Our recommendation for the best A/B testing tool is Optimizely because it’s easy to start and customize tests and allows A/B testing across multiple devices. Get a free demo to see how Optimizely works.
Websites and apps need to cater to the people using them, and A/B testing makes it possible to test different elements to see what works. An A/B testing tool allows website and app owners to evaluate messaging, promotions, images, and other features quickly and easily to get real data that informs their decisions.
We’ve spent several days researching dozens of split-testing tools to narrow our list into five top options that fit specific needs your business might have.
The Top 5 Best A/B Testing Tools
The following companies are among the best A/B testing tools for different purposes. We chose Optimizely as the best A/B testing tool overall because of its powerful features and scalability. Get a free demo of Optimizely to see it in action.
- Optimizely – Best Overall A/B Testing Tool
- Google Optimize – Best Free A/B Testing Tool for Small Businesses
- Apptimize – Best for Mobile App Creators
- Adobe Target – Best for Personalizing the Customer Experience
- Convert – Best for Multi-Client Users
Next, read our in-depth reviews to learn which product might fit your business and optimization needs best.
Match Your Scenario to the Right A/B Testing Tool Solution
There are several things to consider when choosing the right A/B testing tool. Businesses of different sizes and varied products and services have different needs. We chose our top picks based on the most common scenarios companies may need an A/B testing tool:
- Your team is new to A/B testing
- You help multiple clients optimize their content
- Your small business needs a simple and affordable testing tool
- You want to test the customer experience in its entirety
- You need to run tests consistently without impacting site speeds
Your team is new to A/B testing
Best Option: Optimizely
Optimizely has many features packaged into an easy-to-use tool that virtually anyone can pick up and use. Its A/B testing tool has a powerful visual editor that lets you see changes right away.
Optimizely also includes the ability to create templates of tests and campaign elements, allowing users to implement changes quickly into the website or landing page.
Another great choice: Google Optimize
Google Optimize is free, so it’s somewhat stripped down from other A/B testing tools. That’s a good thing for teams who need a simple tool to manage tests and optimizations. Its visual editor lets you create variants of your website without needing to change any confusing code.
Non-technical teams may benefit from a tool with the following:
- Easy setup: Tools that you can begin using right out of the box without technical experience are the best for businesses with non-technical teams.
- Detailed reporting: Some tools feature extremely helpful reports that don’t require data analysis skills to interpret.
- Guided testing: A tool with guided testing setups and simple walkthroughs can make it easier for teams to perform optimization tests.
- Visual editing: Real-time visual optimization editors let you see how your tests look as changes happen—no coding experience is necessary.
- Testing and optimization templates: Your team can use saved templates to replicate tests or quickly add winning elements to websites or pages as campaigns need changes.
You help multiple clients optimize their content
Best Option: Convert
Convert is designed for optimization agencies, so it has features in place to keep your account running fast and securely, even with multiple users involved. Administrators can create separate profiles for each client for agency management and share those profiles with their clients to view or edit.
Convert also takes the privacy and security of you, your agency, and your clients seriously by refraining from storing personal information by default, not storing cookies that aren’t necessary for reporting, and offering two-factor authentication.
Another great choice: Optimizely
Optimizely also leaves room for multiple users on one account, known as collaborators. Add clients as collaborators or add other agency members to an account to help manage each client account. Collaborators get user-based permissions set by the administrator to keep everyone’s information secure.
Solopreneurs and agencies that juggle multiple clients or projects should think about:
- User permissions: When adding users to your account, it’s important that they each have customized permissions to gain access only to the tools they need.
- Privacy and security: Client information should be kept secure and private from other users on your account through high-end encryption, account authorization, and other privacy and security measures.
- Detailed reporting: A tool that pumps out detailed reports makes it easier for you to show clients the precise data they need to make informed optimization decisions.
Your small business needs a simple and affordable testing tool
Best Option: Google Optimize
Small businesses may only want a testing tool for occasional campaign testing. Google Optimize is an excellent choice in this case. It’s free, connects seamlessly to your Google Analytics account for helpful insights, and has a visual editor that allows for quick changes to your site’s pages.
Another great choice: Convert
Convert is significantly more expensive than Google Optimize as a paid tool, but it’s also relatively budget-friendly compared to similar tools.
Its lowest tier includes features for small businesses with occasional testing needs, like five active projects, 15 active optimization goals, and unlimited tests. Plus, the pricing is based on the number of tested users each year rather than the number of account users.
If you don’t need advanced testing features right now, consider the following:
- Pricing: Tools with free plans or pricing not based on the number of users can be the most affordable for small businesses.
- Ease of use: A tool that doesn’t have a significant learning curve is usually best for small businesses without consistent testing needs.
- Scalability: Can your A/B testing tool scale as your business grows? How easy is it to upgrade to a new plan, if needed?
You want to test the customer experience in its entirety
Best Option: Adobe Target
How does your website perform for your customers from start to finish? Adobe Target helps you learn through its multichannel testing capabilities. Find out how your customer journey works from the moment someone visits your site to the time they finish placing their order by testing every element they interact with.
