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Choosing Your Path to Better Customer Experiences
As companies get more serious about using data to make decisions, they often want to run more experiments and tests. This is what we call evolving your "experimentation culture."
To support businesses at different stages of this growth, VWO offers two powerful ways to test and improve digital products: VWO Web Testing and VWO Feature Experimentation.
Think of it like building things: you might start with simple tools for quick fixes, but you need more advanced equipment as your projects get bigger and more complex.
VWO's products follow a similar idea, offering the right tools as your testing needs grow.
Let's compare our Web Testing and Feature Experimentation products, especially when you want to change what your users see and interact with.
Finding the Right Tool for Your Experiment
To help you see which tool fits best, here’s a comparison.
| Feature / Product | VWO Web Testing (Includes Visual & Code Editor) | VWO Feature Experimentation |
| What it is | Your go-to for testing changes specifically on your website. | A system for managing and testing any kind of change across any platform. |
| How it's set up | You add a small piece of VWO code (SmartCode) to your website pages. | Your technical team integrates VWO SDKs (Software Development Kits) into your application's code (website, mobile app, backend, etc.). |
| Who is it for | Great for marketing teams, CRO specialists, and designers. The Code Editor is helpful for those with some coding skills. | Primarily for technical teams like developers, product managers, and engineers. |
| Platforms supported | Limited to websites that load in a browser. | Supports any platform where you can integrate the SDK, including websites, mobile apps, smart devices, and backend systems. |
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What do both products offer you?
While Web Testing and Feature Experimentation cater to different levels of technical complexity and platforms, they both share core VWO capabilities designed to help you run effective experiments and make smart decisions:
- Clear Reporting: Both give you access to easy-to-understand reports powered by robust Bayesian statistics. You can see how your variations perform, compare different groups of users, and get reliable insights into which changes win.
- Connecting to your business goals (Data 360): Both products connect to VWO's Data 360. This means you can link your experiments directly to the metrics that matter most to your business, like revenue, sign-ups, or conversion rates. You can track specific user actions (Events) and use information about your users (Attributes) for targeting and analysis. For Web Testing, some basic audience targeting based on browser info is available, while with Feature Experimentation, you pass user information via the SDK, giving you immense flexibility in defining who sees your tests.
- Smart experiment setup: You can set up advanced rules for your experiments, like ensuring users in one test aren't accidentally included in another (mutually exclusive groups (MEG)) or controlling what percentage of your visitors see a variation. Both allow for sophisticated targeting based on user segments you define.
- Planning and teamwork (Kanban): Whether you're using Web Testing or Feature Experimentation, VWO provides tools like a Kanban board to help your team plan, track, and collaborate on experiments, keeping everyone on the same page. This helps build that strong experimentation culture we talked about!
- Seeing user behavior (Integration with Insights): Both can integrate with VWO Insights tools like session recordings and heatmaps. This is incredibly valuable because you can see not just what happened (in the reports) but why it happened by watching real user interactions.
- Connecting with your other tools: Both products are built to fit into your existing data and analytics ecosystem. You can easily send your experiment data from VWO to your data warehouse, cloud storage, customer data platforms (CDPs), and analytics tools for further analysis and unified reporting.
Summary
- VWO Web Testing (Visual & Code Editor): Great for quick, focused frontend tests and changes on your website. Ideal for teams who need flexibility without heavy developer involvement for every change.
- VWO Feature Experimentation: Necessary when you need to test complex features, change backend logic that affects the frontend, or run experiments across mobile apps and other platforms beyond just your website. It requires technical resources but provides ultimate power and flexibility.
Many companies start with VWO Web Testing to build momentum with website optimization and then adopt VWO Feature Experimentation as their experimentation needs become more integrated across their technology stack.
We're here to help you determine the best approach for your team and goals. Let's chat more about what you're looking to achieve!
Need more help?
For further assistance or more information, contact VWO Support.