Platform Evaluation
Independent scorecarding that cuts through vendor noise. When every platform claims to be best-in-class, our architects prove which ones actually deliver for your business.
Why Platform Decisions Deserve Independent Expertise
Choosing a CMS or digital experience platform is one of the most consequential technology decisions your organization will make. The wrong choice costs years of rework, millions in sunk licensing, and mounting technical debt that compounds with every quarter. The right choice accelerates content operations, reduces total cost of ownership, and positions your team to move faster than competitors.
HT Blue brings something rare to this decision: complete independence. We don't resell licenses, collect referral fees, or maintain preferred vendor agreements. Our architects have implemented Sitecore, Adobe Experience Manager, Optimizely, Sanity, Contentful, Drupal, and WordPress at enterprise scale. That hands-on experience across platforms is what makes our evaluations trustworthy. We know what vendor demos hide, what implementation really costs, and which architectural promises hold up under production workloads.
Evaluation Services
From comprehensive platform audits to focused technology assessments, our evaluation services match the depth your decision requires.
DXP & CMS Evaluations
Deep-dive audits of your current platform's technical health, content architecture, performance, security, and business alignment. Our proprietary scorecard benchmarks your system against Gartner MQ and Forrester Wave criteria weighted by real implementation outcomes.
Platform Selection & RFP
Vendor-neutral selection guidance that aligns platform capabilities with your technical requirements, content model, integration landscape, and governance needs. We help you build the right RFP, evaluate responses objectively, and negotiate with confidence.
Architecture Review
Independent validation of proposed or existing technical architectures. We assess scalability patterns, integration design, content modeling decisions, and hosting strategy to identify risks and optimization opportunities before they become costly problems.
What Our Evaluations Cover
Every platform assessment examines six critical dimensions that determine whether your technology investment will deliver sustained value or accumulate hidden costs.
System Architecture
Server topology, hosting environment, database configuration, caching strategy, and CDN setup evaluated against vendor best practices and your traffic patterns.
Includes CM/CD server review, search index config, and cloud resource optimization.
Performance & Scalability
Page load benchmarks, server response times, Core Web Vitals analysis, and load testing under realistic traffic conditions to identify bottlenecks before your users find them.
Lighthouse scoring, real user monitoring data, and stress testing against 2x peak load.
Content Architecture
Content model design, template structure, taxonomy effectiveness, authoring workflows, and whether your information architecture supports reuse across channels and touchpoints.
Content type audit, relationship mapping, and governance gap analysis.
Security & Compliance
Access controls, authentication protocols, data encryption, patch currency, and alignment with regulatory requirements like GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, or industry-specific mandates.
Vulnerability scanning, SSL/TLS configuration, and role-based access review.
Integration Health
How your CMS connects with CRM, DAM, analytics, marketing automation, and commerce systems. We identify fragile integrations, data sync issues, and missed automation opportunities.
API contract review, error handling audit, and integration dependency mapping.
Developer & Editor Experience
Codebase quality, customization maintainability, authoring UX, publishing friction, and whether your teams can move at the speed your business demands without unnecessary IT dependencies.
Build pipeline review, deployment workflow analysis, and content team interviews.
Our Evaluation Process
A structured, repeatable methodology that balances thoroughness with efficiency. Most evaluations complete in two to six weeks depending on scope.
Discovery & Alignment
Stakeholder interviews, documentation review, and requirements gathering to understand your business goals, content operations, integration landscape, and governance needs.
Technical Deep Dive
Architecture assessment, codebase review, performance benchmarking, security audit, and integration health check using our standardized evaluation framework.
Capability Scoring
Our proprietary HT Blue DXP Scorecard rates platform capabilities against Gartner MQ and Forrester Wave criteria, weighted by actual implementation outcomes from our 30+ years of experience.
AI-Assisted Analysis
Our Open DXP Index analyzes platform maturity, release velocity, community health, and innovation trajectory to surface trends that traditional evaluations miss.