The tool also has multiple ways to target the right people for testing, such as behavioral targeting and rules-based personalization, to give each visitor a customized experience.
Another great choice: Apptimize
Make changes you make to your app or website and see how they could affect other channels with Apptimize. For instance, changes to your most successful landing page could lead to decreased revenue for that offer, which Apptimize data can break down for you.
You can also test the effects of changes to an app on a website or changes on a website to an app. This way, you’ll know more about how your changes affect each part of the customer journey.
Make sure your customer journey works as intended by considering:
- Multichannel testing: See how changes to your website might affect your app, and vice versa, for a better picture of the customer experience across all channels.
- Easy feature implementation: How easy is it to add a winning feature to your website or app after completing a test?
- Ability to test multiple elements: The ability to test virtually any element, like images, CTAs, and website copy, makes it easier for you to ensure a fully optimized site.
- Visual testing: Look for a visual editor that lets you see changes in real-time to better understand how a customer experiences your site.
You need to run tests consistently without impacting site speeds
Best Option: Optimizely
As helpful as A/B testing tools are, they can also bog down a website, especially when you run multiple tests frequently. Optimizely compartmentalizes its tests in its content delivery network to prevent them from slowing down your site and potentially affecting your traffic.
Another great choice: Convert
Some A/B tools cause flickering, which displays the older version of your site or app for a quick period before loading the testing version. Flickering can slow down your loading times and cause people to leave your site before browsing it.
Convert offers flicker-free testing, allowing pages to load in about 300ms or less for first-timers or 50ms or less for subsequent loads.
To improve your site without affecting speed, think about:
- Flickering: A/B tools that work with reduced or zero flickering can help speed up page loading times when testing.
- Testing types: Some tests are more complex than others and can, therefore, slow down your site. Consider a tool with multiple types of tests and experiments to use the bare minimum of your site’s resources necessary for testing.
A/B Testing Tool Company Reviews
We spent dozens of hours over several days testing top A/B testing tools. In the end, we narrowed our options to the following five tools, determining that they meet the needs of most businesses based on their well-rounded features.
Dive into our full reviews below to find your best solution.
Optimizely – Best Overall A/B Testing Tool
Optimizely is perhaps the most robust A/B testing tool on the market, which is primarily why we chose it as our overall winner. There’s simply not a test you can’t perform on virtually any element using its website tester.
Optimizely goes beyond simple testing, although you can get as complex or stripped-down as you’d like. In addition to A/B testing, it provides multivariate and multi-page funnel testing. Test website elements, promotional campaigns, and customer experiences with Optimizely’s breadth of options.
You don’t need to be a technical wizard to use Optimizely, either. Its visual editor is one of the best with its drag-and-drop interface that results in straightforward testing and implementing experiences. Plus, saved templates help your team retest and reimplement elements quickly without coding anything new.
Because it’s so powerful, Optimizely is a pricey option that may not be the best fit for small businesses without a need for complex testing.
What Makes Optimizely Great
Optimizely includes several methods to target the right audience with split tests, ensuring that no one falls through the cracks. For instance, you can test a specific offer that pops up when a visitor clicks on a page link. Or, you can create geographic tests to experiment with location-based offers.
In addition to its strong A/B testing features that medium to large businesses can enjoy, Optimizely has some of the most in-depth reporting with excellent data insight. Deep analyses focus on the customer journey for future improvement. Its data also updates as soon as it’s available, so you’ll have it on hand when you’re ready to view it.
Optimizely currently doesn’t list its pricing for Web Experimentation on its website, so you’ll need to contact Optimizely for more information. However, users must sign up annually, which can be a significant cost consideration for some businesses.
Request a quote from Optimizely.
Google Optimize – Best Free A/B Testing Tool for Small Businesses
Small businesses and solopreneurs need optimized websites, too. However, they may not need the vast number of tools and features that larger businesses do for testing. Google Optimize has an attractive set of features for individuals and businesses falling into this category, and it’s all for free.
Like other Google products used for marketing, such as Google Analytics and Google Ads, Google Optimize fits right into the Google ecosystem for free for basic users. It includes several tools typically found in paid options, like a visual editor, split URL testing, and objective-based reporting.
Of course, it’s also designed with a Google environment in mind, as it connects directly to Analytics and Ads for seamless end-to-end operation. This is usually a good thing, but you might find that Optimize is too deep into Google if you don’t use its other tools much.
What Makes Google Optimize Great
It’s not common to get a free version of an A/B testing and optimization tool with as many features as Google Optimize has. In fact, A/B testing is just one of many of its offerings, yet its tests are fully capable of giving you the basic information you need to make decisions for your visitors.
Google Optimize also lets you test personalized experiences to decide which website version works best for specific groups of people. You can use the streamlined visual editor to set up tests and change code without actually diving into the code. You can also use its raw code editor if you are more technical.
Reports run through Google Analytics, so you’ll need an account there to get the results of your tests. The good news is that if you know your way around Google Analytics, you’ll likely have a good understanding of your test results.
