The Forrester Wave™:

Digital Experience
Platforms, Q3 2021
The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How
They Stack Up
July 21, 2021

Summary
In our 26-criterion evaluation of digital experience platform (DXP) providers, we
identified the 13 most significant ones — Acquia, Adobe, Bloomreach, CoreMedia,
Crownpeak, HCL Software, Liferay, Magnolia, Optimizely, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP,
and Sitecore — and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report shows how
each provider measures up and helps digital experience professionals select the
right one for their needs.

Deep Integration Separates True

Platforms From Mere Product Portfolios
Forrester distills a digital experience down to four solutions: 1)
understanding the customer with data; 2) creating the experience with
content; 3) tailoring that experience to fit the context with marketing; and 4)
delivering value with commerce. To deliver these capabilities, firms must
deploy digital experience platforms — a three-layer architecture comprising
experience management, platform services, and infrastructure services.
The experience layer provides unified tooling for practitioners and delivers
a consistent experience to customers. Common platform services,
including content, customer data, and transactions keep all interactions in
the customer’s context. Infrastructure services provide the scalable, secure,
extensible foundation to support platform services and customer
experiences.
That’s the promise. But today, companies buy digital experience parts from
multiple vendors and implement them over time. Even when a company
goes all in with a single vendor, it doesn’t implement all the parts in unison.
That means your digital experiences are delivered (even temporarily) in a
multivendor, multiproduct stack. In a world like this, interoperability is
imperative. But all too often, the burden of integration is your responsibility.
Is this welcome? Absolutely not. In this evaluation, the most common thing
reference customers told Forrester is that they’re most satisfied with
technology providers’ services — not the products themselves. That’s a
signal that the products — and the platforms they aspire to be — are still
too challenging to deploy and operate. Vendors are racing to
simultaneously modernize their technology and simplify the way the parts
interoperate. As a result of these trends, digital experience platform
customers should look for providers that:
 Offer prebuilt integrations to more digital experience
parts. Platforms are expected to deliver efficiency — not just the
ability — for assembling capabilities. Larger vendors proclaim that
their product portfolios are pre-integrated and work well together.
Smaller vendors focus on pre-integrating their narrower portfolios
with cloud parts from the broader ecosystem. Customers tell
Forrester that they want an integrated set of capabilities that “just
works” — regardless of whether it comprises parts from one or many
vendors.
 Prioritize the practitioner experience. Task-focused, frictionless
digital experiences inspire customers to reach their journey goals and
realize the value your firm delivers. It’s high time the experience-
builders levy those expectations on their vendors — because the
benefits are the same. Streamlined tools allow practitioners to
maintain focus on crafting digital interactions that lead to
differentiated customer outcomes.
 Elevate testing and optimization to a first-class
capability. Content is the soul of, but not the whole of, experience.
Pervasive changes in customer behavior caused by COVID-19
demonstrated how fragile predictive behavioral models can be in
periods of turbulence. Practitioners need tools to continuously test
and optimize all facets of their digital experiences at scale to be
resilient in the face of black swan events.
 Have a microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native, headless
(MACH) offering. Digital teams need scaling to be instant and APIs
to be productive for modern developers. They need cloud-native
platform parts to evolve continuously without requiring upgrades. And
they need a platform built for interoperability and composability. All
the vendors in this evaluation are headed in this direction, but some
are much farther along than others.
Evaluation Summary
The Forrester Wave™ evaluation highlights Leaders, Strong Performers,
Contenders, and Challengers. It’s an assessment of the top vendors in the
market and does not represent the entire vendor landscape. You’ll find
more information about this market in our Now Tech report on digital
experience platforms.
We intend this evaluation to be a starting point only and encourage clients
to view product evaluations and adapt criteria weightings using the Excel-
based vendor comparison tool (see Figure 1 and see Figure 2). Click the
link at the beginning of this report on Forrester.com to download the tool.
Figure 1Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms, Q3 2021

Figure 2Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms Scorecard, Q3 2021

Vendor Offerings
Forrester included 13 vendors in this assessment: Acquia, Adobe,
Bloomreach, CoreMedia, Crownpeak, HCL Software, Liferay, Magnolia,
Optimizely, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and Sitecore (see Figure 3).
Figure 3Evaluated Vendors And Product Information

