Dovetail vs. Optimizely Web Experimentation

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Dovetail
Score 8.6 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Dovetail, headquartered in Sydney, aims to enable the world to create better products and services through deep customer understanding. Dovetail states they empower 45,000+ people, from agencies to universities to Fortune 100 companies, to make sense of their customer research in one collaborative research platform.
$0
per month
Optimizely Web Experimentation
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Whether launching a first test or scaling a sophisticated experimentation program, Optimizely Web Experimentation aims to deliver the insights needed to craft high-performing digital experiences that drive engagement, increase conversions, and accelerate growth.N/A
Pricing
DovetailOptimizely Web Experimentation
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
Professional
$15
per month
Enterprise
Contact Sales
per year
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DovetailOptimizely Web Experimentation
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalOptional
Additional DetailsDiscount available for annual billing on the Professional plan.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DovetailOptimizely Web Experimentation
Features
DovetailOptimizely Web Experimentation
Testing and Experimentation
Comparison of Testing and Experimentation features of Product A and Product B
Dovetail
-
Ratings
Optimizely Web Experimentation
8.0
163 Ratings
5% below category average
a/b experiment testing00 Ratings9.0163 Ratings
Split URL testing00 Ratings8.5135 Ratings
Multivariate testing00 Ratings8.4139 Ratings
Multi-page/funnel testing00 Ratings7.9126 Ratings
Cross-browser testing00 Ratings8.197 Ratings
Mobile app testing00 Ratings8.075 Ratings
Test significance00 Ratings8.4147 Ratings
Visual / WYSIWYG editor00 Ratings8.1133 Ratings
Advanced code editor00 Ratings8.0125 Ratings
Page surveys00 Ratings6.217 Ratings
Visitor recordings00 Ratings8.418 Ratings
Preview mode00 Ratings7.6145 Ratings
Test duration calculator00 Ratings7.9112 Ratings
Experiment scheduler00 Ratings8.2112 Ratings
Experiment workflow and approval00 Ratings7.890 Ratings
Dynamic experiment activation00 Ratings7.574 Ratings
Client-side tests00 Ratings7.896 Ratings
Server-side tests00 Ratings7.250 Ratings
Mutually exclusive tests00 Ratings8.280 Ratings
Audience Segmentation & Targeting
Comparison of Audience Segmentation & Targeting features of Product A and Product B
Dovetail
-
Ratings
Optimizely Web Experimentation
8.2
152 Ratings
7% below category average
Standard visitor segmentation00 Ratings8.4147 Ratings
Behavioral visitor segmentation00 Ratings7.6122 Ratings
Traffic allocation control00 Ratings9.1144 Ratings
Website personalization00 Ratings7.8111 Ratings
Results and Analysis
Comparison of Results and Analysis features of Product A and Product B
Dovetail
-
Ratings
Optimizely Web Experimentation
8.3
149 Ratings
4% below category average
Heatmap tool00 Ratings9.313 Ratings
Click analytics00 Ratings8.833 Ratings
Scroll maps00 Ratings8.517 Ratings
Form fill analysis00 Ratings8.072 Ratings
Conversion tracking00 Ratings8.744 Ratings
Goal tracking00 Ratings8.2127 Ratings
Test reporting00 Ratings7.9137 Ratings
Results segmentation00 Ratings7.7103 Ratings
CSV export00 Ratings7.9102 Ratings
Experiments results dashboard00 Ratings8.049 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DovetailOptimizely Web Experimentation
Small Businesses
Smartlook
Smartlook
Score 8.8 out of 10
Convert Experiences
Convert Experiences
Score 9.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Optimal
Optimal
Score 8.6 out of 10
Dynamic Yield
Dynamic Yield
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Optimal
Optimal
Score 8.6 out of 10
Dynamic Yield
Dynamic Yield
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DovetailOptimizely Web Experimentation
Likelihood to Recommend
8.4
(50 ratings)
8.7
(254 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.1
(4 ratings)
9.5
(51 ratings)
Usability
6.7
(49 ratings)
10.0
(58 ratings)
Availability
9.0
(2 ratings)
10.0
(7 ratings)
Performance
7.1
(2 ratings)
7.3
(6 ratings)
Support Rating
6.9
(2 ratings)
10.0
(16 ratings)
Online Training
8.2
(1 ratings)
3.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(11 ratings)
Configurability
5.6
(2 ratings)
6.0
(1 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
5.6
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
6.9
(2 ratings)
8.0
(163 ratings)
Professional Services
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
6.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
5.2
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DovetailOptimizely Web Experimentation
Likelihood to Recommend
Dovetail
Well suited for: A product team with one FT person dedicated to research and operations to ensure the DT stays up to date, since its automated connectors are not that robust for lower plans. Eg., Salesforce doesn't work great without an enterprise plan, and you have to use outside automated workflows to feed in data from other sources of user feedback (e.g., Google Docs, Sheets). An enterprise team with more engineering time to dedicate to customizing their user research workflows.
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Optimizely
I think it can serve the whole spectrum of experiences from people who are just getting used to web experimentation. It's really easy to pick up and use. If you're more experienced then it works well because it just gets out of the way and lets you really focus on the experimentation side of things. So yeah, strongly recommend. I think it is well suited both to small businesses and large enterprises as well. I think it's got a really low barrier to entry. It's very easy to integrate on your website and get results quickly. Likewise, if you are a big business, it's incrementally adoptable, so you can start out with one component of optimizing and you can build there and start to build in things like data CMS to augment experimentation as well. So it's got a really strong a pathway to grow your MarTech platform if you're a small company or a big company.
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Pros
Dovetail
  • I really like the User Interface, how easy it is to have all your research data in one project and how visual it is to understand where are things. It does have a good User Experience.
  • I like how nice and easy it is to create categories or use the ones auto generated as a starting point. It is very easy to create a color coded set of categories that help make sense of the data.
  • I like how easy it is to see the video snippet of a specific highlight.
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Optimizely
  • The Platform contains drag-and-drop editor options for creating variations, which ease the A/B tests process, as it does not require any coding or development resources.
  • Establishing it is so simple that even a non-technical person can do it perfectly.
  • It provides real-time results and analytics with robust dashboard access through which you can quickly analyze how different variations perform. With this, your team can easily make data-driven decisions Fastly.
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Cons
Dovetail
  • As mentioned up top, the contextual errors that occur in AI analysis.
  • Your IA and discovery routes were better before; this overhaul was unnecessarily complex and frustrating to navigate.
  • I find assigning names clunky. Batch uploading data, or even agentic API plugins for drive or user testing, would make this more seamless.
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Optimizely
  • JavaScript is hard to implement sometimes especially for JQuery elements
  • ROI reporting should be part of the overall experimentation reporting
  • CMP integration: where we can easily show status of test on the HPT request
  • CMS integration
  • More widgets like social proof banners, etc.
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Likelihood to Renew
Dovetail
Because we are really happy with the tool and it’s capabilities at the moment. The price increase is the main issue we can have but the features are getting better and better. It really saves a lot of time for our team and allow us to collaborate more efficiently with certain stakeholders that often did not réalise how much research we conduct. Now they can just have a look to it by themself!
