The best VWO alternatives & competitors, compared

Apr 15, 2024

1. PostHog

• Founded: 2020
• Similar to: VWO, Amplitude
• Typical users: Engineers and product teams
• Typical customers: Mid-size B2Bs and startups

What is PostHog?

PostHog (us 💪) is an open-source suite of product and data tools like A/B testing, feature flags, product analytics, session replay, and user surveys. This means it's not only an alternative to VWO but also tools like Mixpanel and Hotjar.

According to BuiltWith, as of April 2024, 5,610 of the top one million websites use PostHog. This is just over half of VWO's 9,183.

Key features

• 🧪 A/B tests: Optimize your app and website with up to nine test variations and track impact on primary and secondary metrics. Automatically calculate test duration, sample size, and statistical significance.

• 📈 Product analytics: Custom trends, funnels, user paths, retention analysis, and segment user cohorts. Also, direct SQL querying for power users.

• 🚩 Feature flags: Rollout features safely with local evaluation (for faster performance), JSON payloads, and instant rollbacks.

• 📺 Session replays: View exactly how users are using your site. Includes event timelines, console logs, network activity, and 90-day data retention.

• 💬 Surveys: Target surveys by event or user properties. Templates for net promoter score (NPS), product-market fit (PMF) surveys, and more.

How does PostHog compare to VWO?

PostHog and VWO have very similar feature sets. VWO focuses more on personalization and its visual experiment editor while PostHog has a stronger analytics suite.

Why do companies use PostHog?

According to reviews on G2, companies use PostHog because:

1. It replaces multiple tools: PostHog can replace VWO (A/B testing), Amplitude (analytics), and Hotjar (feedback and surveys). This simplifies workflows and keeps all product data in one place.

2. Pricing is transparent and scalable: People appreciate how PostHog's pricing scales as their projects grow. There's a generous free tier they can use forever. Companies eligible for PostHog for Startups also get $50k in free credits.

3. They need a complete picture of users: PostHog includes all the tools necessary to understand users and improve products. This means funnels to track conversion, replays to see where users get stuck, A/B tests to optimize flows, and surveys to gather feedback.

Bottom line

PostHog most closely matches the functionality of VWO while being free, self-serve, and open source. This makes it a great alternative, especially for product-led startups and scaleups.

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2. Optimizely

• Founded: 2010
• Similar to: VWO, AB Tasty
• Typical users: Enterprise marketing, frontend teams
• Typical customers: Large retail, travel, and other B2C companies

What is Optimizely?

Optimizely is an all-in-one set of tools for marketing. It helps businesses create the best possible digital experiences. It does this through a combination of content management, marketing, web and feature experiments, and ecommerce optimization tools.

According to BuiltWith in April 2024, 5,353 of the top million sites use Optimizely. This is just over half of VWO's 9,183.

Key features

• 🕸️ Web experimentation: Optimizely's visual editor, on-page previews, and pre-built components help create frontend experiments quickly.

• 🧪 Feature experimentation: Run targeted experiments anywhere on your stack. Personalize experiences to specific segments and users. View detailed reports on their impact.

• 🤹 Project management: Idea backlogs, workflows, and design tools to coordinate and collaborate on experiments and content.

• 📝 Content management system: Manage, deliver, and optimize your content in a centralized location.

• 💸 Ecommerce optimization: Customize checkout workflow along with CMS and experimentation to create the best possible commerce experience.

How does Optimizely compare to VWO?

Both Optimizely and VWO are multi-product platforms with a focus on optimizing user experiences. VWO has more tools for understanding users, like session replays and surveys, while VWO focuses more on content and project management tools.

Why do companies use Optimizely?

According to G2 reviews, people are fans of Optimizely because:

1. User-friendly interface: It is easy to set up and manage experiments. People praise the visual editor as a big part of this. Non-technical users can create and manage experiments without developers.

2. Integration with analytics platforms: Optimizely doesn't have built-in analytics, but people appreciate its integrations with Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and others.

3. Business-oriented: Optimizely focuses on optimizing business, marketing, and ecommerce use cases. It helps them improve the core business metrics they care about, like revenue and conversion.

Bottom line

Anyone considering VWO would likely come across Optimizely as another massive platform for optimizing user experiences. For content and ecommerce-focused teams, it's a solid choice, but smaller or product-focused teams are likely better off elsewhere.

3. AB Tasty

• Founded: 2013
• Similar to: LaunchDarkly, Optimizely
• Typical users: Marketing and product teams
• Typical customers: Large retail and entertainment companies

What is AB Tasty?

AB Tasty is a set of tools for optimizing brand and product experiences. This includes experimentation, personalization, and recommendations.

It helps teams build better end-to-end digital user experiences that drive ROI, engagement, and loyalty. The company focuses on retail, entertainment, and ecommerce companies

BuiltWith says 2,351 of the top one million websites deploy AB Tasty as of April 2024. This is significantly less than VWO's 9,183.

