Decent experimentation platform with a few shortcomings you can probably live with
July 25, 2019
Decent experimentation platform with a few shortcomings you can probably live with
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Optimizely
We use Optimizely mostly in one team; other teams are aware and looking into starting to use it. We're using Optimizely's Web Experimentation product for frontend A/B testing.
- Easy set up of simpler A/B tests.
- Semi real-time results dashboard.
- Easy integration with in-house analytics.
- Good API documentation.
- No i18n support by default - we had to build it for ourselves.
- For ease of use, some complexity is hidden away which you would need to understand in order to optimize your site's page load time.
- The audit trail is almost unusable, as the history view lacks a lot of basic features.
- There's no way to do a proper approval workflow.
- We've managed to validate significant concepts pretty fast with Optimizely - overall, we had a very positive impact, but that was also highly dependent on the strategy used for coming up with the right experiments.
- It's important to mention that we have absolutely no issues with educating people about how to use Optimizely - it's a more accessible way for A/B testing than what we've used before.
We don't (yet) use the entire suite, as some of our requirements can't be fulfilled with just Optimizely's tools, and we have a pretty streamlined process that we don't want to alter as long as there's no significantly better choice. But we looked at several competitors of Optimizely, and we haven't found any solution which provided everything "just right". The good part is that it was possible to inject Optimizely into our setup, so even though there is a possibility to use Optimizely for "everything", it doesn't force you to do so, and in some regards, it even supports it (extensions, integrations, APIs, etc.).