Pop quiz: What button color is the best for getting users to click on e-commerce CTAs?

If you couldn’t definitively answer this question (no one can!), a website optimization tool like VWO might be right for you.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for button colors, CTAs, or anything else on a website, as it depends heavily on the target audience. This is where website optimization tools come into play: Instead of making guesses about how to improve each element of your website, you can add multiple variants into your platform and see which combinations perform best.

What is VWO?

An acronym for Visual Website Optimizer, VWO is an online A/B testing and conversion optimization platform that provides users with a suite of tools to create and test different versions of their websites.

VWO is a platform that specializes in website optimization and experimentation. Although it is primarily focused on marketing use cases, it offers some server-only capabilities for feature gates/toggles/flags as part of its full-stack package.

For marketers, VWO is a strong tool for gathering user insights, prioritizing hypotheses, planning roadmaps, conducting tests, and analyzing results. VWO boasts its ease of setup, stating that users can launch their first test within minutes without help from IT.

Pricing model: VWO’s pricing model is difficult to grasp unless you know what you’re looking for.

VWO splits its offering into seven (7) different products, with each product featuring up to four pricing models—Starter, Growth, Pro, and Enterprise—bucketed by number of users.

The products are:

• Web testing

• Mobile app testing

• Server-side testing

• Web behavioral analytics

• Web user-based personalization

• Web rollouts

The pricing buckets are:

• <50k monthly users: Starter

• <500k monthly users: Growth

• <2M monthly users: Pro

• >2M monthly users: Enterprise

Starter tier: VWO advertises a free tier that caps at 50k MAU.

Notable features:

• Web customization and analytics

• A/B tests and experiments

• Website funnels, heatmaps, session recordings

• Multi-armed bandit optimization

The top VWO alternatives

1. Statsig

Pricing model: Statsig offers unlimited seats, free feature flags, and easily-predictable prices based on usage.

• Starter tier: Up to 500 million free events, and a generous program for startups

• Pro tier: Starting at $150/month

• Enterprise and Warehouse-Native: Contact sales

Notable features:

• Advanced Stats Engine (CUPED and Sequential Testing with Bayesian or Frequentist approaches)

• Highly-rated in-house Support Team

• Out-of-the-box metric attributes

• Holdouts, Experiment Layers, Dynamic Configs, and more

• Warehouse-native or cloud-based implementation

• Change propagation within seconds

Summary: Thousands of companies of all sizes and impact rely on Statsig to serve billions of end users per month.

Watch out for: Statsig’s reviews are overwhelmingly positive, although some users relay that the learning curve for “people new to the game” is sometimes really steep. We aim to address this with some entry-level web-based experimentation in the near future.

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2. Launchdarkly

Pricing model: Launchdarkly has a Pro tier that starts at $16.67 per seat per month, but you’ll need to chat with sales in order to get enterprise pricing catered to your business.

Starter tier: Launchdarkly has a limited starter tier that costs $8.33 per seat per month.

Notable features:

• A/B tests

• Scheduled rollouts

• Feature flags

• SDKs for every major language

Summary: Launchdarkly is a robust feature flagging, A/B testing, and experimentation platform. Founded in 2014, it was one of the first third-party feature flagging and rollout tools to gain widespread adoption, as it fits into an otherwise unfilled niche.

Watch out for: Once you’ve adopted Launchdarkly, it’s very hard to un-adopt it. Users allege that replacing Launchdarkly with a different experimentation and analytics platform is difficult.

3. Optimizely

Pricing model: Optimizely’s pricing is opaque without a custom quote but reportedly starts close to six figures.

Starter tier: Optimizely doesn’t offer a starter tier.

Notable features:

• A/B testing

• Content management

• Built-in CMS

• AI predictive audiences

Summary: A strong competitor against VWO, Optimizely is a digital experience platform that offers A/B testing and even a full-stack experimentation suite.

Optimizely has strong feature parity against VWO, making it an ideal alternative for users looking for web experimentation and optimization. It also boasts a built-in CMS, which makes integrating its SDKs with your existing website and content a breeze.

Besides the ambiguous pricing, Optimizely is VWO’s best alternative for website experimentation, as it offers most of the same features, some additional ones, and has been in the market since 2010.

Watch out for: Whenever you’re purchasing expensive software—especially the type with long contracts—there’s a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong. Make sure you’re asking every question to ensure you’re getting what you’re paying for.

One user, who ended up paying $66,000 for Optimizely, states that the thing they like best about Optimizely is that their “subscription only lasts a year and [they] never have to use this product ever again.”

They go on to write, “VWO is approx. $10,000 per year and does exactly the same thing as Optimizely’s base product.”

4. CloudBees

Pricing model: CloudBees pricing model starts at $1,325 per month for 16-20 users. If you exceed 50k MAU or 21 users, the price jumps to a maximum of $2,000 per month.

Starter tier: CloudBees community tier is free for up to 15 users.

Notable features:

• Unlimited feature flags

• Audit logs

• Webhooks

• Flag approval flows

Summary: CloudBees is an enterprise-grade feature management platform and software delivery company that allows teams to build quickly using its scalable repeatable workflows. CloudBees aims to unite development, IT, operations, security, and business management all under one platform.

Watch out for: Some users voice that CloudBees is only for people who “have not used Jenkins before.”

However, other users seem to get lots of value out of it. One writes, “Kubernetes cluster management has become a breeze thanks to a user-friendly interface and simple-to-use application. The majority of our cloud-hosted applications run smoothly on CloudBees as well.”

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