I am a raving fan of VisualWebsiteOptimizer.com (VWO) and highly recommend using or trying their A/B product over any other. Paras truly cares about his product, responds personally to inquiries although I am sure that as the business grows he may not be able to do that as much. It was clear to me from day 1 as an early customer (1st test deployed Sept 2010) that he truly cares about his customer, listens to his customer, and works insanely hard for his customer as does his entire team; and you can not put a price tag on that, in my opinion.
Now go subscribe to VWO and take his team to 2000+ customers! It will be beyond worthwhile for your website and business. It has been for mine.
Thank you for building a phenomenal product @paraschopra and team!
Thanks James! I remember you being one of the earliest customers of VWO. With expanded team, we're baking lots and lots of interesting new features. But I will make sure the customer experience remains #1 priority even as we grow :)
might be appropriate given his stunning success (congrats Paras)
The other great thing about Wingify is that they aimed from the beginning at a global product vs a 'localized' knock off of an existing American product.
I'd be keen to hear the difference from someone who has used both in anger. I'm with VWO (because it gets mentioned around here so much - so I went there first) and it's awesome but it's always good to keep your options open.
As for a comparison, Optimizely uses Akamai which has 100,000 nodes in 75 countries. VWO uses Cloudfront and does two round-trips. Cloudfront has 32 points of presence in 12 countries.
Your Terms say (https://www.optimizely.com/terms)
- 4.B. No Refunds. You may cancel your Member account at any time; however, there are no refunds for cancellation. In the event that Optimizely suspends or terminates your account or this Agreement, you understand and agree that you shall receive no refund or exchange for any Optimizely Property, any unused time on a subscription, any license or subscription fees for any portion of the Service, any content or data associated with your account, or for anything else.
Also couldn't locate the SLA on your site, can we have the link?
I do see it being prominently listed in Pricing page, but the "Terms of Service" is a binding contract which I have to agree to while I signup, don't you think they should be consistent.
Is this SLA done individually with each customer after they signup?
Thanks Dan. Appreciate you pitching in. However, actually, you have old statistics. We recently rolled out a dynamic, custom built CDN that sped up our response times by 7x. Our average is now 45ms. We spent a lot of time perfecting our system. See the details here: http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/geo-dis...
Plus, you are wrong about almost all of your points:
- Our 21 lines of code is unique as it provides an asynchronous fail safe method. With 1-line of code, websites still have a theoretical single point a failure where code is fetched from your servers/CDN. If your code isn't able to get fetched for any reason, standard timeout of browser (30 seconds) applies and since it is synchronous page load stalls. With our asynchronous approach, we completely decouple the dependence (even if it doesn't look elegant, it certainly is much preferable to our customers). Here are the details: http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/asynchr...
- We offer developer CSS/JavaScript API that allows complete modification of a website without touching any backend code
- Our tests run on mobiles as well, a lot of our enterprise customers regularly test their mobile landing pages
- We have one-click integration for Google Analytics, and have plugins for KISSMetrics, SiteCatalyst, etc.
- ALL employees of Wingify (including me the CEO and our CTO) do support for all levels of customers (not just enterprise ones). In fact, support is bed rock of our offering. My number is there on our about us page http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/about-us.php
According to best of my knowledge, apart from cross-browser previews I do not think there is any feature that VWO lacks. You may want to cross-check your facts. Our backend delivery infrastructure prioritizes on speed and fall-back rather than elegance of how the code looks.
However, you did not mention the features VWO has that Optimizely currently lacks:
- Free 30 day trial without requiring a credit card.
- Numerous other small features that I won't go into (test labels, test organization, frequently used goals, roles/permissions, account management, reports exportable to CSV/PDF, etc.)
It's great to see multiple products in the market trying to solve this problem and I admire your ability to do so without a large team or any funding. It's unclear how the market will grow in the future but we're thrilled to see Optimizely grow +397% amongst the top 10,000 websites in the last year to over 2,500 happy customers.
I'm glad to see you are focusing on improving your response time. Unfortunately hitting live servers serving dynamic content in 5 locations is never going to be able to beat 100,000 edge-cached nodes in 75 countries serving static content when it comes to response time and reliability.
