Introduction
TL;DR
VWO vs Optimizely: Features and Pricing
How do VWO and Optimizely Stack Up in Experimentation and Testing?
How do VWO and Optimizely Compare in Analytics and Reporting?
What’s even the point of conducting tests if they don’t fetch substantial data to work with? That’s why we think a platform’s reporting and analytics features are just as important as its testing features. Let’s see what our contenders have in store in this regard.
Behavioral analytics
VWO has a respectable Insights module that gives you qualitative insights to complement quantitative data from experiments.
Integration of Insights with Goals in VWO Via VWO
VWO’s primary arsenal here includes heatmaps for visualizing user interactions, session recordings to replay user journeys and form analytics to identify friction points in forms.
Native analytics view in Optimizely Via Optimizely
Optimizely tracks customer behavior across the entire journey using tools like funnels, session tracking, and purchase path analysis. It integrates with e-commerce platforms for deeper insights into shopping behaviors (like checkout drop-offs). The Optimizely Data Platform (ODP), even integrates customer data from multiple sources to create unified profiles.
We have to give this win to Optimizely, as it also has warehouse-native analytics that integrate with data warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, and Amazon Redshift, for faster setup and data flow management.
Customization of reports
VWO’s reporting interface is plenty customizable with layout options (like prioritizing graphs over tables) and table configurations (like adding/removing columns). You can adjust statistical settings to further tune your experiment results.
Optimizely lets you create custom reports using ODP’s reporting tool. You can personalize dashboards to display specific metrics like revenue trends or product performance (like "Gem Rank" for hidden opportunities).
Both do a pretty good job here and we won’t be able to pick a favorite.
Statistics
VWO relies on Bayesian statistics in its SmartStats engine to produce accurate probability-based results (stats like "Better Than Control"). SmartStats also predicts timelines for statistical significance based on your traffic trends.
Results page with detailed statistics Via Optimizely
Optimizely depends on a proprietary statistics system combined with machine learning in its Stats Engine. This results in faster significance detection with minimal frequency of errors like peeking or false positives.
We found that Optimizely is usually more reliable when we need precise data. VWO’s SmartStats Engine has many bugs that need to be ironed out.
Funnel analysis
VWO has conversion funnel analysis to track drop-offs at all the important stages of the user journey. Funnels are closely tied with behavioral tools like heatmaps for a better, more detailed view of user interactions at each step.
Funnels dashboard in the Insights module Via VWO
Optimizely isn’t far behind either—you get funnel analysis through ODP and integrations with e-commerce platforms. The platform tracks user flow through purchase funnels to pinpoint the drop-off points at each stage of the journey (like registration or checkout).
Our take
VWO has a more direct focus on qualitative tools like heatmaps, session recordings, and form analytics that helps you better understand your user behavior. Choose VWO if you need ease of use, qualitative behavioral insights and cost-effectiveness suitable for small-to-medium businesses or teams focused on UX improvements.
Optimizely is better suited for e-commerce-specific analytics like shopping behavior tracking, abandoned cart analysis, and revenue attribution. Choose Optimizely if you need enterprise-level analytics with predictive inference and deeper e-commerce integration.
How Do VWO and Optimizely Compare in Personalization?
No two users are alike. Your tool of choice needs to be personalized to adjust the user experience and satisfy the preferences of different user segments.
VWO is geared towards creating rule-based personalized experiences, with the help of visitor attributes like browsing behavior, location, and device type.
Optimizely is designed for 1:1 digital experiences, with machine learning and real-time visitor behavior to deliver targeted content. Its slew of experimentation tools make way for cohesive optimization strategies.
Real-time personalization
VWO supports real-time changes triggered by user actions like page scroll depth, time spent on a page, or specific events. It gives you layered experiences for overlapping segments with fallback options.
Optimizely also supports real-time personalization with features like Contextual Bandits, which dynamically adjust content delivery to optimize user engagement during each session.
If you want something more modern and easier to implement, consider Fibr. It is adept at post-click optimization with smart 1:1 web pages, and it offers standout features like AI-driven text suggestions, tailored text personalization, and inbuilt UI element customization.
Performance dashboard for language based personalizations Via Fibr
Fibr also has a comprehensive performance dashboard that displays all your important performance metrics sorted by events and sessions.
Visual editor
VWO bundles a WYSIWYG editor and a widget library for drag-and-drop customization. Technically sound users can tinker with the Code Editor for custom JavaScript-based widgets.
Optimizely also contains a powerful visual editor for creating personalized campaigns without coding. Customizable templates and collaboration features make it easy to scale personalization efforts across teams.
You’d be good to go with either of these two editors.
Our take
VWO is more inclined towards simplicity and accessibility with its WYSIWYG editor and pre-built widgets. You cannot go wrong with VWO if you prioritize accessibility, cost-effectiveness, and straightforward rule-based personalization for smaller teams or less complex needs.