Recommendations & Roadmap
Comprehensive report with executive summary, detailed findings, prioritized remediation plan, TCO analysis, and a clear adoption roadmap backed by data and experience.
Platforms We Evaluate
Our team has deep implementation experience across the enterprise CMS and DXP landscape. We evaluate Sitecore XP, XM, and XM Cloud implementations alongside Adobe Experience Manager, Optimizely DXP and CMS, Sanity, Contentful, WordPress VIP, Drupal, and Kentico. We also assess emerging headless platforms including Hygraph, Storyblok, and Strapi when they appear in client shortlists.
What separates our evaluations from analyst reports is production-level familiarity. We've migrated content between these platforms, debugged their edge cases, and optimized their performance under real enterprise workloads. That operational knowledge means our recommendations account for what happens after the sales demo ends and implementation begins.
Who Benefits from Platform Evaluation
Organizations Planning a Migration
Before committing to a new platform, validate that the migration investment is justified and the target platform genuinely fits your requirements. Our audit quantifies technical debt and provides an honest assessment of optimize-vs-migrate tradeoffs.
Teams Struggling with Performance
Slow page loads, publishing bottlenecks, and content team frustration often signal deeper architectural issues. Our evaluation identifies root causes and provides a prioritized remediation plan that typically delivers 30 to 60 percent performance improvement.
Enterprises Entering Vendor Selection
Vendor demos and sales engineers present best-case scenarios. Our independent evaluation ensures you ask the right questions, test the right capabilities, and choose based on production reality rather than presentation polish.
Leadership Seeking a Second Opinion
When your implementation partner recommends a platform, you need an independent voice to validate that recommendation. Our vendor-neutral assessment confirms whether the proposed solution truly aligns with your long-term strategy.
Platform Evaluation FAQ
How long does a platform evaluation take?
Timeline depends on scope and complexity. A focused CMS audit covering a single site typically takes two to three weeks. Comprehensive DXP evaluations spanning multiple sites, integrations, and personalization layers require four to six weeks. Enterprise assessments across multiple brands or regions may take six to eight weeks. We design the engagement to minimize disruption to your team.
What platforms do you evaluate?
We have deep implementation experience across Sitecore (XP, XM, XM Cloud), Adobe Experience Manager, Optimizely DXP, Sanity, Contentful, WordPress VIP, Drupal, Kentico, and emerging headless platforms like Hygraph and Storyblok. Our evaluation framework adapts to any content management or digital experience platform because it is built on architectural principles rather than platform-specific checklists.
Are your evaluations truly vendor-neutral?
Yes. HT Blue does not resell platform licenses, collect referral commissions, or maintain preferred vendor partnerships. Our revenue comes from consulting services, not platform sales. This independence is fundamental to our practice. When we recommend a platform, it is because our analysis shows it genuinely fits your requirements.
What deliverables do we receive?
Every evaluation includes an executive summary for business stakeholders, a detailed technical report with severity-rated findings, a content health assessment, a prioritized remediation roadmap with estimated effort, and a management-ready presentation. When migration is under consideration, we add a total cost of ownership comparison across platform options.
Can an evaluation help us decide whether to stay or migrate?
Absolutely. This is one of the most valuable outcomes. Rather than making a migration decision based on vendor demos alone, our evaluation quantifies your current platform's real strengths, technical debt, and optimization potential. We provide an honest assessment of what it would take to improve your existing system versus the total investment required to migrate, including licensing, implementation, data migration, retraining, and opportunity cost.
What makes HT Blue's evaluation approach different?
Three things set our approach apart. First, our proprietary DXP Scorecard benchmarks platforms against industry analyst criteria weighted by actual implementation outcomes, not just feature lists. Second, our architects have built production systems on the platforms they evaluate, so recommendations reflect operational reality. Third, our Open DXP Index uses AI-assisted analysis of platform maturity, release velocity, and innovation trends that traditional evaluations miss.
Start Your Platform Evaluation
Tell us about your current platform challenges and goals. Our team will recommend the right evaluation scope for your organization.