the future. There's so many possibilities for it. It depends on what you're trying to do, but at bedtime, if I do anything, no matter what you're trying to do, you'll find the right application within the platform to be able to make your job alive easier.

Incentivized

• They offer valuable guidance and educational resources to Administrators
• Their I.T. support is knowledgeable and responsive. And friendly!
• They build community among Acquia DAM (Widen) Admins
• They aren't as salesy and pushy as many of the other DAM Vendors that we considered. I don't feel like they are constantly trying to upsell me or take advantage. I hope this continues to be the case with the acquisition by Acquia.
• They're just plain nice people to work with.

Incentivized

• Customer Service: They'll contact you with a "we're looking at your issue" email within the hour, even on weekends and holidays. Beyond solving your issues/problems with the software, they'll also follow up later to make sure you don't have additional associated issues.
• Live Analytics: You're given a snapshot of how your blog content is doing at any point in time, since they've been tracking your posts/content. You can compare this month's traffic to last year's trafffic during this same month. Other data points include: Unique Visitors, Average Attention Time, Pageviews, Engagement Rate, etc...and you'll even get referral traffic source. There's much more that I'm leaving out here.
• CMP User Interface (UI): Love the easy to use interface to upload blog posts, to use for editing and publishing content, and broadcasting social shares. Besides easily identifiable icons, you can create/edit content in the WYSIWYG or use the html view to make sure everything looks exactly how you prefer. Another cool thing is that the CMP auto-embeds live links of social updates (like Youtube, Twitter, Instagram) for more dynamic blog posts.

Incentivized

• The AI tagging is not very intuitive; if you upload 100 assets, you have to wait for ages to see if they have been tagged by constantly checking the field views over and over again. It would be good to have an AI tagging manager where you could submit and check tagging status.
• For image downloading, it would be good to be able to select an image size rather than an aspect and then adjust the image to the size.
• We would have jumped at the chance for SSO or Site Core integration, but the costs were so high it just was not worth it; we could have hired people to do it manually for cheaper.

Incentivized

• In my opinion, there are too many notifications, making it difficult to manage and figure out which ones are necessary and which ones are not.
• I feel workflows are over engineered.
• For medium-sized organizations, the tool is overly complicated and requires a significant investment to optimize it.

Incentivized

Acquia DAM (Widen) is changing its pricing model and at this point, we are unsure whether it is a good thing for us or not. While we consider this a robust tool, we will take our time to evaluate the competitors.

Incentivized

Acquia DAM (Widen) is very intuitive, it does not take extensive training as some tools do to use the tool. Uploading assets, creating portals, collections and sharing are all very simple. Acquia DAM (Widen) also does not force you to fill out all of the metadata. You can fill out as little or as much as you would like.

Incentivized

As a Content Operations Manager, I find the customizable task views and calendar views to be most helpful in the Plan Module. This allows me to have visibility into each team's overdue tasks, and determine where my time is best allocated to help in content production. The Library is a easy to access and highly used function as well for sharing assets across teams

Incentivized

Never had an issue where I was unable to access Widen.

Incentivized

I have not experienced any prolonged outages. From time to time there will be errors but nothing that significantly slows down production

Incentivized

There have been a couple of rare instance where after I uploaded an asset, I was unable to rename it, or after uploading it it took a while before it actually appeared and can be viewed in the DAM.

Incentivized

Optimizely Content Marketing Platform's performance is generally good. Nothing that has impacted production. Page load speed doesn't typically lag longer than a few seconds. Reports take some time but not any longer than we're used to with other platforms. We have not experienced lag when integrating with other platforms

Incentivized

The Acquia DAM support team is fantastic! Not only do we have an amazing customer support contact, the regular chat support is a great resource. Our CSM schedules meetings with our team regularly to ensure that we're meeting our goals. And the general support is great at responding quickly!

Incentivized

The NewsCred team is very responsive and helpful with any technical issues.

Incentivized

The training was very thorough. The recordings for all our traning sessions were provided to us so that we could go back and review. Our trainer was always available for follow up questions. Our trainer shared a spreadsheet with us as a checklist for all things that needed to be done to ensure proper import and setup of our assets and DAM.

Incentivized

Training was clear and concise. It was intuitive and helped me understand how to navigate the platform. Options to dive in on each action or skip to learn about areas of regular use. Resource links available to when I had additional questions or needed more training in a specific area. Overall, the training allowed me to use the platform without interruption

Incentivized

It was a lot of work! But worth the effort to get our assets cleaned up and organized. Enough time and personnel need to be allotted for any implementation, but we had some advantage in having our assets in a previous DAM with attached metadata in XML, and our users were prepared with knowledge of our existing DAM at that time. Though old habits present their own issues, a company that is starting from scratch with no DAM has to think farther ahead about how it will organize and collect assets. Far more pre-planning with stakeholders would be needed for a company starting an implementation from scratch.

Incentivized

We started with the Widen system but ended up switching to Brandfolder. Brandfolder had the consistent interface across internal and external platforms. It was easier to use and search for assets for our internal team and brand partners. I preferred the Widen system's ability to share assets with direct links and the ability to add metadata upon upload.

Incentivized

I use mainly Microsoft Dynamics, CRM, customer insights, journeys for marketing, email automation or marketing automation. I use Seismic. We're looking to launch an events platform, which I'm not using yet, but that will be a tool that I will want to integrate with the other systems I'm using. Customer Insights Journeys is probably the biggest other tool that I use that I'm trying to be an SME in.

Incentivized

Optimizely is generally a reliable platform for A/B testing and digital experience management. It's helpful for it's stability, flexibility, and comprehensive features, which is helpful when managing an enterprise website

Incentivized

• Acquia DAM simplifies global access by offering an intuitive platform for easy asset uploads
• With centralized storage, sharing becomes seamless, fostering efficient collaboration worldwide.
• Utilizing Acquia DAM, I efficiently apply metadata for accurate categorization, enabling easy reference to past content whenever needed.

Incentivized

• It certainly has helped. I think there is guardrails in how you use CMP, what you are putting in. It needs to be the right way of how you want to work, otherwise you're going to create a mess within CMP. So creating that framework outside and implementing it into the system I think is quite important. Again, that's our way of working, but I think it has helped us.

Incentivized