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Does what it says on the tin, but that tin is a can of worms
November 05, 2023

Does what it says on the tin, but that tin is a can of worms

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Optimizely Feature Experimentation

We use Optimizely Feature Experimentation for its feature flag features, which lets my team and I develop features of our product privately behind a gate before rolling it out to steadily larger internal and then external audiences. We then use the feature to fully release to the full user base.
  • Fine grained controls of target audiences
  • Offers an API with support for multiple languages
  • Extremely confusing, complicated, and unintuitive webapp. It's hard to figure out if a feature flag is active and what it will evaluate to for a given user, organization, or audience. The app has many different toggles for enabling, disabling, and targeting a flag, and they don't follow a consistent design.
  • Slow and buggy login process
  • Difficult to use human-readable aliases for user IDs and organization IDs when defining audiences. We maintain spreadsheets to understand our Optimizely configurations
  • Feature flag creation
  • Audience creation and targeting
  • API
  • Improves feature development velocity
  • Has led to occasional embarrassing experiences with customers
LaunchDarkly is better, Optimizely is much cheaper

Do you think Optimizely Feature Experimentation delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Optimizely Feature Experimentation's feature set?

No

Did Optimizely Feature Experimentation live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Optimizely Feature Experimentation go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Optimizely Feature Experimentation again?

No

Optimizely Feature Experimentation has all the features required to create feature flags and use them to control the release of software and to run hold backs. It's technically a good fit for these development and rollout use cases and helps avoid complicated version control alternative solutions. However, Optimizely Feature Experimentation is not easy or intuitive to use in my opinion. This is annoying from a usability and learning curve perspective. Worse, the unintuitive webapp can introduce risk where users may think they've toggled a feature flag for a target audience but instead have applied a different configuration (or don't have the flag active at all).