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The Best VWO Alternatives that We Recommend

The Best VWO Alternatives that We Recommend

Laura Ojeda Melchor Avatar
Laura Ojeda Melchor Avatar

Disclosure: Our content is reader-supported, which means we earn commissions from links on Crazy Egg. Commissions do not affect our editorial evaluations or opinions.

Looking for the best VWO alternatives to gather insights from your website and customers? We recommend Crazy Egg for marketing-led teams, PostHog for developer-led teams, and Optimizely or ABTasty for enterprise brands.ย 

My Personal Top 3 Alternatives to VWO

Hereโ€™s a breakdown of our top 3 VWO alternatives.ย 

Best for quick A/B tests, surveys, heatmaps, and replays.Best for developer teams that want control of their data.Best for enterprise teams
Crazy Egg

Pricing: $29-$499/month

What I like: Quick, insightful A/B tests, rich heatmaps, thorough session replays, built-in surveys, and fine-grained privacy masking, all in one tool.
PostHog

Pricing: Free plan; paid cloud; self-host option

What I like: Experiments, session replays, heatmaps, and surveys in one, developer-friendly tool with self-hosting.
Optimizely

Pricing: Enterprise

What I like: Client and server-side A/B testing with gradual rollouts, ideal for high-stakes changes. Missing maps, replays, and surveys natively.

How I Chose These VWO Alternatives

Letโ€™s take a look at the criteria I followed as I chose these alternatives to VWO:

  • Split testing. Since VWO is an one of the best A/B testing tools, itโ€™s important for any alternative to also provide these split-testing capabilities. I looked for tools that can set up clean A/B tests, safely roll them out, and provide trustworthy results.ย 
  • Surveys and feedback. Customer behavior analytics is VWOโ€™s other big strength. Because of this, I looked for tools that give companies an easy way to survey customers and analyze their behavior.ย 
  • Heatmapping. Heatmaps are a core part of VWOโ€™s behavior analytics toolset, so any alternative should provide robust heatmapping with at least three to five types of heatmaps. Heatmapping also needs to make sense on modern pages with tabs and popupsโ€”and, ideally, easily segmented by device or traffic source for quick comparisons.
  • Session replays. One of the best ways to understand user frustrationsโ€”and fix themโ€”is to view the actions customers take on your website as though you were looking over their shoulder. Session replays record hundreds of sessions a day for a complete look at whatโ€™s workingโ€”and what isnโ€™t.ย 
  • Privacy. Your website visitors shouldnโ€™t have to worry about their privacy being compromised when you analyze their movements on your site. Any good website behavior analytics tool will automatically mask sensitive fields or inputs on the userโ€™s end so they never reach your servers.ย 

1. Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is a behavior analytics platform that checks all the boxes above: it comes with split testing, surveys, heatmaps, session replays, and automatic privacy features to gain deep insights without compromising any personally identifiable information (PII).ย 

What I like:ย 

  • Split testing. Crazy Egg goes above and beyond with split testing. You can launch A/B tests in minutes with a visual page editor, define your goals without doing any coding, and auto-shift traffic to the winning version of a web page. Crazy Egg even offers automatic heatmaps and session recordings for each variant so you can visualize and compare their performance.
  • Heatmaps. Speaking of heatmaps, Crazy Egg offers five map types: click, scroll, confetti, overlay, and list. You can sort maps by over 20 audience filters, including by device, traffic source/UTM, user type, goals, date range, and any custom filters you set up. Plus, you can track unlimited website domains on any planโ€”even the base plan.
  • Surveys and feedback. Surveys are core to Crazy Eggโ€™s offerings, and you get unlimited survey and feedback tools with any plan. Pick from over 50 templates for everything from net promoter score (NPS) ratings to support requests. You can edit all templatesโ€”or create a custom survey, picking from 10 question types. Adding a survey to your website just takes a few clicks. See Crazy Eggโ€™s free survey tour for a closer look.
  • Session replays. Website session recordings are core to Crazy Eggโ€™s toolset. Recordings are easy for you to scan, and you can tag them or tie them to a specific visitor category to make follow-ups easier. Plus, Crazy Eggโ€™s error tracking auto-detects JavaScript errors and links them to the exact session replay where they happened. This makes fixing issues easy.
  • Privacy and masking. Crazy Egg auto-masks input fields and avoids tracking user keystrokes. You can also customize masking and skip entire pages or specific elements for extra precision and privacy.ย 