Google Optimize is completely free to use and includes features like Google Ads integration, audience personalization, and user and account administration. For multivariate testing and more complex testing, you can upgrade to Optimize 360 by contacting the sales team.
Set up a free Google Optimize account today.
Apptimize – Best for Mobile App Creators
Some A/B testing tools prioritize website testing, and others focus more on mobile apps. Although Apptimize can handle both, its special focus on mobility makes it an excellent option for mobile app creators.
Apptimize creates specific tests for mobile apps, allowing you to split-test mobile forms, surveys, navigation, and other features of your app. You can also create tests for the mobile version of your website to ensure that it offers the same experience to customers using virtually any device.
One of the best features for mobile app developers is the ability to launch tests without needing to add a new version of your app to an app store. Instead, launch the test instantly via your Apptimize dashboard to get the results you need before the official version goes live.
What Makes Apptimize Great
Apptimize goes beyond just ensuring that your mobile app or website looks and functions well. It also helps button up the entire customer journey across your channels by analyzing how a change to one platform might affect your other platforms.
This happens via the comprehensive dashboard that tracks data across your channels. See whether a promotion on your website performs the same on your mobile site. And, make changes to your mobile app’s messaging that you also want to be reflected on your website without changing codes for both.
Apptimize even lets you personalize content for different mobile audiences, just like you can with other website testing and optimization tools.
Get a 30-day trial of Apptimize’s standard features. Pricing information for the paid version of Apptimize isn’t listed on its site, but you can contact support to get a free demo.
Adobe Target – Best for Personalizing the Customer Experience
The primary use of A/B testing tools is to assist you in better understanding your audience and what works for them. Adobe Target does this incredibly well through a unique suite of personalization targeting and implementation tools.
When you run a test, you can target select audiences across any of your channels, giving you insight into the precise audience you want to learn more about. Adobe Target walks you through the test setup process to ensure its success.
Then, Adobe Target takes that data and builds detailed reports down to the customer level, continuing to collect test and behavior data to improve your insight.
What Makes Adobe Target Great
Adobe Target’s personalization begins with its split-testing for specific customer groups. Then, it moves into implementation territory, helping you add winning elements to your website based on customer needs and wants.
Although your team can make changes as needed, Adobe Target’s sophisticated artificial intelligence is there as a backup. The sub-tool called Adobe Sensei uses collected data to learn what offers and products could work best for your audiences, recommending them without any extra work on your end.
Adobe Target also lets customer customize their target algorithms based on offline data they collect. This helps further improve the customer experience by allowing you to pinpoint what’s most important to your business and its customers.
Adobe Target’s pricing varies based on each business’s needs. Contact the sales team to get a quote.
Convert – Best for Multi-Client Users
Optimization agencies or freelancers working with multiple clients need a way to keep A/B tests and data organized. Convert assists multi-client users with separate databases to store information on each client or project.
Convert users can also move projects from their primary account to a client’s database and vice versa quickly and simply. Plus, varied permissions allow main accountholders to choose who can access specific data within a client’s profile.
You can also allot a specific amount of your plan’s traffic to various projects so that clients without intense testing needs don’t take up more of your resources than necessary. This can create a simpler billing process for your agency to invoice clients based on usage.
What Makes Convert Great
Create split tests, multipage experiments, or multivariate tests with Convert, ensuring that your customers get the data they need for successful optimization. Convert includes a raw code editor and visual editor to cater to users of any level, making the optimization process easier on your team and your clients.
Convert also helps you target the right audiences for tests with more than 40 targeting filters, effectively ensuring that you can meet your customers’ optimization needs, no matter what specific parameters they’re looking to test.
In addition to its targeted features for agencies, Convert also prioritizes flexible pricing, allowing agencies of all sizes to get what they need without overpaying. Convert bills based on the number of users tested annually rather than the one-price-fits-all or per-user models that many other tools require.
Convert begins at $699/month for up to six million tested users annually. Sign up for a 15-day free trial of Convert to try the Growth or Expert 1 plan. Enterprise users will need to contact the sales team for pricing.
Quick Sprout A/B Testing Tool Related Content
Understanding how A/B testing works, how to improve your A/B testing strategy, and what tools to use for A/B testing can help you make necessary changes to your websites and apps. Browse the following resources for guidance:
A/B Testing Guides and How-Tos
- Beginner’s Guide to A/B Testing
- 24 A/B Testing Ideas That You Should Try
- 15 A/B Testing Mistakes to Avoid
- How To Interpret AB Testing Results
- A/B Testing Research Tips
- How To A/B Test Ads In Google Ads
- What Should You Be A/B Testing?
- How to Start A/B Testing Your Email Marketing (A Beginner’s Guide)
A/B Testing Tool Related Top Lists
The Top A/B Testing Tools in Summary
Our research team worked hard to find the top A/B testing tools for website and app optimization. Our top A/B testing tool recommendation for most is Optimizely because of its well-rounded capabilities and features that keep it simplified when needed.
If your business doesn’t need a tool quite as intricate, try Google Optimize, a free but feature-rich testing and optimization tool that works seamlessly with other Google products you probably already use.
Source: quicksprout
Compare the Best A/B Testing Tools