A/B Testing Tools Compared, and the Self-Serve Way to Skip Straight to Variants
Testing tools tell you which version won. They do not tell you what to try, and they need traffic you may not have. Here is the field compared, and the faster route to variants worth testing.
Why this tends to convert:
Data-informed, not guarantees
Where each one fits
A/B testing tools are the right call when you have the traffic and the time to run rigorous experiments. Products like VWO and Optimizely let you split traffic, measure lift with statistical confidence, and roll out winners, and for high-traffic teams that discipline is genuinely valuable. The tradeoff is that testing tools require installing a JS snippet before you get any value, most are sales-gated at thousands per year, and, crucially, they make you design the variations yourself, they run the test, but you still have to write and build what you are testing. Converto comes in one step earlier. It audits the live page you already have with nothing to install, then generates the variants for you, so you arrive at a test with ready-to-ship options instead of a blank editor. It is self-serve from $19/mo. If you later want to run a formal test, a tracking snippet is optional. Suggestions are data-informed, not guarantees.
Side by side
Converto vs A/B testing tools
| Capability | Converto | A/B testing tools |
|---|---|---|
| Needs a JS snippet to get value | Optional | |
| Generates the variations for you | ||
| Audits an existing live URL | Partial | |
| Self-serve, no sales call | Often gated | |
| Runs statistically rigorous split tests | Optional snippet | |
| Priced for one person | From $19/mo | Often enterprise |
| Suggestions framed as data-informed, not guaranteed | Often "+X% lift" |
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Comparison reflects general product positioning and is provided in good faith. Verify current capabilities with each vendor.
A/B testing tools compared in 2026
The useful way to sort this category is not by feature count. It is by who operates the tool day to day, because that decides whether it gets used after month two. A marketer-operated visual tester and an engineer-operated SDK are not competing products even when the pricing pages look similar. Every price below was read at the vendor's own page in August 2026, with reported figures labeled.
| Tool | Who operates it | Published entry price | Meter | Free option |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Optimizely | Experimentation lead plus engineers | None published | Monthly tracked users (reported) | No |
| VWO | Marketer, with a visual editor | None published as of 2026 | Monthly tracked users | 30-day trial only |
| AB Tasty | Marketer plus CSM | None published | Not published | No |
| Adobe Target | Enterprise team inside Adobe | None published | Not published | No |
| Convert Experiences | Marketer, with a visual editor | $299/mo annual, $399 monthly | 100,000 tested users/mo | 15-day trial, no card |
| Kameleoon | Marketer plus engineers | Not published at source | Tested visitors (reported) | 30-day trial (reported) |
| GrowthBook | Engineer or data team | Free, then $40 per seat/mo | Seats, not traffic | Yes, open source and 3-user cloud |
| Statsig | Product engineer | Free, then $150/mo | Metered events | Yes, 2M events/mo |
| PostHog | Product engineer | Free, then usage-based | Events, recordings, flag requests | Yes, 1M events/mo |
| LaunchDarkly | Platform or release engineer | Free, then $10 per service connection/mo | Connections and client-side MAU | Yes, Developer plan |
Read that column of operators before the price column. Buying an SDK-first platform for a two-person marketing team is the most common failure in this category, and it fails quietly: the tool gets installed, two tests get shipped in the first month, and then it sits there because every experiment needs a developer ticket.
Client-side or server-side: the split that decides your shortlist
Almost every disappointing A/B testing purchase traces back to picking the wrong side of this line, and most comparison articles do not mention it at all.
| Client-side (visual editor) | Server-side (SDK or flags) | |
|---|---|---|
| How a variant is made | Point and click in a WYSIWYG editor | Written in code behind a flag |
| Who can ship a test | A marketer, alone | An engineer, in a release |
| What it can change | Copy, layout, images, CTAs | Anything, including pricing logic and algorithms |
| Flicker risk | Real, the page repaints after the script loads | None, the server renders the variant |
| Effect on page speed | A blocking script before render | Negligible |
| Typical tools | VWO, Convert, AB Tasty, Optimizely Web | GrowthBook, Statsig, PostHog, LaunchDarkly, Optimizely Feature Experimentation |
If your tests are headline, offer, layout, and CTA changes, you want client-side and a visual editor, and the flicker and speed costs are the price of admission. If you are testing checkout logic, search ranking, or pricing, you want server-side and you will need engineering time regardless of which vendor you pick. Teams that need both usually end up paying for both, which is worth knowing before the first quote arrives.