Vendor Profiles
Our analysis uncovered the following strengths and weaknesses of
individual vendors.
Leaders
 Oracle has a robust experience platform, with strength in
commerce and campaigns. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Oracle
has a bigger customer presence in North America and a smaller
presence in EMEA and Latin America. Oracle serves customers like
Motorola, Panasonic UK, and WebContinental, with a bigger
presence in high-tech industrial manufacturing, financial services,
and automotive. Oracle offers a complete cloud stack —
infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, application
components, and fully integrated experience applications. Compared
 with other vendors we evaluated, Oracle shows strength in
omnichannel experience management, automation and AI, and
developer tools and support. It also has strength in search, content
creation, and content hub. Reference customers told us that they like
that Oracle provides access to product managers and engineers but
would welcome improvements in rationalizing the personalization
capabilities across products. One reference said, “I was skeptical
because I never heard good things about Oracle. But I really liked my
experience.” Oracle is a good fit for companies that are looking for a
suite of experience capabilities that are pre-integrated into the
business objects managed by their Oracle enterprise applications —
less so for luxury and apparel brands building direct-to-consumer
experiences.
 Salesforce has a strong experience platform overall but a
persistent gap in content. Headquartered in San Francisco,
California, Salesforce has a bigger customer presence in North
America and a smaller presence in EMEA, Latin America, and Asia
Pacific. Salesforce serves customers like Mascoma Bank, Volvo, and
Zenovate, with a bigger presence in high-tech, manufacturing, and
financial services. Salesforce focuses on providing a portfolio of fully
integrated solutions plus low-code tooling to enable citizen
developers to build experiences for customers, partners, and
employees. Compared with other vendors we evaluated, Salesforce
shows strength in search, digital commerce, and platform
certifications. It also has strength in testing and optimization, content
creation, customer profile and segmentation, and platform operations
but has gaps in content hub. Reference customers told us that they
like Salesforce's speed of deployment, scalability, and ease of use for
practitioners but would welcome improvements in simplifying the
licensing across all products that are part of a customer's digital
experience. One reference said, “One of the primary drivers of our
choice to use Salesforce is because of the one-platform simplicity of
using Salesforce for both our core application and our digital
engagement experience.” Salesforce is a good fit for companies that
are looking to leverage their Salesforce CRM investments for internal
productivity and for customer self-service productivity — less so for
consumer brands building differentiated experiences on a
multivendor stack of MACH components.
 Adobe leads with the strongest portfolio and an evolving cloud-
native strategy. Headquartered in San Jose, California, Adobe has a
bigger customer presence in North America and a smaller presence
in EMEA and Asia Pacific. Adobe serves customers like Helly
Hansen, Swisscom, and Walgreens Boots Alliance, with a bigger
presence in retail, high-tech, and manufacturing/consumer goods.
 Adobe offers solutions to address marketing teams’ needs across
creative, demand generation, and acquisition and technical teams’
needs to integrate customer data and touchpoints with enterprise
sales and support stacks. Adobe continues to refactor its acquired
products to use the shared services of the Adobe Experience
Platform. Compared with other vendors we evaluated, Adobe shows
strength in testing and optimization, digital commerce, and customer
profile and segmentation. It also has strength in developer tools and
support, integration tools, and platform operations. Reference
customers told us that they like easy-to-use analytics tools that help
marketers who aren't as analytical but would welcome improvements
in integrating its products. One reference said, “We needed
something to replace so many individual technologies — so it had to
be someone that had everything.” Adobe is a good fit for global
organizations needing integrated experience components and a real-
time customer data platform (CDP) that supports local teams — less
so for smaller shops needing only a handful of experience
components.
 Optimizely has merged assets to offer a multicloud platform
with all the parts. Headquartered in New York, New York,
Optimizely has a bigger customer presence in North America and a
smaller presence in EMEA. Optimizely serves customers like
D'Addario, Dolby, and Living Spaces, with a bigger presence in retail,
technology, and manufacturing and distribution. Optimizely has a
highly acquisitive strategy as it grows beyond its content roots as
Episerver. Compared with other vendors we evaluated, Optimizely
shows strength in testing and optimization, digital commerce, and
platform operations. It also has strength in campaign management,
customer journey management, and platform certifications.
Reference customers told us that they like Optimizely's flexibility in
their licensing model when expanding the set of sites but would
welcome improvements in its FIND search capability. One reference
said, “Optimizely was very simple to get up and running — more so
than other DXPs I've implemented.” Optimizely is a good fit for
companies that are content- and commerce-centric brands that
embrace Microsoft Azure — less so for businesses that have
committed to building out their stack with multivendor MACH
components.
Strong Performers
 Bloomreach has strong search and customer profiles and is
solid across the board. Headquartered in Mountain View,
California, Bloomreach serves customers with a similarly sized
presence in North America and Europe. Bloomreach’s customers
include Albertsons, Desigual, and MSC Industrial Direct; it has a
 bigger presence in retail, distribution, and manufacturing.
Bloomreach focuses on enriching digital commerce experiences with
data and AI. Bloomreach acquired Exponea in January 2021 to build
out its CDP capabilities. Compared with other vendors we evaluated,
Bloomreach shows strength in search, customer journey
management, and automation and AI. It also has strength in digital
commerce, content creation, and developer tools and support.
Reference customers told us that they like Bloomreach’s easy-to-use
tooling and the support and insights from the account management
team but would welcome improvements in autoscaling. One
reference said, “They've built a platform that is both exciting and easy
to use.” Bloomreach is a good fit for brands establishing direct
customer channels with digital commerce experiences — less so for
insurance companies building account management experiences for
clients.
 SAP has strong campaign and solid commerce capabilities but
is weak in content. Headquartered in Walldorf, Germany, SAP has
a bigger customer presence in EMEA and a smaller presence in
North America and Asia Pacific. SAP serves customers like
dōTERRA, Tetra Pak, and Yell, with a bigger presence in consumer
products, retail, and industrial machinery and components. SAP has
a broad range of offerings across several portfolios. It continues to
acquire capabilities to enhance its portfolio. Compared with other
vendors we evaluated, SAP shows strength in campaign
management, customer journey management, and platform
certifications. It also has strength in search, digital commerce, and
platform operations but has gaps in content creation, content hub,
and practitioner tools and support. Reference customers told us that
they like SAP's out-of-the-box functionality but would welcome
improvements in its integration. One reference said, “The SAP telco
and utilities accelerator allowed us to reduce our implementation
time.” SAP is a good fit for large organizations with an investment in
the broader SAP portfolio with complex B2B marketing and sales
operations and for companies with operations in Greater China —
less so for smaller firms or digitally native brands.
 Acquia has strong content tools and is solid in most places but
needs to beef up testing. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts,
Acquia has a bigger customer presence in North America and a
smaller presence in Europe. Acquia serves customers like AT&T,
Edward Jones, and Pfizer, with a bigger presence in financial
services, healthcare, and retail. Acquia has an open DXP strategy
that emphasizes composability and has made acquisitions to round
out its offering. In the past two years, Acquia has completed three
acquisitions to build out its low-code (Cohesion), CDP (AgilOne), and
 marketing (Mautic) capabilities. Compared with other vendors we
evaluated, Acquia shows strength in practitioner tools and support,
