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Creating a positive customer experience is a hot topic, and it’s not difficult to understand why. A recent Forrester study found that, on average, businesses that invest in improving their customer experience grow 1.7 times faster than those that don’t.
What’s more? Companies that invest in customer experience improvements achieve a 230% boost in average Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
These days, a key part of any online business’s customer experience strategy involves using Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs). An integrated suite of tools designed to analyze and improve your customers’ digital experience of your brand, a DXP is integral to any successful digital transformation.
Read on to learn about the best DXPs on the market today!
Disclaimer: The information below is accurate as of July 15, 2023.
Best Digital Experience Platforms: Summary Chart
Digital Experience Platform Use Cases
A powerful DXP provides vast functionality and benefits, enhancing experience management in countless ways—from data collection to creating personalized experiences.
Here are six powerful use cases for DXPs to help you deliver a superior customer experience, boosting conversions and increasing customer retention rates.
Digital hub for experience management efforts
A well-designed DXP provides a centralized, cloud-based digital hub where you can manage all your digital experience efforts and ensure they’re meeting your business needs.
DXPs help streamline workflows, from content creation to customer relationship management and much more. They interface with modern Content Management Systems (CMSs), empowering you to produce an unforgettable user experience.
Personalization
A recent McKinsey study found that 71% of customers expect personalization and that a personalized digital experience can help companies grow faster.
A personalized experience can:
- Reduce friction throughout the customer journey
- Enable businesses to present offers based on a customer’s online history and interaction with their brand
- Keep customers engaged throughout their journey
- Increase conversions
Today’s leading DXPs use powerful data collection and analysis and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to present highly relevant offers to online visitors.
Marketing automation
A powerful DXP can interface with email marketing platforms, advertising platforms, and marketing efforts to increase customer engagement and boost conversions.
It makes market segmentation and personalization easier and connects divergent aspects of your operations and digital marketing ecosystems.
This makes life easier for your marketing teams, allowing them to handle web content management seamlessly and greatly enhance the commerce experience.
Omnichannel content delivery
A multi-channel approach to customer communications and marketing is vital, from social media to mobile apps designed for messaging.
State-of-the-art DXPs use composable, headless architecture and microservices to deliver fast, flexible communications across different channels.
This flexibility makes it easier to adapt to emergent channels, allowing eCommerce companies and other businesses to connect with their customers across various touchpoints.
Future-proofed integrations and adaptability
As new technologies become available, a good DXP can make connecting those integrations to your current systems easier. This ensures that the User Experience remains topnotch, allowing you to compete with top companies in your sector successfully.
Data collection and analysis
DXPs are also data management tools, helping companies collect and process customer data surrounding their preferences and online activities. It’s a single source of truth for all your digital experience management needs.
Digital Experience Platforms are a Swiss Army knife of customer experience tools, empowering companies to optimize the customer experience on numerous levels. This makes DXPs an essential element of digital transformation, and a suitable platform will be a key component of your technology stack.
Platform #1: Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe’s Experience Manager is a leader among DXPs, offering the full array of content management, analytics, and other tools to handle high-traffic levels and scaling.
This fully managed service can handle flexible workflows and integrate seamlessly with many external tools.
G2 rating
4.0 / 5
Capterra rating
4.3 / 5
Top Adobe Experience Platform features
- Powerful content management and digital asset management tools
- Capable of handling high-traffic volumes
- Perfect for handling flexible workflow integrations
What we love
Adobe Experience Manager is great for large enterprises, providing the scalability and flexibility that big companies need to manage their User Experience end-to-end.
Downsides
Adobe’s price point is higher than other options. Also, there is currently no way to perform A/B tests on imported content.
Platform #2: Sitecore Experience Platform
Sitecore is a full-featured DXP focused on enterprise-level functionality. It’s known for its content management capabilities, including content creation, promotion, and re-use.
