People who look for a web testing and conversion optimization solution often choose between Optimizely and VWO. These platforms have a lot in common but differ in some functions. This article will help you figure out which solution is best for you.
What is Optimizely?
Optimizely is a US company that supplies software for A/B testing and multivariate testing, website customization, web content management, and digital commerce. Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen founded it in 2010, getting 1.2 million in funding from investors.
Now, Optimizely has five core products, including tools for marketing planning, content management, A/B website testing, e-commerce, and feature management. In addition, it allows developers to run experiments on websites to validate their conversion rate optimization efforts. This way, they predict how implementing changes will affect the site performance.
What is VWO?
VWO is an Indian company run by Paras Chopra and Sparsh Gupta and launched in 2009, a year earlier than Optimizely. Having started as a marketing optimization suite with 1,000 visitors, it has grown to a company with 2500+ customers in 90+ countries globally.
The current version of the VWO user experience optimization and growth platform consists of eight products. In addition, it has website and mobile app testing features, visitor tracking, website editing, and personalization. With this tool, you can run detailed research of your web resource and instantly fix any issues without the help of developers.
Optimizely vs. VWO Compared
This section describes the main characteristics of the compared tools to make choosing the best option simpler.
Features of Optimizely vs. VWO
Overall, VWO has more features for user tracking, while Optimizely focuses on website testing approaches. Let’s talk about the characteristics of these tools in more detail below.
Optimizely
As mentioned, Optimizely has five subproducts designed to make customer digital journeys smoother:
- Marketing Planning is a project management software that can help you create a roadmap of upcoming promotions. It has a calendar, workflow management, and performance analysis to demonstrate marketing results.
- Content Management allows you to manage all your content in one place for seamless digital experiences. You can set roles, permissions, and publishing approval workflows to organize posting across channels. It also has the Authoring & layout feature with a drag-and-drop content builder.
- Web A/B Testing lets you safely run multiple experiments without sacrificing performance.
- Feature Management is a product that can enable, disable, roll out, or hide product features. You can also choose who has access to the feature.
- Commerce is a tool for B2B and B2C businesses that can customize almost every detail on your website for a flawless customer experience.
VWO
The VWO platform unites even more versatile tools than Optimizely. You can pick any of the following products:
- Web Experimentation is suitable for website testing and editing. You can use a point-and-click visual editor or change code directly in the distraction-free “code only” mode.
- Mobile App Experimentation allows quickly testing new ideas to enhance app design. You can track all KPIs to evaluate the implemented changes instantly.
- Server-size Experimentation supports omnichannel experiments to test solutions across platforms.
- VWO Insights provides funnel, session recording, and heatmaps to let you step into your visitors’ shoes. You can learn why people bounce and how to make them convert.
- VWO Personalize is good for building tailored visitor journeys based on real-time user data.
- VWO Deploy allows you to release a new website with limited technical knowledge and skills. You have a visual editor and widgets to design pages and can push changes to production without involving developers.
- VWO Data 360 provides a unified view of your customers based on real-time behavior and demographic data gathered across channels.
- VWO Plan allows you to create a centralized repository of all insights from Google Docs, Excel sheets, analytics tools, whiteboards, project management boards, and other sources to prioritize the testing program.
Pricing of Optimizely vs. VWO
VWO and Opimizely don’t publish information about the pricing of their products on their websites. Instead, you must provide your contact details and request pricing for a particular tool. It’s pretty inconvenient but makes these two tools even more similar.
Based on the online public information, we may assume that both VWO and Optimizely cost thousands of dollars annually. It’s enterprise-level software that brings considerable benefits but requires high investments.
Benefits of Optimizely vs. VWO
Both tools have campaign targeting, report segmentation, API support, single-page app support, advanced user permissions, an editor, and many other features. So how to choose one of them? The review of benefits can help.
Benefits of Optimizely
- With Optimizely ultrafast Experiment Delivery Network, you can run hundreds of web experiments with a 50-millisecond median load time.
- Experiment status is live, so if you have sufficient traffic, you may reach statistical significance in hours.
- A broad network of powerful integrations.
- Machine learning optimization for nurturing audiences with personalized experiences.
- More suitable to run experiments at scale than VWO.
Benefits of VWO
- Extensive functionality for monitoring website visitor behavior at scale or tracking every click.
- Idea gallery should help you develop testing ideas for your web resource.
- Opportunity to add on-page surveys and ask users’ opinions about their website experience directly.
- 24×7 email, phone, and chat support.
Customer Reviews Optimizely vs. VWO
Now that you know much about Optimizely vs. VWO, it’s time to find out what other professionals think. Check out several reviews:
“Generally, we enjoy using VWO more than other testing platforms (Katie R).”
“Optimizely is the most advanced A/B testing tool I’ve ever seen. It’s solid, has a large knowledge base, and is surprisingly easy to configure (Antoaneta Y.).”
“The main drawback is that Optimizely ran a test that was more complex than the visual editor would allow us to handle. As a result, we needed development resources we didn’t have (Alex B.).”
“With VWO, you can run a variety of tests. Heatmaps showing clicks and scrolls are my favorite features. My team can see which pages have the highest activity and where guests drop off (Alex V.).”
Conclusion Optimizely vs VWO Testing Comparison
The final choice will largely depend on whether you need a CRO platform or a tool with advanced testing capabilities. In the first case, you should prefer VWO, whereas Optimizely may be better in the latter case.
