Acoustic Tealeaf vs. VWO

Tealeaf is a must for any site that has a key business process that drives revenue for a company. It is not limited to only capturing a small percentage of visitors to your site, it captures every visitor to your site. A lot has changed to the last year for Tealeaf for the good. There are many more options to for capturing data including a cloud and SaaS offering. Take a look again if you haven't seen it in a while.

It works better for either small or big companies because small companies can start with the free plan which is very decent and has everything they need. Also for big companies who get the best paid plans they get a lot of premium functionalities, the insight module, outstanding reports. But for medium size companies who can only afford the basic paid plan, it may not be the best tool as it is very limited. For example, they cannot analize a/b tests for new and ruturning visitors, neither based on the users device category.

Incentivized

• Speed of searching for web sessions and users. This particular feature seems to impress me the most. When researching incidents where users report to have difficulty on our site, all we need is any of the unique identifiers of a user (email address used, IP address, user id) and we can locate their session(s) almost immediately in TeaLeaf.
• Multiple conditional events - I really like how we can have events contain already existing events. This helps a great deal if issues being researched become even more complex.

• VWO is pretty easy to implement on websites and doesn't require a heavy technology lift
• The VWO interface is pretty intuitive and let's non-technical users make variants for testing
• The VWO reporting dashboard is excellent for determining statistical significance and understanding whether differences in conversion rates are meaningful or not

Incentivized

• IBM is still working out a solution for seeing Mobile App traffic in Tealeaf. What they have now allows you to see the response and request, but it doesn't show where the customer is actually clicking. They've promised that newer versions will be better with this.
• Tealeaf is pushing a web based viewer, trying to make this the standard over the more robust and extremely useful desktop based Tealeaf Viewer. the Web Based viewer is slow and clunky and just not as flexible, but IBM insists on pushing customers towards it. Last I heard, they plan for their mobile solution to only work in the web based viewer.
• Recently IBM moved all the support documentation for Tealeaf to the IBM Support portal instead of Tealeaf.com where it has been for years. This completely broke the in application Tealeaf Help. At the time of my last use of Tealeaf near the end of November 2013, when you tried to search help from the Tealeaf web portal, you were sent to the IBM support site, and once you logged in, the search request was lost and you had to start the search again. The search of the help files is also nowhere near as good as the original tealeaf.com help site. Also, if your users tried to use help, they were out of luck because only the Tealeaf Admins have access to the IBM support portal. At first they insisted that they were not going to fix this for older versions of the software, but instead only release a fix when the next version of Tealeaf was release. There was a large discussion about this on the LinkedIn forum and IBM has said they're working on a solution, but I'm not sure when/if that will get release.

• The user interface within VWO does take a bit of time to get used to, especially as it pertains to switching back and forth between tests. When running multiple experiments on a site at a time, a clear and succinct dashboard for everything in one place would be helpful (as opposed to needing to switch between A/B, multivariate, etc).

Incentivized

Tealeaf is a scalable product that works with complex user-facing environments. It is one of the leading products in the market that helps identify user pain points and increases defect identification. The user interface is simple, clean, and easy to use. Lastly, Tealeaf Support provides good customer service and is eager to help solve chalenges we face along the way.

It's great value and we think we've ironed out all the major teething troubles. However, if we experience any more bugs or problems that significantly slow us down then we're seriously considering switching to Optimizely, which I haven't personally tested but have heard great things about from my CRO peers

I gave Visual Website Optimizer a rating of 8 because it is overall a great product to use. Setting up and keeping track of various tests is easy and straight forward. The only reason why this product is not rated higher is because the support documents online leave a lot of room for improvement.

I have not experienced an application error or unplanned outage with VWO.

Incentivized

VWO doesn't appear to slow down our website at all, though some customers with adblockers like UBlock Origin have been known to not see entire pages if VWO is making changes to the page at a macro level (background, font, etc). This is rare though.

Incentivized

While their online document support is lacking a simple email to their support team will almost always get responded to the next day. It has however taken more than one email to explain the problem to the support team till they understood the problem. The solution I was given also only half fixed the problem the rest I figured out on my own.

Training was good, just limited to the onboarding process. They walked through all of the steps it takes to get started in VWO and each of the modules, along with giving us ideas for starting our first test. I feel like it could be better if there was a guided process within the VWO program to continue to educate you along the way, and a way to turn that off for experienced users.

Incentivized

Overall, the implementation of VWO is straightforward. If you've got a straightforward way of deploying code to all of your test pages, either a good CMS or a TMS, then implementation should be a breeze. There is no tweaking to be done to the code itself, and once deployed it has the flexibility to cope with different VWO modules (tracking, conversion analysis, session analysis) without modification.

Incentivized

There are significant differences in each platform when it comes to Optimizely and vwo. From a functionality and performance perspective they each have their pros and cons. It is important to go through the feature sets of each and ensure the solution you select will work specifically with your business objectives and conversion rate optimization goals

Incentivized

The product seems infinitely scalable for our needs (small business) and we've never had any issue with loading VWO-edited elements. I will say, though, that online customers with ad blockers have been known to not see certain VWO elements as their third-party scripts are disabled.

Incentivized

• With the specific KPI's we report on, Tealeaf has helped shine a light on metrics we would not have seen in a normal analytics reporting tool.
• Tealeaf has helped us pinpoint areas of user struggle and vastly improved our website experience.

• The ability to offer a CRO service is greatly enhanced by VWO, as it allows us to run tests for clients
• The editor means to some extent we don't need much developer resource to run the tests, lowering costs of doing so

Incentivized