LaunchDarkly vs. Optimizely Web Experimentation

Great for rolling out features slowly for beta testing in production. I would say it is less well suited for toggling features permanently for users as this requires more integration with our backend and billing systems that would be a lot of work to set up.

Incentivized

I think it can serve the whole spectrum of experiences from people who are just getting used to web experimentation. It's really easy to pick up and use. If you're more experienced then it works well because it just gets out of the way and lets you really focus on the experimentation side of things. So yeah, strongly recommend. I think it is well suited both to small businesses and large enterprises as well. I think it's got a really low barrier to entry. It's very easy to integrate on your website and get results quickly. Likewise, if you are a big business, it's incrementally adoptable, so you can start out with one component of optimizing and you can build there and start to build in things like data CMS to augment experimentation as well. So it's got a really strong a pathway to grow your MarTech platform if you're a small company or a big company.

Incentivized

• Feature Flag Management: It's like magic. With a flip of a switch, you can manage feature rollouts to visitors or accounts across the web and mobile applications!
• Segmentation: Create a segment of visitors or accounts and then use that to target a feature flag rule. Really easy to use and saves so much time.
• Ease of Use: Seamless copy/paste functionality, really clear status indicators so you can find what is on and for whom.

Incentivized

• The Platform contains drag-and-drop editor options for creating variations, which ease the A/B tests process, as it does not require any coding or development resources.
• Establishing it is so simple that even a non-technical person can do it perfectly.
• It provides real-time results and analytics with robust dashboard access through which you can quickly analyze how different variations perform. With this, your team can easily make data-driven decisions Fastly.

Incentivized

• It would be nice to see a feature flag's settings against all environments at once.
• It would be to have a "array" type flag for related but different settings (eg, enableA and enableB could be enable: [a, b]).
• It would be nice have customizable columns on the Users page (eg, if I want to inject a new meta data).

Incentivized

• The results view is dense and difficult to package easily for leadership, and when filtering by segment it's hard to read comparative outcomes without clearing or swapping filters
• The organization of experiments and statuses is a cluttered list and the search is limited in use - would love to see that improve with time
• There are so many other MarTech products out there, would love to see more dedicated integrations so we don't have to invest in something like Zapier or Tray to build hacky automations

Incentivized

It fits out business case

Incentivized

Because it's an incredible and essential tool for my line of work as a conversion optimization specialist. Really couldn't do my job nearly as effectively without it. It's paid for itself many times over and I feel like I'm only beginning to unlock the tools potential.

It's very easy to create new feature flags and set them properly. It is more difficult to get LaunchDarkly integrated within a distributed system so that flags can be used. Especially on stateless servers where gating features by user is not easy. Overall though, it is very easy to get started and I like how simple it is to use.

Incentivized

Optimizely Web Experimentation's visual editor is handy for non-technical or quick iterative testing. When it comes to content changes it's as easy as going into wordpress, clicking around, and then seeing your changes live--what you see is what you get. The preview and approval process for sharing built experiments is also handy for sharing experiments across teams for QA purposes or otherwise.

Incentivized

No issue with availability at all

Incentivized

I would rate Optimizely Web Experimentation's availability as a 10 out of 10. The software is reliable and does not experience any application errors or unplanned outages. Additionally, the customer service and technical support teams are always available to help with any issues or questions.

Incentivized

From what I have seen, LaunchDarkly integrates well with your code and also services you might have in your tech ecosystem. We use Jenkins for automation and we were able to use it to build pipelines to automate the control of LaunchDarkly toggles in our code.

Incentivized

I would rate Optimizely Web Experimentation's performance as a 9 out of 10. Pages load quickly, reports are complete in a reasonable time frame, and the software does not slow down any other software or systems that it integrates with. Additionally, the customer service and technical support teams are always available to help with any issues or questions.

Incentivized

The overall support is very responsive

Incentivized

They always are quick to respond, and are so friendly and helpful. They always answer the phone right away. And [they are] always willing to not only help you with your problem, but if you need ideas they have suggestions as well.

The tool itself is not very difficult to use so training was not very useful in my opinion. It did not also account for success events more complex than a click (which my company being ecommerce is looking to examine more than a mere click).

Yes I do.

Incentivized

The implementation through the tag management system took a bit of trial and error at first, mostly due to the asynchronous nature of the TMS. We had to manipulate the implementation to assure that the Optimizely code was written to the page at the right time to allow the experiment content load in the browser without showing any of the original content first. We also needed to make some adjustments to the TMS code to get the integration with Site Catalyst timed appropriately.

Rollout is another dedicated feature flag tool that can be used to manage features. LaunchDarkley offers all the features of an enterprise level tool, unlike Rollout, reserves the security features for the Enterprise plan. Out of box integrations are limited but they do have a well documented REST API.

Incentivized

The ability to do A/B testing in Optimizely along with the associated statistical modelling and audience segmentation means it is a much better solution than using something like Google Analytics were a lot more effort is required to identify and isolate the specific data you need to confidently make changes

Incentivized

The platform didn't go down since we implemented it

Incentivized

It's incredibly flexible and adapts well to organizations of all sizes, whether you’re running a single site or managing multiple departments and platforms. The ability to deploy experiments seamlessly across different environments is a huge plus, especially for growing businesses. While it’s highly scalable, the last point would depend on the right team leveraging its full potential.

Incentivized

• Improved developer experience with some teams moving to Trunk-based Development.
• Increased deployment frequency due to smaller code releases.
• Validation of the technical and business value of work is achieved more quickly through smaller pieces of work and through experimenting with a small group of users before a feature gets to 100% of customers.

Incentivized

• we saved money by not implementing certain copy/design
• we learned that customers from different states react different to a variation
• we are slowly learning where conversion happens and where to fix the frictions
• Testing shorter vs longer journeys increased funnel conversion in some states - we avoided implementing this nationwide

Incentivized