What could use improving:ย 

  • Web-first focus. Crazy Eggโ€™s true strength lies in providing heatmaps, recordings, surveys, and A/B testing for websites, not for native apps. If youโ€™ve developed an app for your company and want to track usage on it, youโ€™ll need to use a third-party tool.ย 

Best for:ย 

  • Web teams mostly led by marketing pros that want quick A/B tests, surveys, heatmaps, and replays without tons of heavy setup. Plans start out at an affordable $29 a month and can scale with you. See the full pricing details on the Crazy Egg website.ย 

2. PostHog

PostHog is an open-source platform for A/B experimentation, surveys, heatmaps, and session replays with self-hosting for teams that want full control over their data.ย 

What I like:ย 

  • Full suite of tools for testing and launching products and websites. PostHog offers every tool a team needs to get projects off the ground and running smoothly: A/B testing, session replay, product analytics, heatmaps, error tracking, feature flags, and surveys, to name a few. The brand is laser-focused on offering everything you need in one tool, and it succeeds.ย 
  • PostHog is unapologetically geared toward software developers. If youโ€™ve got a team of software engineers driving every iteration of your website and products, PostHog is for you. The tool lets you get into the weeds with codeโ€”set up tests and simple on/off switches (feature flags) from within your code, turn a new feature on for just a slice of users (say 5% or only customers in Canada), and keep the same person recognized across your site and app so your results stay consistent.
  • Granular data and privacy controls. If your team needs airtight compliance, you can self-host your data or pick a specific region in PostHogโ€™s managed cloud. You can also mask input fields and text by default, block or exclude pages and elements from the session replay tool, avoid capturing data until users give their consent, and use anonymous IDs to tie web events together (instead of using personally identifiabl information, or PII).
  • Openness and transparency. As a company, PostHog is committed to affordability (it comes with a generous free plan), transparency, and growth. It invites users to ask for specific features, makes all of its company manuals and documents transparentโ€”salaries includedโ€”and offers crystalline views of whatโ€™s coming up next for the team. Itโ€™s hard not to trust and love a brand that does these things.ย 

What could use improving:ย 

  • Limited audience. Remember how I said PostHog is unapologetically built for engineers and developers? This can be a major pro if you do have an engineer-led team, but itโ€™s a drawback if you donโ€™t. You need to know how to code in order to get the most out of PostHog. If this isnโ€™t you (or your team), a more user-friendly all-in-one tool like Crazy Egg is a better VWO alternative. See PostHogโ€™s plans and pricing to learn more about whatโ€™s offered.

Best for:ย 

  • Developer and engineer-led teams that want to run experiments in code (with both feature flags and server/client-side A/B tests) and keep tight control of their data, all while having access to replays, heatmaps, and quick surveys in the same tool.

3. Optimizely

Optimizely is a platform focused on using A/B testing to improve content marketing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) products, especially for marketing and product dev teams.

What I like:ย 

  • Split testing for high-stakes experiments. Optimizely packs a punch when it comes to A/B testing versions of SaaS products for large companies. Itโ€™s built for this, really, on both the client and server sides. It can handle just about anything, which is why some of the biggest companies aroundโ€”Discovery, Nike, and Shell, to name a fewโ€”use it.
  • Lots of AI features to eliminate busywork. Like it or not, AI tools are here to stay, and Optimizely takes full advantage of them. You can use Optimizelyโ€™s AI assistant, Opal, for everything from market research and keyword research to content ideation and video transcription. Better yet, Opal learns your brand inside and out so you can automatically create branded experiences, marketing materials, and reports.ย ย 
  • Integrations for features itโ€™s missing. Optimizely is so heavily focused on split testing that it lacks other website optimization tools, like surveys and heatmaps. Good news is, Optimizelyโ€™s integrations include Qualtrics and Mouseflow, so you can still enjoy those key features. Just not natively.