Key features

• 🌐 Web experimentation: Run A/B and multivariate tests easily with low/no-code tools like a visual editor and pre-built widgets.

• 🧪 Feature experimentation: Test new features on specific users or segments in your server-side or mobile apps.

• 🫂 Personalization: Create personalized experiences with audience builder and segmentation tools.

• 🛼 Rollouts: Use feature flags to progressively deliver, manage, and rollback new features.

• 🙋‍♂️ Recommendations: Show the right products at the right time in customer journeys. Provide unique suggestions to increase conversion.

How does AB Tasty compare to VWO?

AB Tasty focuses entirely on experimentation and personalization features. VWO has these along with tools to help you understand users and their behavior.

Why do companies use AB Tasty?

According to G2 reviews, people choose AB Tasty for the following reasons:

1. Ease-of-use: Non-technical users can create and manage simple A/B tests using the visual editor. People also appreciate how simple and intuitive the entire platform is.

2. Support: AB Tasty's customer support receives high praise. The company also provides an option to help you with recommendations and implementation (for a cost) if needed.

3. Widgets: People enjoy AB Tasty's collection of pre-built widgets such as alerts, banners, and modals. These help make personalizing experiences easy.

Bottom line

For people looking for a simple personalization and experimentation tool, AB Tasty makes a good alternative. It is missing more of the analysis tools you might expect, though.

4. Amplitude

• Founded: 2012
• Similar to: PostHog, FullStory
• Typical users: Product managers, data analysts, marketing teams
• Typical customers: Mid-size and large enterprises

What is Amplitude?

Amplitude is one of the original product analytics tools. Many large enterprise customers, like Ford, NBCUniversal, and Walmart rely on it. In recent years, it also added A/B testing, session replay, and a customer data platform to its offering.

Data from BuiltWith says that 10,713 of the top one million websites use Amplitude. This is just above VWO's 9,183.

Key features

• 📈 Product analytics: Funnel and retention analysis, user paths, behavioral cohorts, custom dashboards, and more.

• 🧪 A/B testing: Test new features on specific targets and analyze with primary, secondary, and counter metrics.

• 💁‍♂️ Customer data platform: Combine analytics data with third-party tools for data governance, identity resolution, and data federation.

• 🤖 AI insight builder: Generate insights based on natural language requests, like "What is my purchase conversion rate?"

• 📹 Session replay: Reconstruct user sessions to understand how people interact with your site and app. Visualize the reality behind user journeys and metrics.

How does Amplitude compare to VWO?

Amplitude heavily focuses on being an analytics platform. This means it misses out on other behavioral analytics tools like heatmaps and surveys as well as experimentation tools like personalization. VWO has all of these.

Why do companies use Amplitude?

According to G2 reviews, Amplitude users appreciate three key aspects:

1. Simple to use: Amplitude makes it easy for non-technical users to get insights about their product and make improvements. This makes Amplitude a popular choice for product managers and marketers.

2. Built-in A/B testing: Amplitude integrated experiments feature enables companies to run A/B tests on existing cohorts. People like how it connects to their data and enables them to do analysis all in one place.

3. Become data-driven: People like how Amplitude helps them become data-driven by making it easy to to add data, visualize it, and make decisions. It makes data accessible to people who might not have a technical background.

Bottom line

You likely won't contemplate Amplitude if you're looking at the experimentation side of VWO. For teams mostly looking for an analytics platform with experimentation on the side, the old choice is still a solid one.

5. Heap

• Founded: 2013
• Similar to: PostHog, FullStory
• Typical users: Product and marketing teams
• Typical customers: B2C SaaS and ecommerce companies with a user experience focus.

What is Heap?

Heap describes itself as a digital insights platform. This means it offers both product analytics and session replay and supports marketing use cases with multi-touch attribution.

Contentsquare, a marketing and ecommerce analytics firm, acquired Heap in September 2023 and announced plans to integrate the two products. Contentsquare also owns Hotjar, another alternative on this list.

According to BuiltWith, as of April 2024, 4,062 of the top one million websites deploy Heap. This is just under half of VWO's 9,183.

Key features

• ✅ Event autocapture: Product teams don't need to rely on engineers to instrument all events. Heap has a visual editor for teams to tag events directly on-page for analysis.

• 📺 Session replay: Get qualitative insights about user behavior by replaying their session – although this lacks the debugging tools typical of most replay tools.

• 🔥 Heatmaps: See where people click, what point they scroll to, and the areas that get the most attention.

• 🤖 Analysis suggestions: Advanced data science capabilities discover hidden interactions, friction points, and knowledge about key paths.

• 🔁 Managed ETL: Connect to data warehouses, so you can combine your analytics with other sources and get a fuller picture of the entire user journey.

How does Heap compare to VWO?

Similar to Amplitude, Heap focuses on analytics and session replay for product teams. This means it misses out on the experimentation features of VWO.

Why do companies use Heap?

