Duda vs. Optimizely Commerce Connect

Duda is great for agencies. There is a good client management area. It's even good for small businesses. They can choose a template and build out their own site. It's easy to customizes a website from a barebones template. There are many customizations in the each widget. The pricing is good for all size businesses. There is no tech headache with updates and backups.

Incentivized

Our experience may be unique because we opted for an Optimizely team to implement our website/console set-up and connection to our PIM and ERP. The experience may have been different with a 3rd party or it may not have. That said, we have been live with our primary website for almost 2 years and I still do not consider it was ever "done". We have been going back and forth on functionality issues and bugs since launch. I have low confidence that changes made the previous day will 100% be online the next - so my team rechecks the work they did the previous day to ensure everything is online. The addition of a second channel and enhancement requests have compounded the issues. I feel this product would work fine with singular or less complex market SKU offerings.

Incentivized

• Very easy to learn and master
• Builds beautiful, feature rich and easy to maintain cool websites
• Provides an efficient management platform for agencies
• Has a very good and responsive support team
• Is continually expanding features and new add-on partners

Incentivized

• Episerver has a robust discount engine. This engine, combined with "visitor groups" allow our marketing department to categorize customers and offer a variety of discounts to targeted customers at specific times.
• Episerver has a full-featured, storefront experience that can handle everything you might want for an e-commerce website.
• Episerver offers A/B testing that can be helpful for trying out new content ideas and tracking the results.

Incentivized

• Ecommerce can use some improvement--but this should be taken care of in 2023
• A more robust app marketplace
• More custom widgets

• Support. Episerver used to have direct support and access to the tech team to discuss and resolve issues. The new support portal is not enough for developer needs.
• Quality Assurance. We find issues in the Episerver code that should have been resolved in QA before release.
• Sales. Episervers sells the framework as a solution while showing Alloy. While it helps Episerver sell more, it puts the implementation partner into trouble as the client thinks they bought the solution. Episerver does not provide a solution. It provides a framework that you can build a solution on.

Incentivized

Really want to be able to spend more time and resources on rolling out new things with Episerver but at the moment we seem to be fixing alot of issues and pain points with the way our system was setup.

Incentivized

Again, this platform has to be one of the easiest web development sites I have ever used in my life. From creating pages to linking buttons, hiding pages, and more, it makes it so much easier to develop websites for clients, including forms and custom membership login portals. It really is the best.

Incentivized

The administrative interface is largely intuitive and relatively easy to use. The complexity of business needs and ability to customize can affect this (i.e. you have to set up and develop with the user in mind), but the basic structure is largely solid. There are some areas of redundancy (such as Commerce Manager overlapping with other administrative areas) that can sometimes cause confusion or offer some functions in one place, whereas other related functions are managed on a completely different page.

Incentivized

We had an incredible team at Episerver Supporting us with the go live, reviewing our integration, and pushing our integration partner to deliver a quality product

Incentivized

Fully understand what is OOTB feature of the platform before proceeding to develop. Then implement a customization of key features once you can prove they are working as OOTB to make them more user friendly and productive for the business. Eg pre order and e gift card

Incentivized

I can't speak to why my agency selected Duda, but I can say from personal experience that building a website in Duda is much easier, and backed by better support than any other website builder I've used. Duda allows me, as a web designer, to still create great looking and unique websites. I find that other platforms, while they may provide nice templates, make it very difficult to deviate from the guardrails they put in place. Through the years, even the most basic site that I've built in Duda is significantly better than those built in other platforms

Incentivized

Optimizely Commerce Connect offers a very wide range of features for admin users. There is less a need for an IT specialist or programmer to be involved when changes need to be made.

Incentivized

• Much faster project turnaround
• Easy for non-tech staff to handle some of the work
• Costs are lower than we were paying for less capabilities before we switched to Duda

Incentivized

• Positive: We have a usable website - better than what we had before and we are seeing a constant increase in adoption.
• Positive: Counter associates are using the website to help customers.
• Negative: Too much time being spent QCing previous work.

Incentivized