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Optimizely
I rated this question because at this stage, Optimizely does most everything we need so I don't foresee a need to migrate to a new tool. We have the infrastructure already in place and it is a sizeable lift to pivot to another tool with no guarantee that it will work as good or even better than Optimizely
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Usability
Dovetail
it is relatively intuitive but it does take some practice to get used to the platform and understand the capabilities and limitations. There are also times that we have run into issues where the people we are sharing reports with either cannot view them or access is not provided. Additionally, the ability to export any of the video clips or snippets has created some frustration since we want to include the great findings that Dovetail helps put together, but need to bounce between screens or share after-the-fact rather than embedding it directly into a readout deck.
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Optimizely
Optimizely Web Experimentation's visual editor is handy for non-technical or quick iterative testing. When it comes to content changes it's as easy as going into wordpress, clicking around, and then seeing your changes live--what you see is what you get. The preview and approval process for sharing built experiments is also handy for sharing experiments across teams for QA purposes or otherwise.
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Reliability and Availability
Dovetail
I’ve never had any access issues with Dovetail, so I don’t see any problems in that area.
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Optimizely
I would rate Optimizely Web Experimentation's availability as a 10 out of 10. The software is reliable and does not experience any application errors or unplanned outages. Additionally, the customer service and technical support teams are always available to help with any issues or questions.
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Performance
Dovetail
Regarding performance, I would say it’s satisfactory. Adding data and transcriptions is really fast and efficient, and can be done in the background, so I’m never hindered by these aspects. However, all the new AI-generated features are still somewhat slow to run. It’s nothing major, but it should improve in the future.
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Optimizely
I would rate Optimizely Web Experimentation's performance as a 9 out of 10. Pages load quickly, reports are complete in a reasonable time frame, and the software does not slow down any other software or systems that it integrates with. Additionally, the customer service and technical support teams are always available to help with any issues or questions.
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Support Rating
Dovetail
Support was good, especially when it comes to the capability of your support agents and engineers. But as i am located in Europe, the difference in the time zone made it hard to communicate with your offices and kept my work way back
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Optimizely
They always are quick to respond, and are so friendly and helpful. They always answer the phone right away. And [they are] always willing to not only help you with your problem, but if you need ideas they have suggestions as well.
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Online Training
Dovetail
The training went very well, and we co-built it to really address our needs. I also think it was beneficial to have feedback coming from someone other than myself (since I manage the tool), as it helped reinforce the points I wanted to highlight. The team’s feedback on the training was very positive.
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Optimizely
The tool itself is not very difficult to use so training was not very useful in my opinion. It did not also account for success events more complex than a click (which my company being ecommerce is looking to examine more than a mere click).
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Implementation Rating
Dovetail
No answers on this topic
Optimizely
In retrospect: - I think I should have stressed more demo's / workshopping with the Optimizely team at the start. I felt too confident during demo stages, and when came time to actually start, I was a bit lost. (The answer is likely I should have had them on-hand for our first install.. they offered but I thought I was OK.) - Really getting an understanding / asking them prior to install of how to make it really work for checkout pages / one that uses dynamic content or user interaction to determine what the UI does. Could have saved some time by addressing this at the beginning, as some things we needed to create on our site for Optimizely to "use" as a trigger for the variation test. - Having a number of planned/hoped-for tests already in-hand before working with Optimizely team. Sharing those thoughts with them would likely have started conversations on additional things we needed to do to make them work (rather than figuring that out during the actual builds). Since I had development time available, I could have added more things to the baseline installation since my developers were already "looking under the hood" of the site.
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Alternatives Considered
Dovetail
We looked at a few other options, Marvin and Reforge Insight. They were both pretty cool platforms that operate largely or entirely on AI, but neither quite fit our needs. Reforge Insight was cool, but it did not have all the features we needed from Dovetail, and switching to Marvin felt like a massive undertaking. We have so much data in Dovetail that the "cost" of leaving feels monumental. Besides, Dovetail fits our needs right now.
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Optimizely
The ability to do A/B testing in Optimizely along with the associated statistical modelling and audience segmentation means it is a much better solution than using something like Google Analytics were a lot more effort is required to identify and isolate the specific data you need to confidently make changes
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Dovetail
It’s very expensive, and we use a lot of features in beta. I think we could also be rewarded for our usage and frequent feedback on the tool.
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Optimizely
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Dovetail
Management is quite straightforward; it’s easy to change access if certain stakeholders need to use it. The repository features are accessible to all teams, making it a good entry point into the tool. The more people use it, the more powerful the tool becomes, so it seems truly scalable to me. The limits are more financial, in terms of accessing additional features.
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Optimizely
We can use it flexibly across lines of business and have it in use across two departments. We have different use cases and slightly different outcomes, but can unify our results based on impact to the bottom line. Finally, we can generate value from anywhere in the org for any stakeholders as needed.
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Return on Investment
Dovetail
  • Having a centralized research space is a game changer. Makes it so much easier to hand over research if working with new people and have system in place (using the templates). Saves so much time. We don't have hard numbers on the hours saved but we are much more efficient using Dovetail than without.
  • The tagging system in general is amazing and allows for consistency in topic marking. This was non-existent for our team before Dovetail and now we can do much more granule reports with exact # of times something was said with accuracy.
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Optimizely
  • We're able to share definitive annualized revenue projections with our team, showing what would happen if we put a test into Production
  • Showing the results of a test on a new page or feature prior to full implementation on a site saves developer time (if a test proves the new element doesn't deliver a significant improvement.
  • Making a change via the WYSIWYG interface allows us to see multiple changes without developer intervention.
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ScreenShots