G2 rating
4.7 / 5
Capterra rating
4.2 / 5
Top Sitecore features
- Vast content management capabilities
- Complete customization and personalization capabilities
- Simple to connect with external data in Xconnect
What we love
Sitecore is incredibly flexible, and developers will find it easy to customize and expand its functionality to fit an individual business’s needs.
Downsides
Sitecore’s features are vast and received top ratings on both G2 and Capterra, but users have reported one drawback. Its only major issue is that entry-level users find it more complicated, with a steeper learning curve than other popular DXPs.
Platform #3: Liferay DXP
Liferay is a powerful DXP with a full suite of tools to help businesses manage their customer experience. It allows teams to manage content, deliver personalized user experiences, and simplify complex eCommerce operations.
G2 rating
4.2 / 5
Capterra rating
4.6 / 5
Top Liferay DXP features
- Excellent collaboration capabilities
- Robust and easily scalable
- Easy to customize
- Continuous updates to regularly enhance functionality
What we love
Liferay is easy to use straight out of the box for both techies and non-techies. It’s also easy to tailor to the needs of different user segments.
Downsides
Out-of-the-box integrations are not as vast as some other DXPs, requiring customization from software engineers when certain integrations are required.
Platform #4: Optimizely
Optimizely Digital Experience Platform allows companies to manage their users’ digital experience across many touchpoints, from a prospect’s first-time encounter with your brand to marketing emails and repeat business.
Known for its Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) software, Optimizely’s DXP makes conducting experiments like A/B testing for content easy.
G2 rating
4.2 / 5
Capterra rating
4 / 5
Top Optimizely features
- Easy setup and activation
- Excellent marketing and advertising features out of the box
- Excellent A/B testing capabilities
- Stable platform with excellent security features
What we love
Optimizely is a cost-efficient provider that still offers wide-ranging functionality, emphasizing A/B testing and other types of experimentation designed to boost conversions.
Downsides
Some users find it difficult to make changes to the platform’s design and layout, with limited flexibility, without the help of a software developer.
Platform #5: Glassbox
Glassbox is a DXP known for its advanced analytics and powerful, tagless data capture. In other words, it captures data at every stage of the customer journey, collecting more than 1,000 data points in an average session.
G2 rating
3.9 / 5
Capterra rating
5 / 5
Top Glassbox features
- Tagless data capture across different digital channels
- AI-powered insights to spot themes in your customer journey
- Security controls and multi-layered privacy to protect customer data
What we love
Glassbox’s tagless data capture is designed to collect data from 100% of each customer’s journey, with advanced analytics to help process and make sense of it all.
Downsides
Initial onboarding may be challenging for some new to evaluating the digital customer experience and prefer a more straightforward solution.
Platform #6: Bloomreach
Bloomreach is a highly rated DXP recognized by Gartner Peer Insights, which awarded the platform its Customers’ Choice award in 2022 for its Voice of the Customer: Digital Experience Platform category.
A powerful platform with a full suite of tools to connect with customers across different digital touchpoints, Bloomreach is known for offering exceptional personalization across various digital channels.
G2 rating
4.7 / 5
Capterra rating
4.7 / 5
Top Bloomreach features
- Product discovery features are helpful for digital commerce
- Highly scalable platform
- Powerful omnichannel marketing features
What we love
Bloomreach is easy to use and provides powerful personalization tools, displaying products at the right time to boost conversions.
Downsides
Customers had few complaints about Bloomreach on Gartner Peer Review, but some suggested the company could improve its customer support.
Platform #7: Salesforce Experience Cloud
Salesforce Experience Cloud offers an incredibly robust set of features, which you’d probably expect from a leader like Salesforce. It’s versatile, scalable, and deeply customizable, just like the Salesforce CRM.
We did notice that users rate Salesforce a bit lower than other digital experience SaaS products, likely due to its higher price point.
G2 rating
4.2 / 5
Capterra rating
4.3 / 5
Top Salesforce Experience Cloud features
- Incredibly robust and versatile, like all Salesforce products
- Flexible deployment, with cloud-based and onsite options
- Easy integration with other products within the Salesforce ecosystem
What we love
The Salesforce Digital Experience Platform interacts seamlessly with other Salesforce products within the ecosystem, such as Sales Cloud and Service Cloud.