content hub, and platform certifications. It also has strength in search
and digital commerce but has gaps in testing and optimization and
integration tools. Reference customers told us that they like Acquia’s
easy-to-use personalization but would welcome improvements in the
complicated technical setup of the CDP. One reference said, “The
Acquia services team took the time to understand our business and
our needs.” Acquia is a good fit for brand-centric companies that
want to increase the marketing team's agility with architectural
composability and open source.
 Sitecore has strong content capability but limited developer
tools. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Sitecore has a
bigger customer presence in North America and a smaller presence
in EMEA. Sitecore serves customers like Caleres, DP World, and
Triumph Motorcycles, with a bigger presence in financial services,
manufacturing, and professional or technical services. Sitecore’s
strategy is to be interoperable with customers' existing investments
and to have a complete offering of capabilities. Sitecore is using a
$1.2 billion private equity investment from January 2021 to acquire
cloud-native capabilities as the basis for its next-generation offering.
At the time of this evaluation, its first two acquisitions — Boxever, a
customer data platform with real-time personalization and
experimentation, and Four51, an API-first, headless e-commerce
solution — had not yet been fully integrated. Compared with other
vendors we evaluated, Sitecore shows strength in content hub. It also
has good capabilities for omnichannel experience management,
customer analytics, and platform certifications but has gaps in search
and developer tools and support. Reference customers told us that
they like Sitecore's well-thought-out marketing functionality but would
welcome improvements in ease of use and documentation. One
reference said, “Upgrade cost and performance of the latest release
has significantly improved.” Sitecore is a good fit for companies that
are looking for an integrated, all-in-one experience platform,
especially if they are committed to Microsoft Azure — less so for
companies looking for a cloud-native, full-featured, integrated
experience platform.
Contenders
 Magnolia has solid content, commerce, and analytics
capabilities but lacks campaigns. Headquartered in Basel,
Switzerland, Magnolia has a bigger customer presence in EMEA and
a smaller presence in North America and Asia Pacific. Magnolia
serves customers like JetBlue, Sainsbury’s, and Toshiba, with a
bigger presence in banking and securities, tourism and hospitality,
 and retail. Magnolia’s open DXP strategy emphasizes composability,
and it avoids making acquisitions to expand its offering. Compared
with other vendors we evaluated, Magnolia has good search, content,
commerce, and practitioner and developer tools but could improve in
omnichannel experience management, campaign management, and
platform certifications. Reference customers told us that they like
Magnolia's flexibility, which comes from a headless approach to
content, but would welcome improvements in the page load speed of
the practitioner tools when managing large volumes of content items.
One reference said, “Their approach is a breath of fresh air — they
have a licensing model that works; people don't want monoliths.”
Magnolia is a good fit for companies that have multiple business units
with agile teams committed to solutions with best-of-breed
capabilities — less so for companies trying to consolidate their
experience stack vendors.
 Crownpeak has good content creation but lacks integrated
commerce and campaigns. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado,
Crownpeak has an equally sized customer presence in North
America and EMEA. Crownpeak serves customers like Associated
Press, Freddie Mac, and Healthgrades, with a bigger presence in
finance and insurance, pharma/life sciences, and high-tech.
Crownpeak wants to be the simplest and easiest DXP on the market.
It recently acquired e-Spirit and has a multiyear roadmap to enhance
and modernize its core offering with those assets. Compared with
other vendors we evaluated, Crownpeak has strength in testing and
optimization, content creation, and platform certifications but has
gaps in omnichannel experience management, digital commerce,
and developer tools and support. Reference customers told us that
they like Crownpeak's easy-to-use content editing but would welcome
improvements in page load times of the practitioner tooling and in
troubleshooting publishing errors. One reference said, “They are
transparent with us and do a good job of keeping communication
open and taking feedback.” Crownpeak is a good fit for companies
that need quick time-to-value — less so for industrial equipment
manufacturers building post-purchase customer experiences.
 Liferay has a solid content hub and developer tools but lacks
campaign management. Headquartered in Diamond Bar, California,
Liferay has a bigger customer presence in EMEA and a smaller
presence in North America and Asia Pacific. Liferay serves
customers like Excellus BlueCross BlueShield, Tag, and Vodafone,
with a bigger presence in banking and securities, government, and
insurance. Liferay’s product strategy focuses more on post-sale self-
service experiences and less on inbound campaigns for demand
generation. Liferay favors organic development over acquiring
 product capabilities. Compared with other vendors we evaluated,
Liferay has good platform operations. It also has strength in
practitioner tools and support, digital commerce, and content hub but
has gaps in search, campaign management, and customer journey
management. Reference customers told us that they like Liferay's
consultative approach to implementation projects but would welcome
improvements in the cost of professional services. One reference
customer said, “Their knowledgeable consultants helped us start the
project on the right path.” Liferay is a good fit for companies that
need to consolidate a fragmented enterprise environment, and it’s
HIPAA compliance makes it ideal for patient healthcare experiences
— less so for lifestyle brands creating direct-to-consumer
experiences.
Challengers
 CoreMedia offers solid content and commerce capability but
lacks reach and data. Based in Hamburg, Germany, CoreMedia has
a bigger customer presence in EMEA and a smaller presence in
North America. CoreMedia serves customers like Deckers Brands,
Deutsche Telekom, and Emerson Electric, with a bigger presence in
retail/consumer brands, communications/media, and B2B
manufacturing. CoreMedia has a long history of co-innovating tools
for building content experiences with its customers. Private equity
firm OpenGate Capital took a controlling stake in CoreMedia in 2019
with the intent of modernizing based on MACH Alliance principles.
Compared with other vendors we evaluated, CoreMedia has good
omnichannel experience management. It also has strength in search,
campaign management, and digital commerce but has gaps in
customer profile and segmentation, customer journey management,
and developer tools and support. Reference customers told us that
they like CoreMedia's customer support but would welcome
improvements in upgrades and training. One reference said, “The
CoreMedia team has been great — and that sets them apart from
other companies.” CoreMedia is a good fit for companies with global
brands that differentiate with content experiences — less so for
financial institutions building customer account management
experiences.
 HCL Software invested heavily but is still weaker in many parts
of digital experience. Based in Sunnyvale, California, HCL Software
(a unit of HCL Technologies) has a bigger customer presence in
North America and a smaller presence in EMEA. HCL Software
serves customers like Freedom Mortgage, the state of Ohio, and
Penn Vet, with a bigger presence in financial services (banking,
insurance), government, and healthcare. HCL Software uses a
partnership approach to help clients extract business value from their
 existing investments in the products they acquired from IBM. HCL
Software deploys its “Studio” team to provide hands-on assistance to
clients and continues to close out technical debt and feature request
backlogs. Compared with other vendors we evaluated, HCL Software
is below par in many factors, including content hub and customer
profile and segmentation, and is missing campaign management
altogether. Reference customers told us that they like HCL
Software's emphasis on providing guidance and support to their
business and IT teams but would welcome improvements in
integrations and training. One reference said, “The biggest reason I
have brand loyalty is the sales and support team; they embody
partnership in every sense of the word.” HCL Software is a good fit
for companies that had made significant investments in products that
IBM has since divested — less so for companies going all in on
cloud.