Do you have enough traffic to A/B test?
This is the question that decides the purchase for more readers than price does, and no vendor page raises it. Check it before you shortlist anything.
| Monthly visits to the page | What a testing tool can realistically do | What to do instead |
|---|---|---|
| Under 10,000 | A two-way test takes over a year to resolve | Do not buy a testing tool yet |
| 10,000 to 50,000 | Only large changes, and only on your best page | Fix known problems directly, test the big swings |
| 50,000 to 200,000 | Real testing on top pages, a few tests a quarter | Buy one, start with the highest-traffic page |
| 200,000 and up | A continuous program with a roadmap | Buy the suite, hire for it |
The working rule is about 1,000 conversions per variation per month. On a page converting at 2 percent, detecting a 10 percent lift needs roughly 50,000 visitors per variation. Most calculators quietly assume you are chasing lifts of 10 percent or more, and real lifts are usually smaller than that, which makes the requirement larger rather than smaller. A page seeing 8,000 visits a month will not produce a trustworthy result inside a year, and by then the offer, the page, and the traffic mix have all changed.
What the free A/B testing tools actually give you
When Google Optimize shut down on September 30, 2023 with no direct replacement, the standard advice was to move to VWO's free plan. That plan is reported to be ending. Here is what genuinely free looks like now.
- GrowthBook: free open source self-hosted with unlimited experiments, plus a free cloud tier for up to three users. Meters seats rather than traffic, which inverts the economics for a high-traffic site.
- PostHog: 1 million events, 5,000 web recordings, and 1 million feature flag requests a month, free, with no platform fee.
- Statsig: 2 million events a month, unlimited flag checks, 50,000 session replays, and a year of analytics retention on the free Developer plan.
- LaunchDarkly: a free forever Developer plan with unlimited seats, built for release control rather than conversion testing.
- Microsoft Clarity: free, unlimited sessions, heatmaps and recordings, and no A/B testing whatsoever. Worth running alongside anything on this list.
Every one of those is engineer-shaped except Clarity, and Clarity cannot run a test. There is no longer a free, marketer-operated, visual A/B testing tool of the kind Optimize was. That is the actual gap in the 2026 market, and it has not been filled.
Who will actually show you a price
Five of the biggest names in web experimentation publish no price at all: Optimizely, VWO, AB Tasty, Adobe Target, and Kameleoon, whose pricing URL does not resolve. AB Tasty is the most striking of those, because it does publish a ten-question pricing FAQ and still names no figure, which we take apart in what AB Tasty actually costs. Every tool that does publish a full table is developer-first, open-source-rooted, or free: Convert Experiences, GrowthBook, PostHog, Statsig, LaunchDarkly, and Microsoft Clarity.
Price transparency in this category tracks almost perfectly with whether the product is sold to a marketer with a company card or to a procurement department. VWO used to be the counterexample. It removed its public figures in 2026, which means the shortlist a marketing team can price without booking a call is now down to one client-side option.
What changed in this category since 2023
Most A/B testing tool roundups were assembled from lists that are several corporate events out of date, so it is worth checking a vendor's current state before you invest a quarter in migrating to it.
| Tool | What changed | When |
|---|---|---|
| Google Optimize | Shut down with no direct replacement | September 30, 2023 |
| Heap | Acquired by Contentsquare | December 2023 |
| Hotjar | Folded into Contentsquare, hotjar.com now redirects there | 2024 to 2026 |
| Statsig | Acquired by OpenAI, then brand and customer base handed to Amplitude while the team stayed at OpenAI | September 2025, then May 5, 2026 |
| VWO and AB Tasty | Combined under Everstone Capital, reported over $100M ARR and 4,000 customers | January 20, 2026 |
| VWO | Public prices removed, free Starter plan reported ending | 2026 |
What A/B testing tools do not do
A testing platform is a measuring instrument. It tells you which of two things you already built performs better, at a given confidence level, on the traffic you already have. It does not tell you what to try, it will not write the variant, and it cannot manufacture sample size. Those three gaps are why so many testing subscriptions go quiet after the first quarter: the tool is fine, the pipeline of ideas ran out.