Optimizely, on the contrary, shines in AI-driven personalization with tools like Contextual Bandits for real-time optimization. Choose Optimizely if your organization needs AI-driven features, omnichannel features, and enterprise-level scalability.
Fibr edges out both VWO and Optimizely when it comes to personalization. Apart from your usual personalization features, you get personalization at scale for large-scale campaigns—you can create hundreds of optimized pages, each for a unique audience experience.
Via Fibr
Plus, it gives you the freedom to create multiple ads, landing pages or campaigns on various themes while keeping your brand voice intact. Bonus features include:
Bulk creation using Excel
Unlimited audience rules and parameters
Multiple page hosting in one URL
One-click integration with CDP and Ads platform
Pricing Comparison
No matter how good and feature-rich a tool is, pricing makes or breaks the deal. Ultimately, the returns from the platform need to be higher than what you invest in it.
VWO
VWO offers a four-tiered, pay-as-you-go pricing structure that includes a free account. Billed annually, the plans are as follows for 10K to 50K unique visitors:
Starter: Free
Growth: $275/month (ideal for small to medium-sized businesses)
Pro: $633/month (includes advanced features and higher traffic limits)
Enterprise: $1107/month (includes full platform access and premium support)
Each tier adds more features and capacity as you go up. The price mainly depends on how many visitors you have each month and how many tests you want to run at the same time.
Optimizely
Via Optimizely
Pricing plans of Optimizely are completely customized, so you’ll have to reach out to sales for a quote.
Overall, Optimizely usually costs more than VWO because it’s designed for larger businesses. The price depends on your traffic, your needed features, and how you plan to set it up.
You can expect to pay at least $36,000 per year, plus a percentage of any extra revenue you make using the platform. Pricing usually exceeds $200,000 annually for enterprise-level clients.
Pro-tip: Are these prices making you second guess your decision? Fibr takes a complete u-turn with lifetime free A/B testing. Yes, that’s right—you can create, run, and analyze A/B tests on any webpage, and it's always free.
How does Fibr compare to VWO and Optimizely?
Fibr AI is a newer entrant in the market and has approached digital experiences with an AI-first stance.
Via Fibr
It stands out with its innovative features for modern marketing challenges, like the ability to create personalized 1:1 landing pages for every ad, a no-code editor for ease of use, and a pay-per-use pricing model that ensures affordability for businesses of all sizes.
Other noteworthy features of Fibr include:
Adjust landing pages dynamically with adaptive content creation based on campaign data, user interactions, and keywords.
Via Fibr
Integrate your ads with your landing pages for a cohesive user journey from ad click to conversion.
Receive AI-generated on-brand content suggestions within the editor.
Via Fibr
Create multiple ads, landing pages or campaigns on various themes with bulk content creation.
Why Choose VWO over Optimizely?
While both platforms target a similar demographic and go toe-to-toe in features, VWO takes the lead in some key areas:
1.Lower web performance impact
Lower load times translate to better user experience, and this is where VWO takes the lead. The average load speed for VWO is 718 milliseconds, whereas it's 745 milliseconds for Optimizely. Once you install VWO’s SmartCode extension, you can run infinite client-side experiments. This is really easy, as VWO has just one code snippet to enable your entire experimentation cycle.
VWO’s speed in server-side experimentation comes from the fact that SDK API decisions are executed without the need for any external calls. This means that you can conduct experiments on our SDKs with minimal latency across all your apps.
2.Easier to set up tests
As we already said before, once you install VWO SmartCode, you can run countless client-side experiments. It's effortless to set up tests in VWO. Why?
In Optimizely, you have to manually switch between snippets and mini snippets to access different product offerings. Compared to VWO, this becomes a hassle when you have to repeat the process over and over again.
3.Comes with a legacy
VWO pioneered the CRO space by introducing features like a visual editor, dynamic CDN, asynchronous code, testing inside shadow DOM, and dimension-level reporting. Over time, VWO has refined these features to become a market leader in the CRO space.
VWO’s pioneering features, like the drag-and-drop editor for creating A/B tests, let you manipulate web page content in real time without affecting the underlying code. VWO’s DOM parsing and modification tech changes web pages, and the reverse proxy enables dynamic inserting of Javascript code
4.Comes with a long list of integrations
VWO is a CMS agnostic solution, and it integrates easily with the most popular B2B platforms like WordPress, Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, Drupal, Contentful, etc. This means that you can test websites built on any CMS without switching your CMS along with your testing platform. Ain’t that easy?
In addition to these integrations, you benefit from 40+ third-party tools, including Amplitude, Mixpanel, Heap, Google Analytics, and more.
5.Provides great customer support
Great support is the sign of any great product. VWO excels in this area, with an industry-leading response time of 45 minutes and an almost perfect customer satisfaction score (99%), compared to an industry average of 94%. The first call resolution rate of 70% also far surpasses the industry average which is just 40%.