Dovetail Screenshots

Screenshot of Automate workflows with AI: Agents track every customer signal and act on what’s important before they turn into problems.Screenshot of Transform customer data into searchable evidence with automated transcripts and structured note-taking that anchors insights in the voice of the customer. Plus, utilize AI-powered Chat and Search to get instant answers grounded in your data—whether you're in Dovetail, Slack, or Teams.Screenshot of These AI Dashboards help spot risks before they escalate, act on new opportunities, and focus your team on the work that matters most.Screenshot of Centralize fragmented customer feedback by connecting Dovetail to an existing tech stack, including Slack, Linear, and various meeting recording tools.Screenshot of Surface actionable product opportunities from high-volume ticket data by automatically clustering customer issues into prioritized themes and trends.Screenshot of Monitor organizational health with real-time dashboards that aggregate sentiment, NPS, and app reviews into a unified view of the customer experience.

Optimizely Web Experimentation Screenshots

Screenshot of AI-Powered Experimentation with Opal:

- Instant Test Ideas: Generates high-quality A/B test ideas based on any goals and audience insights.
- Smarter Experimentation: The AI can suggest impactful variations, reducing guesswork and increasing test velocity.
- More Than Just Ideas: From hypothesis generation to analyzing results, Opal helps optimize every stage of the experimentation process.Screenshot of the new Visual Editor with an AI Variation Development Agent

Create simple or advanced website changes fast without writing a line of code with our AI Development Agent.

Use natural language to build out your ideas and apply brand styles to your experiments instantly.Screenshot of Advanced Audience Targeting:

- Delivers personalized experiences by targeting users based on behaviors, attributes, and real-time conditions.
- Defines precise audience segments using first-party data, geolocation, and device type.
- Can test and optimize for different audience groups to maximize impact and engagement.Screenshot of Variation Template

Library of experience templates that you can access right within the Visual Editor. Customize these templates or create your own to easily reuse throughout your experimentation program.

- Offers pre-built templates for common test setups.
- Standardized variations and maintains brand integrity with reusable templates.
- Templates can be customized visually or tweak them with code for full flexibility.Screenshot of Web Experimentation Results Page:

- Data visualizations help interpret experiment performance.
- Displays which variations are winning with built-in statistical significance calculations.
- Results can be filtered by audience segments, events, and conversions to uncover key trends.Screenshot of the custom code editor for JavaScript & CSS changes, used to build complex tests.