According to G2 reviews, people enjoy these three areas of Heap:

1. Autocapture: Non-technical users love how easy autocapture makes tracking on their site. Along with the element data included, this provides a huge amount of useful analytics data with little setup.

2. Simple setup: People find Heap easy to set up. Add a single script to your site and data starts being captured. Heap then makes it easy to visualize that data through user paths, funnels, and session replays.

3. Streamlining analysis: By having analytics and session replay data in one place, Heap makes it easy to understand the usage of their app or site. This replaces interviews or user testing and makes the development cycle faster.

Bottom line

For product teams looking for analytics and session replay, Heap is a good alternative (it's self-serve). If you are looking to match the experimentation functionality of VWO, you should look elsewhere.

6. LaunchDarkly

• Founded: 2014
• Similar to: PostHog, Optimizely
• Typical users: Enterprise engineering teams
• Typical customers: Massive engineering-focused enterprises

What is LaunchDarkly?

LaunchDarkly is a feature flag and A/B testing platform helping developers de-risk releases, target experiences, and optimize their product. It provides automation and governance features to ensure enterprises are following engineering best practices.

According to BuiltWith, 1,019 of the top one million sites use LaunchDarkly. This is nearly 10x less than VWO's 9,183 but may undercount mobile and backend usage.

Key features

• 🚩 Feature flags: Control and target the release of features using multi-variate flags with real-time updates and local evaluation.

• 🧪 Experimentations: Run A/B/n tests against metric groups and segment. Easily roll out winning variants.

• 🤖 Automation: Automate and schedule changes to flag state, progressive rollouts, and trigger workflows.

• 🔍 Governance: Audit flag changes. Get visibility into flag state across platforms. Use roles-based access controls to decide who can access and change flag state.

How does LaunchDarkly compare to VWO?

LaunchDarkly focuses on engineers. This means it misses out on the features marketing or product teams choose VWO for, like the visual experiment editor or analytics.

Why do companies use LaunchDarkly?

According to G2 reviews, people appreciate these aspects of LaunchDarkly:

1. SDKs: People like how easy it is to integrate LaunchDarkly into their apps thanks to the range of SDKs it provides like JavaScript, Python, and iOS.

2. Automations: LaunchDarkly provides automations like stale flag cleanup, rollout templates, DevOps pipeline integrations, and scheduled rollouts which reviewers mention as big selling points.

3. Speed and availability: High uptime and speed are critical for developers. Reviewers highlight local caching and edge computing integrations as critical ways LaunchDarkly supports these.

Bottom line

Engineering teams focused on following best practices with feature flags and A/B testing should consider LaunchDarkly as an alternative. For teams looking beyond this, there are better options.

7. FullStory

• Founded: 2012
• Similar to: PostHog, Heap
• Typical users: Product managers, customer success, and support
• Typical customers: Online retailers and SaaS companies

What is FullStory?

FullStory describes itself as a "behavioral data platform," which is code for product analytics with a side of session replay and mobile app analytics. It focuses on behavioral analytics, and like PostHog and Heap, it supports event autocapture, so you don't have to manually code every event you want to capture.

According to BuiltWith, as of April 2024, 8,226 of the top one million websites use FullStory. This is just under VWO's 9,183.

Key features

• 📺 Session replay: Watch and analyze real user sessions on web and mobile apps. Understand the full context of a user's experience.

• 📊 Product analytics: Understand user paths, funnels, retention, journeys, and struggle points. Combine them all on a dashboard and get notified of changes requiring attention.

• 🏷️ Event autocapture: Tagless event capture that ensures the tracking of all events. Get the data you need ASAP and discover issues you didn't know existed.

• 🔥 Heatmaps: Find out where users click and scroll as well as areas they are frustrated by.

• 📱 Mobile app analytics: Automatically capture everything from screen recordings to events to crashes to optimize your app.

How does FullStory compare to VWO?

As already mentioned, FullStory is a behavioral data platform. Although it includes many features of VWO on that front, it will not come as a surprise that it doesn't include the optimization ones.

Why do companies use FullStory?

According to G2 reviews, people like FullStory because:

1. Easier collaboration: As an accessible tool for non-technical users, FullStory facilitates collaboration between product, UX, and engineering teams by allowing all teams to access useful, reliable data.

2. Viewing user issues: Support teams use FullStory to replay sessions to understand user hard-to-replicate problems and identify bugs that need fixing.

3. Improving conversion: FullStory users like to combine funnel insights with replays of user sessions to understand pain points and improve conversion.

Bottom line

For a complete behavioral analytics suite, FullStory is a solid choice, especially for mobile apps. Users wanting experimentation, feature flags, or personalization should switch to other choices.

Is PostHog right for you?

Here's the (short) sales pitch.

We're biased, obviously, but we think PostHog is the perfect VWO replacement if:

• You value transparency. We're open source and open core.
• You want tools to help you build a better product – like behavioral analytics, feature flags, and A/B testing.
• You want to try before you buy. We're self-serve with a generous free tier.

Check out our product pages and read our docs to learn more.