Evaluation Overview
We evaluated vendors against 26 criteria, which we grouped into three
high-level categories:
 Current offering. Each vendor's position on the vertical axis of the
Forrester Wave graphic indicates the strength of its current offering.
Key criteria for these solutions include three categories of services:
experience management to enable practitioners, platform capabilities
to standardize assets for reuse, and infrastructure that drives scale,
drives performance, and enables developers.
 Strategy. Placement on the horizontal axis indicates the strength of
the vendors' strategies. We evaluated vision, market approach,
partner ecosystem, delivery model, commercial model, and
supporting services.
 Market presence. Represented by the size of the markers on the
graphic, our market presence scores reflect each vendor's customer
count and average deal size.
Vendor Inclusion Criteria
Forrester included 13 vendors in the assessment: Acquia, Adobe,
Bloomreach, CoreMedia, Crownpeak, HCL Software, Liferay, Magnolia,
Optimizely, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and Sitecore. Each of these vendors
has:
 An architectural approach to experience delivery. With
extensibility and interoperability core to the platform, these vendors
provide APIs and integration frameworks. This integration strategy is
supported by a marketplace of third-party connectors, apps, and add-
ons.
  Software that enables the creation, orchestration, and
optimization of digital experiences. By providing a critical mass of
well-integrated capabilities (first or third party) comprising content,
customer data, transactions, integration, infrastructure, analytics, and
automation, these platforms allow practitioners to actively manage
customer engagement across owned and third-party digital channels.
 Enterprise relevance and a track record. Customers and partners
confirm that the vendors’ product(s) acts as a core anchor tenant
within the enterprise architecture, and there are enterprise-scale
reference customers.
 Mindshare among Forrester's enterprise customers. The vendors
we evaluated are frequently mentioned in Forrester client inquiries,
shortlists, consulting projects, and case studies.

