Contently Alternatives for Your Content Marketing Platform

You're in the market for a content marketing platform that will help scale content efficiently. And not just any content — content that delivers tangible results and establishes your brand as a trusted authority in your industry.

You know that the best way to achieve quality content at scale is with a vendor, but here's the issue: you're faced with a lot of options. There are trusted, established players like Contently and newer, up-and-coming players that are innovating much faster. Which one would help you best achieve the results you're looking for?

You're in the right place. This guide covers two alternatives to Contently, Optimizely and Letterdrop. We'll evaluate their essential capabilities and provide side-by-side comparisons to help you make your choice.

Evaluating Essential Capabilities of the CMPs

Each of the CMPs presented in this article will be compared according to these essential capabilities:

• Ideation: Generating content ideas and themes using insights from sources like social listening, search engine optimization, and internal data to identify audience demands and trends.
• Integrations: Integration with three or more complementary tools, such as CRM, DAM, lead management, marketing analytics, work management, and sales enablement platforms.
• Content Planning and Workflow Management: This includes content and project management tools, allowing easy task tracking and communication within a marketing team. It also considers content storage, approvals, and a creative editor that supports multiple formats.
• Distribution: Publishing and distributing content assets directly or through integration with various platforms.
• Automation: The extent to which AI technology is used to streamline tasks.
• Performance Analytics: Has tools that measure and attribute content performance.
• Creator Sourcing: The ability to facilitate managed access to third-party content creators through a talent marketplace.

Contently

Contently is an enterprise CMP founded in 2010. Its tools streamline workflow from strategy, planning, connecting to creators, production, publication, and performance monitoring.

Contently's stand-out offering is its expansive integrated freelancer network. It aligns talent with a company's specific goals and facilitates direct workstreams within the software. Vetted contributors from the likes of Forbes and the New York Times are automatically suggested as contributors according to your content strategy.

Key Features

• The SEO Story Ideas feature uses an algorithm to recommend potential high-performing story concepts. The tool reveals which topics, tone of voice, channels, and formats can help give you a competitive edge and engage your audience.
• Content ideas and relevant talent are suggested automatically in compliance with past posts and your content strategy.
• It offers a cross-channel calendar and an individual campaign tracker.
• Contributors write and collaborate in the editor in compliance with gated permissions. They can attach briefs and content strategies per project. They can also create and duplicate workflow templates.
• It supports direct publishing to channels directly from the editor.
• Performance analytics tools show content performance over an allocated time, an overview of team efficiency, and PDF engagement analysis. 

Drawbacks

• Many integrations require Zapier, adding an extra cost.
• There have been complaints that the software is too expensive.

Optimizely

Optimizely is a digital experience platform founded in 2010. It allows teams to create, manage and optimize their digital assets from ideation to performance tracking.

Optimizely stands out as a CMP for its ability to help enterprise-level teams leverage AI, data-driven insights, personalization, and experimentation to create, monitor and scale their content ops.

Key Features

• It aggregates SEO, social, and competitive data to suggest topics, topic ranking, tone of voice, and engagement insights. Suggestions are based on location, visited pages, profile properties, referrer, keywords, and more.
• It can integrate with any CMS, CMP and social feed with a flexible JSON feed.
• It has a content calendar and campaign tracking feature that update in real-time. It supports a calendar, timeline, board, list, or chart view format.
• You can create a dedicated workspace with real-time team collaboration. Collect, approve, prioritize, and assign projects. Track progress at a glance. In-app creation and multi-format file annotation.
• You can push content directly to social channels, CMS, and CRM with publishing widgets and plug-and-play integrations.
• You can design custom rules to ensure content requests are auto-assigned.
• You can track, analyze and attribute campaigns and content. Analyze team efficiency stats.
• It supports freelancer permissions.

Drawbacks

• Optimizely needs Zapier for supported integrations.
• There is no creator network, although there are freelancing permissions.
• There have been complaints about ease of use, including the poor search bar.

Contently vs Optimizely

Letterdrop

Letterdrop was founded in 2021 and is run by ex-Googlers. It's a modern all-in-one content marketing tool that brings everything from ideation to analytics under one roof.

The software is GPT-4 powered, allowing for unprecedented AI-to-enterprise automation capabilities. This includes smart SEO tooling and full-process automation abilities.

Key Features

• It extracts content ideas directly from sales calls. The Idea Generator supports competitor and keyword research. You can review, recycle, and repost previous high-performing content from the same tool.
• All integrations are native.
• It has a cross-channel content calendar synced to content in real time. Has a project board with native artifacts like drafts and outlines, synced in real time. It has gated permissions, and each card shows all associated project data.
• You can repurpose, publish, draft and distribute socials directly from the publishing page.
• It can automate internal links across pages, content repurposing, content page monitoring, distribution, and amplification. Supports AI-assisted writing.
• It has blog performance and email campaign tracking. It's connected to Google Search Console and alerts you to necessary SEO improvements, such as fixing keyword cannibalization.
• It supports freelancer permissions.

Drawbacks

• It's relatively new and prone to early-stage teething problems like bugs.
• While it offers freelancer permissions, Letterdrop doesn't have any feature for creator sourcing and has no plans to develop one.

Choose A Vendor That Offers Impact, Not Just More Content

The vendor you choose should help you streamline your content ops and scale in a way that impacts the top line. The amount of content you put out doesn't matter if it doesn't drive qualified traffic and move the needle for your business.

You want a well-oiled machine that gives you a high-level overview of everything that's in the pipeline and dependable technologies that allow you to automate manual tasks.

Given that the market for AI intelligence in marketing is predicted to jump to $47.2 billion in 2025, it's best to go with a vendor that's actively developing martech-focused AI. Contently's AI capabilities fall short compared to Optimizely and Letterdrop, indicating that product innovation is probably not a top priority.

The final choice comes down to how well either one of these alternative vendors will integrate with your existing martech and what you're hoping to achieve.

In our opinion, Optimizely is suited to analytics-focused teams, given its extensive performance analytics capabilities. You're able to see an overview of what's in the pipeline, and its data-driven ideation automation is a stand-out feature.

Meanwhile, Letterdrop is thinking about the future of SEO and AI in a way that the big players aren't. You can optimize for the shifting SEO environment with AI that semantically understands your writing. The software allows you a detailed, full-pipeline overview and the ability to automate your entire production process from start to finish.

Looking to learn more about streamlining your content ops? Feel free to reach out to us.