[TheBill]

Google Optimize & VWO hurt them. Free, or low price, low friction won at scale with smaller teams running 1-2 experiments or low level personalization. Everyone I know who's going to high volume testing is either on a hosted CMS that has this baked into their offering or JAMStack.

No one I know has deployed Optimizely since 15/16.

[adrr]

Thats the issue. They start at $50k. No startup can afford that, so we build our own or use google optimize. I've been at multiple startups that have scaled to millions of users and Optimizely could have been a player if they had a self service budget option. Need to get in early like other saas/cloud providers because the cost of switching becomes to high as the business scales. Imagine if AWS didn't have self service option and you had to go through a sales process with min commits. It would have failed.

[ssharp]

Optimizely's pricing makes no sense for small teams but VWO and Optimize cannot compete on features that start to become very useful as your experimentation and personalization efforts increase.

Any roll-your-own experimentation platforms take considerable resources to make accessible to those in the organization interested in using it (product, marketing, etc.)

[roasm]

In my experience, I agree the core functionality (variant management, remote config, etc.) is relatively small amount of effort compared to the interfaces to make it accessible to those non-technical orgs, like you mention.

However, we found that those interfaces only allow very limited, shallow tests and you very quickly outgrow them as an organization. In other words, once you reach diminishing returns on button color and header text optimizations, you start wanting to test deeper UI experiences and complicated user flows. At that point, you have to involve engineering anyway.

When an organization has engineers who are motivated by business metrics, they have no problem implementing shallow tests (like button colors) while working on tests of the deeper UI experiences as well. And at that point, the non-technical interfaces have little value.

[ssharp]

I wasn't really talking towards the WYSIWYG editors. Those are trash on all platforms and fall apart quickly for all but the most simple tests.

Metric + page management, results analysis, segmentation, etc. all work better in Optimizely than they do in other platforms.