Supplemental Material
Online Resource
We publish all our Forrester Wave scores and weightings in an Excel file
that provides detailed product evaluations and customizable rankings;
download this tool by clicking the link at the beginning of this report on
Forrester.com. We intend these scores and default weightings to serve only
as a starting point and encourage readers to adapt the weightings to fit
their individual needs.
The Forrester Wave Methodology
A Forrester Wave is a guide for buyers considering their purchasing options
in a technology marketplace. To offer an equitable process for all
participants, Forrester follows The Forrester Wave™ Methodology Guide to
evaluate participating vendors.
In our review, we conduct primary research to develop a list of vendors to
consider for the evaluation. From that initial pool of vendors, we narrow our
final list based on the inclusion criteria. We then gather details of product
and strategy through a detailed questionnaire, demos/briefings, and
customer reference surveys/interviews. We use those inputs, along with the
analyst’s experience and expertise in the marketplace, to score vendors,
using a relative rating system that compares each vendor against the
others in the evaluation.
We include the Forrester Wave publishing date (quarter and year) clearly in
the title of each Forrester Wave report. We evaluated the vendors
participating in this Forrester Wave using materials they provided to us by
April 2021 and did not allow additional information after that point. We
encourage readers to evaluate how the market and vendor offerings
change over time.
In accordance with The Forrester Wave™ And New Wave™ Vendor
Review Policy, Forrester asks vendors to review our findings prior to
publishing to check for accuracy. Vendors marked as nonparticipating
vendors in the Forrester Wave graphic met our defined inclusion criteria but
declined to participate in or contributed only partially to the evaluation. We
score these vendors in accordance with The Forrester Wave™ And The
Forrester New Wave™ Nonparticipating And Incomplete Participation
Vendor Policy and publish their positioning along with those of the
participating vendors.
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We conduct all our research, including Forrester Wave evaluations, in
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