That is the step Converto covers. Paste a live URL and it audits the copy, layout, calls to action, page speed, and AI-readability, scores the page, ranks the leaks by likely impact, and writes ready-to-ship headline, CTA, and body variants. Nothing to install, no traffic minimum, self-serve from $19/mo. If you have the volume to test, you arrive at your testing tool with variants worth testing instead of a blank editor. If you do not, the fixes still get made. Suggestions are data-informed, not guarantees.
Picking one
Marketing team, needs a published price and a visual editor. Convert Experiences. It is the only client-side platform in the category that still shows a full table. See the Convert comparison.
Product team with engineers and a warehouse. GrowthBook, Statsig, or PostHog, all with usable free tiers.
Enterprise with governance requirements. Optimizely, AB Tasty, Adobe Target, or Kameleoon. Budget for a procurement cycle and a quote you cannot preview.
Leaving VWO. Start with the best VWO alternatives roundup, which prices the whole field and works out what replacing each half of the suite actually costs, or the VWO alternative page for the head-to-head.
Leaving Optimizely. The best Optimizely alternatives roundup covers nine replacements on published pricing, and Optimizely pricing explains what buyers report paying.
Replacing Google Optimize. Start with the best Google Optimize alternatives roundup, which prices ten replacements at their own pages and shows what happened to the three successors Google itself named. The Google Optimize alternative page and what replaced Google Optimize cover the head-to-head and the migration.
Not enough traffic to test. Read A/B test sample size first, then fix the page directly with a landing page audit. The wider category map is on best CRO tools.
Last updated August 2026
Questions
A/B testing tools alternative questions
It depends on who operates it. For a marketing team that wants a visual editor and a published price, Convert Experiences at $299 a month billed annually is now the only client-side option you can price without a sales call. For product teams with engineers, GrowthBook, Statsig, and PostHog all have real free tiers. For enterprise governance, Optimizely and Adobe Target.
The range is wider than in any comparable category. GrowthBook, PostHog, Statsig, and LaunchDarkly all have free tiers. Convert Experiences publishes $299 a month billed annually, or $399 monthly, for 100,000 tested users. Optimizely, VWO, AB Tasty, and Adobe Target publish nothing, and buyer-reported enterprise contracts for Optimizely run from roughly $36,000 a year.
As a working rule, at least 1,000 conversions per variation per month, which on a page converting at 2 percent means roughly 50,000 visitors per variation to detect a 10 percent lift. Under 10,000 monthly visits, a two-way test takes over a year to resolve. Most calculators assume lifts of 10 percent or more, and real lifts are usually smaller.
Yes, but they are all engineer-operated. GrowthBook is free open source and free for three cloud users. PostHog includes 1 million events and 1 million flag requests a month. Statsig includes 2 million events and 50,000 replays. Microsoft Clarity is free but runs no tests. There is no free marketer-operated visual testing tool since Google Optimize closed.
No. Google Optimize and Optimize 360 shut down on September 30, 2023, and Google released no direct replacement, pointing users to third-party partners integrated with GA4 instead. Most former users moved to VWO, Optimizely, Convert, or open-source options like GrowthBook. The free path out of Optimize has narrowed further since VWO's free plan was reported to be ending.
Client-side tests are built in a visual editor and applied by a JavaScript snippet after the page loads, so a marketer can ship one alone but the page can flicker and load slower. Server-side tests are written in code behind a feature flag, so they need engineering time but can change anything, including pricing and checkout logic, with no flicker.
Often not, at least not first. Testing measures which of two options wins, but it cannot tell you what to try and it cannot manufacture sample size. On a small site the higher-return move is to fix the clear conversion problems, a vague headline, a buried CTA, a long form, a slow load, and start testing once volume supports it.
VWO combined with AB Tasty under Everstone Capital in January 2026, removed every dollar figure from its public pricing page, and its free Starter plan is reported to be ending with new signups routed to a 30-day trial. No sunset or migration has been announced for either product, but VWO is no longer a tool you can price without creating an account.
Other comparisons
Paste your page and see what is leaking
Drop in any live URL and Converto audits the copy, layout, CTAs, speed, and AI-readability of the page you already have, then hands you ready-to-ship variants to lift signups and sales. Self-serve pricing, no snippet, no sales call. Suggestions are data-informed, not guarantees. Decide for yourself.