Downsides
The price tag for Salesforce Experience Cloud runs higher than other platforms, which is to be expected considering the brand’s powerful name in technology.
Platform #8: Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience
Oracle’s 45+ years in the tech industry made it a solid candidate for developing a powerful DXP with strong data gathering and analytics capabilities. Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience (CX) connects data across an organization to generate insights and improve revenues.
G2 rating
3.9 / 5
Capterra rating
4.3 / 5
Top Oracle Advertising and CX features
- Advanced analytics features
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities
- Powerful third-party integrations
What we love
Oracle offers a comprehensive feature set with excellent data analytics tools.
Downsides
Beginners may need help navigating the vast array of features, initially presenting a steep learning curve.
Platform #9: Kentico
Kentico is a popular, full-fledged, completely integrated platform that gives users access to drag-and-drop widgets to support quick and easy adoption.
Recognized by Gartner as a top DXP, Kentico partners with marketing agencies worldwide to support digital experience strategies for large and small companies.
G2 rating
4.4 / 5
Capterra rating
4.4 / 5
Top Kentico Features
- Excellent eCommerce management features
- Different levels of user management allow different roles to perform diverse functions
- Useful library of page templates
What we love
Kentico’s dynamic, intuitive dashboard offers tremendous flexibility, and users find it easy to access the wide array of tools the platform offers. Here’s how Net Solutions helped Nualight, an international LED lighting company, handle both its content and products using the Kentico CMS and also upgrade its website.
Downsides
Some users have reported challenges understanding the support materials.
Platform #10: Acquia
Acquia is a DXP that makes creating, running, and optimizing a digital experience strategy easy. It’s known for its ease of use and quick onboarding, and it’s popular among Drupal users for its Drupal-tailored stack.
G2 rating
3.9 / 5
Capterra rating
4.3 / 5
Top Acquia features
- Amazing monitoring and performance tools
- Ideal for companies that use Drupal for their content management
- Easy to use and master
What we love
Acquia has a wide array of tools to manage digital content and harness data, and users find it easy to grasp—even those without a technical background.
Downsides
Acquia costs more than other DXPs, and there is currently no free trial.
Platform #11: Progress Sitefinity
Sitefinity has a reputation for ease of use, simplifying marketing challenges, and providing a unified hub to manage digital experience efforts. It offers a wide array of content templates and full data analytics capabilities.
G2 rating
4 / 5
Capterra rating
3.4 / 5
Top Sitefinity features
- Highly customizable without the need for additional coding
- Built-in features and templates for a range of content
- Flexible pricing options
What we love
Sitefinity’s ease of use makes it possible for marketing teams and other non-techies to make full use of this platform.
Downsides
Users complain that the backend is occasionally unreliable, but they also say that each new upgrade has shown improvements.
Looking for guidance on implementing or customizing your Digital Experience Platform?
Net Solutions has been serving businesses and helping them with their IT needs for more than 30 years.
We’re a full-service IT outsourcing firm that has worked with well-known organizations like the Harvard Business Review and IMG, and we can take your digital experience strategy to the next level.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What are Digital Experience Platforms?
Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) provide tools to help companies better serve their customers and improve their experience. DXPs include data gathering and analytics tools, content distribution tools, marketing integration, and more.
2. What is the difference between a DXP and a CMS?
A Content Management System (CMS) allows website owners to easily update content without changing the HTML code or building common features using complex coding. A Digital Experience Platform (DXP) interfaces with the CMS, offering tools to study, manage, and shape the digital customer journey.
3.What are some of the best Digital Experience Platforms?
Bloomreach, Glassbox, Sitecore, and Kentico are some of the highest-rated DXPs on the market, according to G2 and Capterra. Of course, each platform has its pros and cons. Be sure to conduct your research and review our analysis of each product before choosing one.
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