Now, let’s take a look at what CMS 13 is bringing with it
Several of the changes in CMS 13 are great additions, whether or not you take on a full Visual Builder rollout. Most of them will be felt in day-to-day editorial work almost immediately.
1. Content Manager is a smarter way to find and work with your content
Content trees work. We use them. You use them. They are familiar and logical, and for most sites, they’re a great solution for organising and finding your content. But on large sites, or for teams managing content across multiple brands, markets, and even CMS platforms, a content tree might not be enough.
Content Manager is the new editorial hub in CMS 13, and it sits alongside the content tree as a second, search-first way to work with your content. Instead of searching through a hierarchy, you can search, filter, and sort your full content library. The interface is grid-based, columns are customisable, and results are specific and fast.
What makes it a good choice for larger organisations is that Content Manager is not limited to content sitting in Optimizely CMS. It can also surface content from external sources. That means if you’re running multiple CMS instances or want to include content from other brand systems, you can find and work with that content from a single interface.
2. DAM inside the CMS
Optimizely's DAM has been accessible from within CMS 12 for a while, but it has lived as a separate pop-up window that editors dip in and out of. In CMS 13, the integration goes further. DAM is embedded directly within the editing interface, sitting natively alongside your content. For teams where that matters, it means a smoother, less interrupted editing workflow.
3. Most of the new stuff depends on Optimizely Graph
Graph is the one we would draw particular attention to, because it is less of a standalone feature and more of the thing that makes much of CMS 13 possible.
Graph replaces the older Search & Navigation product with a modern content indexing layer that structures and surfaces content for both traditional search and modern delivery patterns. If you plan to use Opal, any of the AI-assisted tooling, the new Content Manager, or any serious headless or multi-channel delivery, Graph is the layer the rest depends on. Skip it, and large parts of what CMS 13 offers simply do not light up.
It also provides the foundation for modern delivery patterns, headless, composable, and SSR-based architectures, which are inherently more efficient for AI crawlers to read and index than traditional server-rendered approaches.
4. Opal AI
Opal is Optimizely's AI agentic workflow orchestration layer and a native part of CMS 13. It orchestrates your workflows and organises content audits, metadata generation, quality checks, SEO review, and content creation assistance, experimentation, and personalisation into agents rather than manual review cycles.
Opal is not simply a chatbot inside your CMS. It’s an agentic orchestrator, and Optimizely are shipping new agents for it every week. The agents cover content creation, experimentation, personalisation, translation, workflow automation, and more. You can pick and choose the best for you.
What makes Opal useful for our clients is the level of control it hands to non-technical users. You can build your own agents and automate full content workflows without writing a single line of code. Not simplified versions of workflows. Actual end-to-end automations, configured by marketers and content managers, running inside the platform they already work in every day.
5. Campaigns launch more cleanly
A handful of improvements to preview and publishing that are easy to overlook individually but add up to a better experience around campaign launches. Real-time content variation previews aren’t so new to Optimizely. Previous CMSs had their version of on-page editing and could present side-by-side using the right plugins. What Visual Builder changes is that this experience is now native, stable, and doesn’t require maintenance on your end when there’s an update.
Scheduled publishing is more reliably managed with clearer visibility in the editing interface. And for teams running headless front-ends, editors can now preview content in context with configurable preview routing built natively into the platform.
6. Opti ID is required, but that has its benefits
Opti ID is mandatory in CMS 13, so if you are not already on it, the upgrade is the moment you make the move. That is worth knowing upfront rather than discovering mid-project.
The practical benefit, once you are there, is reduced context switching if your organisation runs multiple Optimizely products. One set of credentials across CMS, CMP, Experimentation, and the rest of the suite means fewer sign-ins when moving between tools day to day.
It also makes expanding your use of Optimizely’s products more straightforward, so that adding a new one to your stack is a simpler task when the identity layer is already shared.
It is also a prerequisite for Opal, which is reason enough to treat it as an early priority rather than an afterthought in your upgrade planning. It’s actually worth getting Opti ID even if you’re planning to stay put on CMS 12, as you’ll get credits to test Opal there.
