What to expect when you migrate from Optimizely Web Experimentation to Optimizely Feature Experimentation

Growth-focused versus product-focused

Optimizely Web Experimentation is a client-side experimentation tool for marketing or growth teams. It is accessible even without strong technical skills. Optimizely Web experiments often focus on goals like optimizing conversion rates in marketing or purchasing funnels.

Optimizely Feature Experimentation, on the other hand, is an experimentation tool for any device with an internet connection. It is aimed at product development teams who want to experiment with their product and its features without incurring any performance degradation. Optimizely Feature Experimentation users are less concerned with conversion rate optimization and instead work to optimize products for metrics like engagement, retention, usage, and lifetime value.

Technical skill

As we mentioned, Optimizely Web Experimentation does not require users to have high technical sophistication. It provides users with a WYSIWYG visual editor for building experiments. That means you can take your idea from hypothesis to completed experiment without writing a single line of code.

But it is more complex when it comes to Optimizely Feature Experimentation. Setting up server-side and client-side experiments with Optimizely Feature Experimentation often involves writing new code and deploying it on your organization's servers or clients, tasks best suited for skilled developers.

Snippet versus SDK

With Optimizely Web Experimentation, implementation is very straightforward. Just add a single line of code—the snippet—to the code of any page where you want to run an experiment.

With Optimizely Feature Experimentation, there is no snippet. Instead, it relies on SDKs in a variety of popular development languages.

Speed versus depth

If you focus on optimizing various aspects of your site's interfaces, you want to use Optimizely Web Experimentation. It is the fastest way to test the look and feel—layouts, messaging, colors—of your site's user experience, with no code or releases required.

By contrast, Optimizely Feature Experimentation's approach makes it easy to test underlying features, business transactions, and complex algorithms—in other words, how your product works. But deploying an experiment in Feature Experimentation is not as fast as in Optimizely Web Experimentation; you will need to adhere to code release standard practices, like code reviews and testing.

Single-channel versus multi-channel

The experiments you build with Optimizely Web Experimentation will usually run in one channel, usually your organization's website. Optimizely Feature Experimentation lets you experiment across multiple channels simultaneously—web, mobile, SMS, and email, for example.

Performance

Despite its complexity, you may get better performance from Optimizely Feature Experimentation than from Optimizely Web Experimentation. That is because server-side experimentation can be more efficient than experimenting in the browser, which can sometimes affect page load times or induce a slight flickering effect.

Learn more

To find out more about Optimizely Feature Experimentation, you can see the Developer Documentation or Optimizely's blog posts.