What are the best alternatives to VWO? We compare 4 of the best
I’m guessing (and this is just a guess) that you’re here because you’ve checked out VWO’s pricing page and thought, “Woah there… ain’t nobody signing up to that without checking out some alternatives to VWO!”
And that would be perfectly fair because VWO ain’t cheap. But, then again, if you’re looking for value for money, VWO does have some great products and services. Also, VWO can help you save money in the long run by helping you optimise your site.
VWO does this through:
- Testing (A/B testing, multivariant testing and Split URL testing)
- Insights (funnel recordings, session insights, heatmaps, on-page surveys and more)
- Full-stack testing (in-app and server side testing)
- Engagement features (web-push notifications, cart abandonment messages and more)
They also offer analysis in the way of observations and hypothesis to help you formulate better tests, more successfully.
But, we get that if you’re on a budget then it’s important to explore your options. In this article, we’ll throw in a few alternatives to the mix so you can check them out. Hopefully, this will help you choose the best tools and platform for you to help grow your business.
Alternatives to VWO
In this post we’re going to look at these popular alternatives to VWO:
- Hotjar
- Optimizely
- Crazy Egg
- Google Optimize
First, let’s get things straight. We’re not a competitor of VWO, neither are we in partnership with them so we don’t have any vested interests. Being a growth marketing company, we do have experience using VWO as well as other platforms.
Each alternative has its own strengths, and can you can use more than one by integrating some platforms! Which one you choose (if any) will depend on the stage of your business, your goals and your budget.
Ok, let’s go.
Hotjar
Hotjar helps you monitor how your website is being engaged with by visitors. This includes user session recordings (although not in real-time) visitor heat mapping of clicks and mouse movements. You can also get direct customer feedback from creating online polls and calls to action.
Pros of Hotjar
- The tools available are easy to use and high quality.
- Although Hotjar isn’t focussed on data-driven testing and experimentation, it can give you helpful insights. These insights can form the basis of your own testing and experimentation.
- It’s easy to install, with just one line of code.
- You can integrate Hotjar with Google Optimise to help you run experiments and get more well-rounded data.
Cons of Hotjar
- Hotjar doesn’t have the range of features that VWO has, although, this can actually make it easier to use for small businesses.
- Hotjar is more of an observational tool, so you can’t run the type of experiments that you can within VWO.
- It doesn’t have its own A/B testing tool and is only able to monitor your pre-existing A/B tests.
Optimizely
Optimizely’s platform operates a full-stack solution for your site and product to drive growth. There are a huge amount of tools available around marketing, product, engineering and data that a whole team can use. But, if you’re in the very early stages it may not be the right tool for you.
Pro’s of Optimizely
- It makes it easy for anyone to change landing pages without needing coding skills
- Anyone can build and conduct experiments as it’s pretty straightforward to use
- Real-time view of statistical data on experiments
Con’s of Optimizely
- If you’re not already getting a lot of visitors and conversions on your site, this might not be the right platform for you
- It can slow down the rendering of a web page, potentially increasing the bounce rate so not good for optimal website performance
- There’s a learning curve as some tools are complex
- Not a lot of auto-integrations with other products like Google Analytics
- One of the more expensive platforms
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg provides heatmaps and scroll maps to monitor user behaviour. Click maps help you visualise clicks by segments so you can separate out campaigns or metrics.
Pros of Crazy Egg
- It can identify underperforming CTA’s
- It can help you figure out if important content is being missed by visitors
- Visualises the performance of content over different device types
Cons of Crazy Egg
- No integration with A/B testing tools
- Can be slow, so if you have a lot of traffic this isn’t the best tool for you
- No automation, everything has to be done manually
- Visualisations can be limited, for example, there’s no attention maps or mouse move maps
Google optimize
Helps you run tests on your website to improve the experience of various user segments and boost your website’s performance.
Pros of Google optimize
Integrated with Google analytics
- Free to use
- Let’s you focus on specific user segments for a more personalised experience
- Easy to use visual editor, so there’s no need for code
- Although there are no heat maps, you can integrate with tools from Hotjar, for example
Cons of Google optimize
- Lacks the visual appeal of some paid alternatives
- In the free version, you can only have up to 3 tests running at one time
- There has been some negative feedback about “flickering” bigs causing the same user to see two different pages. Adding this snippet can help.
Conclusion
Out of all of the VWO alternatives, if you’re looking for a great value option we’d go with Google Optimize. It’s free so you can’t really complain, plus it integrates with other tools which allow you to view heatmap data.
We’d always recommend a more highly personalised solution such as the Growth Hustlers team to create a solution that’s right for you and your business.
If you’d like to discuss how we can help you do everything these tools do and more, get in touch here!