Support is not limited to your usual troubleshooting via mail and chat. VWO provides holistic support that includes detailed documentation, a knowledge base, and a 24x7 support team always ready to assist you.
Why Choose Optimizely over VWO?
1.Gets you more accurate statistics
Although VWO’s statistics model is good in its own right, it is prone to producing error-prone statistics. Some VWO customers have stated that VWO’s proprietary SmartStats Engine calls some tests prematurely, leading to inaccurate results.
Optimizely, on the other hand, has a far more reliable Stats Engine which was developed in conjunction with Stanford University. It has been specially designed to eliminate false positives and deliver fast and accurate decisions.
2.Has arguably better usability
Although fantastic in concept, VWO’s drag-and-drop visual editor is often plagued by frequent bugs and errors. Bugs in the editor is a complaint from every VWO review site. This ruins the otherwise intuitive feature and ironically requires a lot of developer intervention for even basic changes.
Optimizely’s visual editor might lack a feature here and there, but it is made with marketers and non-technical users in mind. The result is a strong, accurate, and easy-to-use editor. Optimizely gives you the depth and flexibility you need, whether you are adding new page elements, rearranging elements, or creating a multi-page layout.
3.Offers better insights and analytics
VWO customers struggle to create event-based goals and often run into issues while tracking conversions. Marketers demand better visibility into down-funnel conversions and they need to track every interaction beyond the first one. VWO lacks the depth marketers demand to track subsequent interactions.
Unlike VWO, Optimizely natively supports primary and secondary metrics for experiments. You also have the option to combine data from third-party sources with your Optimizely event data for more accurate targeting and measurement of down-funnel metrics.
4.Has a more feature-rich experimentation engine
Optimizely has several unique features dedicated to experiments that VWO misses out on. For instance, Optimizely lets you test using offline events—it includes even more valuable data in your experiments, like offline sales and events from other applications. This allows you to optimize more elements.
It also runs unlimited concurrent experiments on feature flags or any campaign. This unlocks a culture of hypothesis thinking that spills across your entire organization—something not as easily achievable with VWO.
5.Quality of life upgrades
Optimizely is arguably easier to develop and extend. It lets you roll out features in code using SDKs available in 10+ programming languages for the more technically sound users. You don’t get the equivalent of this in VWO.
Optimizely also intelligently auto-allocates traffic for any campaign including MVT or Personalization—it uses multi-armed bandit optimization on any campaign of your choice, complete with clear guidance and best practices to maximize lift and get the outperforming variant to a wider audience.
The Final Verdict: Which is the Better Platform for You?
Both VWO and Optimizely are excellent Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) in their own right. Both offer excellent features for experimentation, personalization, and optimization. However, they are tuned to different user needs and organizational scales, and ultimately, the choice depends on your business needs.
In a nutshell, VWO is better suited for SMBs or even enterprises with simpler experimentation needs. It gives you an affordable entry point into digital optimization with robust testing tools but may fall short in scalability and advanced analytics.
Optimizely is ideal for large enterprises looking for comprehensive experimentation capabilities, advanced personalization options, and scalability. Its higher cost reflects its superior depth in features and integrations.
If none of these two options work out for you, we have another excellent solution for you: Fibr. It is a modern, AI-powered personalization and testing platform with unique features like adaptive content creation, smart A/B testing, AI-powered editing, on-brand content suggestions, and more.
Book a demo today and see how it trumps its competitors yourself.
FAQs
1.Which platform is easier to use for non-technical teams?
VWO is generally considered easier to use for teams with limited technical expertise. Its user-friendly interface and setup make it accessible for small to medium-sized businesses. Optimizely, while also user-friendly, offers more advanced features that may require technical knowledge.
2.How do Optimizely and VWO differ in experimentation capabilities?
Optimizely shines in advanced experimentation with features like mutually exclusive experiments, multi-armed bandit optimization, and server-side testing. VWO gives you plenty of tools for basic experimentation but falls short in depth and flexibility when compared to Optimizely.
3.What are the pricing differences between Optimizely and VWO?
VWO uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model starting at $199/month, which makes it more affordable for smaller businesses or those with fluctuating traffic levels. Optimizely’s pricing starts at upwards of $30,000 annually—the higher cost reflects its advanced features and scalability. However, Fibr AI, with its lifetime free A/B tests, emerged as a more cost effective solution than both VWO and Optimizely.
4.Which platform is better for enterprise-level scalability?
Optimizely is the preferred choice for enterprises for its extensive integration options, advanced experimentation tools, and ability to handle large-scale traffic. VWO, while scalable to some extent, is more suitable for businesses with simpler requirements only.
About the author
Pritam Roy
Pritam Roy, the Co-founder of Fibr, is a seasoned entrepreneur with a passion for product development and AI. A graduate of IIT Bombay, Pritam's expertise lies in leveraging technology to create innovative solutions. As a second-time founder, he brings invaluable experience to Fibr, driving the company towards its mission of redefining digital interactions through AI.
