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.

Pros

  • Fine grained controls of target audiences
  • Offers an API with support for multiple languages

Cons

  • 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).

Comments

  • Emma Davis | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Emma Davis
    (Vendor Representative) commented 2 years ago
    Hi There, Thank you so much for leaving us a review, we appreciate your detailed feedback! We’re sorry to hear that you’ve been having some issues with our Feature Experimentation platform and we’d like to address some of problems you’ve been facing. On the intuitiveness of the platform: we’ve made improvements in simplifying our application’s data hierarchy and workflow, we feel some of these complaints are fair and appreciate the candid feedback. We’re evaluating improvements to visualizing how our rules engine works so it’s easier to understand how a particular user will be evaluated. We’re also considering future designs to address the inconsistencies with toggles for enabling/disabling flags, rules, etc. Next up, on the slow and buggy login process that you’ve been experiencing. We haven’t heard many complaints about the performance of our login process but do recognize that there’s always room to improve this aspect. In addition to native authentication and SSO, we’re developing authentication via Opti ID to ease friction when working across multiple Optimizely products with unified, cross-product credentials. This area of our product is top of mind for us. It would be great if you could reach out directly to your CSMs on your remaining points in your review so we can help to solve them as soon as possible! We appreciate you as a customer and your thoughtful feedback.

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