What could use improving:ย 

  • Lacks core features VWO offers. Unlike VWO, Optimizely offers no native heatmapping, session replay, or feedback collection tools. There is something called Optimizely Forms, but itโ€™s built less for feedback and more for giving customers forms to fill out as part of their business with you. Things like event registration forms and job applications, for example.ย 
  • Too much power (and expense) for small and medium brands. If youโ€™re not an enterprise brand with a digital product, Optimizely might be more than you can chew. And more than your wallet can handle. Pricing isnโ€™t listed on the site, but user reports on various platforms, including Reddit and various competitors from around the web, list prices in the thousands and even tens of thousands per year.ย 

Best for:ย 

  • Enterprise product, marketing, and engineering teams that roll out app or website changes regularly and want trustworthy A/B tests plus safe, gradual rollouts that allow them to start small and then expand. See Optimizelyโ€™s plans and request pricing.ย 

4. ABTasty

ABTasty is a testing platform ideal for helping non-technical teams try out new ideas on live pages and gather feedback about which version is better.ย 

What I like:ย 

  • Heavy focus on A/B testing. I mean, the name of the tool is ABTasty, after all, so this pro makes sense. ABTasty is really, really into facilitating split tests wherever you want them. Run A/B/n, multivariate, and multi-page tests across your website, SaaS products, and apps with ABTasty. No coding expertise needed.ย 
  • No-code and low-code editing. Not every brand has a full software development team on board to help improve UX and UI. ABTastyโ€™s Visual Editor makes it easy for you to build different variations to test with different audience segments. And with ABTastyโ€™s Widget Library, you can add banners and progress bars to your site to help alert users to new features or updates. Or, include on-page surveys to gather feedback on changes.ย 
  • Developer-friendly features. If you do have devs on your team, ABTasty offers the ability run server-side A/B tests in your appโ€™s code, use feature flags via different software development kits (SDKs), and test features at different stages of production privately before launch.
  • EmotionsAI. ABTasty offers an AI personalization engine called EmotionsAI that basically does audience and behavioral segmentation for you. Built on the back of extensive (anonymous) customer behavior research, EmotionsAI helps you quickly identify which of your customersโ€™ emotional desires need meeting on a particular product feature or area of your site. Then, it makes recommendations to help you meet those needs.ย 

What could use improving:ย 

  • No heatmaps or session replays. Unlike some of the other VWO alternatives on our list, ABTasty doesnโ€™t include heatmapping or session replay tools. Youโ€™ll have to integrate with third-party tools for deeper insights into what users are actually doing on your site.ย 
  • Enterprise pricing. If you want to find out how much ABTasty costs, youโ€™ll have fill out a form to sign up for a demo. The form is the first thing you see on the ABTasty pricing page, and itโ€™s a bit aggressive. It asks โ€œWho are youโ€โ€”just like that, no inflection, no emotion, no warmth. Thereโ€™s no clear-cut outline of plans, either.

Best for:ย 

  • Product campaign teams that frequently run on-site offers and/or update their content and want fast, visual tests to see which versions convert the best.ย 

Whatโ€™s the Best VWO Alternative?ย 

The best VWO alternative depends on what your team looks like. If youโ€™re mostly marketers with a few devs here and there, Crazy Egg has everything for A/B testing and web analytics in one convenient tool.ย 

Want more control and coding capabilities? PostHog was (literally) made for you.ย 
Are you an enterprise-level megacompany with huge amounts of visitors to your website, SaaS product, or app? Or all three? Try an enterprise tool like Optimizely or ABTasty.


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