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 Experimentation experiments often focus on goals like optimizing conversion rates in marketing or purchasing funnels.

Optimizely Feature Experimentation is an experimentation tool for any device with an internet connection. It is for 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 work to optimize products for metrics like engagement, retention, usage, and lifetime value.

Technical skill

Optimizely Web Experimentation does not require users to have high technical knowledge. It allows users with a WYSIWYG visual editor to build experiments. You can take your idea from hypothesis to completed experiment without writing a single line of code.

Optimizely Feature Experimentation is more complex. You set up server-side and client-side experiments by writing new code and deploying it on your organization's servers or clients. These tasks are preferred for skilled developers.

Snippet versus SDK

Optimizely Web Experimentation's implementation is straightforward. You add a single line of code—the snippet—to the code of any page where you want to run an experiment.

Optimizely Feature Experimentation has 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 should use Optimizely Web Experimentation. It is the fastest way to test the look and feel (layouts, messaging, and colors) of your site's user experience with no required code or releases.

By contrast, Optimizely Feature Experimentation makes it easy to test underlying features, business transactions, and complex algorithms—how your product works. Deploying an experiment in Optimizely Feature Experimentation is not as fast as in Optimizely Web Experimentation; you must adhere to code release standard practices, like code reviews and testing.

Single-channel versus multi-channel

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

Performance

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

Learn more

See the developer documentation or Optimizely's blog posts to find out more about Optimizely Feature Experimentation.