According to the link you provided it looks like Pingdom reports VWO response times as:
VWO Slowest Average: 352ms
VWO Overall Average: 207ms
VWO Fastest Average: 45ms
According to Pingdom, Optimizely response times are:
Optimizely Slowest Average: 95ms
Optimizely Average: 65ms
Optimizely Fastest Average: 19ms
Here is a head-to-head comparison of Optimizely vs. VWO including response time and feature differentiation: http://i.imgur.com/BRTxC.png
To clarify some of the points you might have misunderstood:
You are right we don't currently offer ancillary features like heatmaps and usability testing. We've been focused on offering the best possible experience for A/B and multivariate testing.
Did Optimizely make that graphic? The support comparison is deceptive. You are comparing the basic plan of VWO to the platinum plan of Optimizely. And comparing lines of code is meaningless. In fact for the reasons outlined above by paras, a 21 line implementation which does not block the site load is more beneficial to most users.
@paras: Your response times do not look good. Why are you using a homegrown pseudo CDN instead of a real one like akamai or limelight ? Also why not make your API docs public ?
The reasons for having a homegrown CDN is mentioned in the article. The major reason though is that our URL matching (determining whether to run a test or not on a particular URL) is complex, and CDNs cannot handle that.
Reason API doc is not public is because API is on demand right now, but anyone can use it. They just have to request for a key from us.
I've said it before and I'll say it again (because Paras and his team deserve it): I tell people about VWO as the prime (and possibly, the only) example of an Indian startup with a truly global product.
Kayako, FusionCharts, BrowserStack, FreshDesk are other great Indian software companies that I admire. (The first 3 are bootstrapped too, as far as I know).
As a user, I pretty much have to chime in here & say this is well deserved success.
It's a great product & pretty much the best customer support I've ever encountered. Every time I've needed it, I was in contact (email & skype) with Someone Who Knows and not afraid of treading into the gray area between your problem & their problem.
I like the VWO guys. I was kind of an ass and ranted about some issues in their JS on twitter recently and they reached out to me and addressed the issues I was encountering. Very responsive, look forward to seeing what they can come up with.
As a long time user of VWO, I'm very impressed and pleased with their success.
Early on, perhaps about 2 years ago, I reached out to Paras asking for an API so our internal dashboard could show the status and performance of all running tests.
Within a few days, there was a private (or non-published) API ready to go. Since then, my business and I have been using it daily.
Disclaimer: I even supplied a testimonial for their homepage after frustrating experiences with Google and Omniture. :)
Yep, that was for the original prototype called Wingify (which I had to completely discard. Horrible user experience). Based on feedback from initial users of the prototype, then I had built Visual Website Optimizer and had launched on HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=991252
Considering the listed plans alone are $49, $129, $249, $729, $900, $1,700 I'm willing to bet annual revenue is many, many, MANY multiples higher than $1 million.
And that's not taking into account all the custom enterprise plans on the very high end.
Really inspirational and motivational stuff for us entrepreneurs just starting with out SaaS apps to see this - and it's all done without giving away a chunk of ownership.
Hey Paras, What was your methodology for customer development, customer acquisition in the early days of your startup? Or, did you build for yourself?
What are the distribution channels you currently use?
Main methodology was guest blogging. I contributed exhaustive articles in publications such as Smashing Magazine, CopyBlogger, etc. The articles were purely educational in nature, taught people what A/B testing was and VWO was introduced as one of the of the new tools to do A/B testing easily.
The second big focus was on passion for feedback from early customers and incorporating that into the product. Really, our product is driven mostly by customer feedback and that is why our customers love talking about it.
I plan to write comprehensively about it. But I do keep posting my experiences on my blog http://paraschopra.com/blog/
It seems so many successful small internet businesses lately are attacking meta-problems for the benefit of small internet businesses. Sort of like Levi selling bluejeans to gold miners in California.
Now go subscribe to VWO and take his team to 2000+ customers! It will be beyond worthwhile for your website and business. It has been for mine.
Thank you for building a phenomenal product @paraschopra and team!