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.
