An A/B testing tool compares two versions of a website, app, or page to determine the best-performing version of all tested variants. It’s usually done with a control version (A), which gets compared to a variant (B) to measure their performance based on the click-through rate (CTR), the bounce rate, the conversion rate, and the scroll depth.
Right now, there’s no shortage of mediocre and borderline unusable A/B testing tools. A truly superior A/B testing tool dons the following qualities:
- Security and compliance—GDPR, HIPAA, and ADA compliance are necessary prerequisites for any modern A/B testing tool, as well as robust security to prevent unwanted parties from accessing your visitors’ data.
- User-friendly interface—A strong A/B testing tool should be easy, intuitive, and friendly for both newcomers and experienced professionals to use. Ideally, it’ll have a choice between a WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get) for the non-coding crowd and a more advanced user interface (UI) to satiate the A/B appetites of power users.
- Advanced targeting and segmentation—A best-in-class A/B tool should allow detailed market segmentation, enabling you to run tests on specific user data (location, device, traffic source) for better results.
- Easy API integration—Uninterrupted integration with other analytics tools, CMSs, and CRMs, as well as offering API/SDK access for automation and custom workflows—is a must.
- Performance and scalability—The A/B testing tool should be able to support your organization as your business needs continue to grow, whether that means running high-volume tests, supporting multiple domains, or handling a sizable data flow at the same time.
Here’s a list of the 7 best A/B testing tools you can use right now.
1. Crazy Egg: Best Overall
Pricing:
- 30-day free trial, you can cancel at any time.
- Up to $499/month for an enterprise-level solution, covering all your testing and experimentation needs.
What I personally LIKE about Crazy Egg:
- A quick and easy installation setup skips any unnecessary friction, enabling users to jump straight into A/B testing without overcoming, as it’s often the case with other unoptimized tools, arbitrarily manufactured obstacles.
- Its codeless approach is optimal for non-technical users, allowing you to identify experiment goals (button clicks, form submissions, landing page hits, different headlines) with ease.
- A combination of Crazy Egg’s Visual Page Editor (ideal for first-time users) and the ability to directly modify HTML, CSS, or JavaScript code for any page element (optional for advanced users), contributes to a complete A/B testing package in a single tool.
What I personally DISLIKE about Crazy Egg:
- Users may need to set up new snapshots after editing a page during a live test, necessitating a quick user training before you become fluent in the ongoing workflow.
- Preemptive cancellation ends the free trial immediately, which might seem abrupt and confuse some users; however, retrying is just as easy, requiring a single click to enable the account’s full capabilities again.
- Very large reports might take a longer time to load.
As one of the pioneering solutions in web marketing and analytics, Crazy Egg continues to wow its user base thanks to its robust and varied toolset (heatmaps, surveys, session replays), detailed reports, and lightning-quick implementation, delivering outstanding user experience and ensuring incremental yet realistic conversion rate improvements.
Specifically, Crazy Egg’s A/B testing module allows you to swap out different pages, images, or CTA variants to determine the best-performing items against the control variant. It also allows you to add or edit different web elements during a live test, skipping any waiting time you could allocate to growing your business instead.
Additionally, Crazy Egg allows you to monitor user behavior in real time, which is very helpful in identifying problem areas or hidden friction points on your site. For example, if a user gets lost navigating your website, you can go back and fix the contentious navigational roadblock to enable a seamless UX in future site visits.
Apart from a few UI quirks and a limited free trial option, Crazy Egg is a top-three contender for the best A/B testing tool out there and likely the most cost-effective option for small and medium-sized businesses today.
Target Audience: Crazy Egg is an excellent choice for both beginner users and advanced web marketers who want to get the powerful capabilities of a cutting-edge A/B testing software, bundled together with the simplicity of a modern UI and the affordability of a budget-friendly option in a single package.
2. GrowthBook: Best for Users on a Budget
Pricing:
- Free unlimited traffic and unlimited feature flags with its Starter plan, but no visual A/B tests.
- Up to $20/month with GrowthBook’s Pro plan, including visual A/B tests, advanced analytics, and premium support.
What I personally LIKE about GrowthBook:
- Integrates well with other analytics tools, enabling seamless data integration, experimentation, and synchronization across multiple platforms.
- Given the project’s open-source nature, GrowthBook’s contributors are quick to respond to any customer issues within a reasonable time frame.
- Very cost-effective considering the platform’s full range of offerings.
What I personally DISLIKE about GrowthBook:
- The UI can be hard to navigate at times, creating a steeper learning curve for users who are new to the A/B testing environment.
- While commendable, its API capabilities are limited in certain areas, potentially hindering advanced customization and automation.
- The technical documentation is inadequate, making it challenging to utilize all of the tool’s features without resorting to external help.
GrowthBook is an open-source feature flagging, data experimentation, and A/B testing platform created to help individuals and teams facilitate product development through data-centered testing. The platform is warehouse native, which means it works with your data wherever it may live, giving you full control even in the case of a vendor lock-in. GrowthBook integrates with the most popular analytics tools, including Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Mixpanel, and notable SQL data sources.
Compared to the other tools on this list, GrowthBook has a noticeably steeper learning curve associated with the platform’s advanced features, requiring a greater time investment to successfully complete an advanced project. Plus, its technical documentation is lacking in specific areas, such as the application’s multi-org setup and issues related to restricted access on BigQuery accounts.
Despite these minor inconveniences, GrowthBook’s open community, continuous improvements, and its unique features (like the ability to add metrics retroactively or use SQL to write a specific metric) make it a reliable A/B testing tool for teams that value data-driven experimentation.
Target Audience: GrowthBook is the ideal pick for experienced A/B testing users and open-source enthusiasts, who, occasionally, like to tinker and experiment to get the results they want at a cost-effective price point.
3. Optimizely: Best for AI-Enthusiasts
Pricing:
- Customizable pricing range, adaptable to any user or team’s specific needs. You must reach out to get a quote.
What I personally LIKE about Optimizely:
- Its set of enterprise-level features, such as project organization, role-based tool access, and easy integration with external tools like JIRA, makes Optimizely an effective solution for large organizations with multiple teams.
- On top of the tool’s standard support for A/B, multivariate, and multi-armed bandit testing, Optimizely is also equipped with powerful web experimentation capabilities that work in concert with the tool’s AI-driven assistance to produce reliable and trustworthy reports.
- Fast deployment, real-time results, low server latency, and flicker-free testing allow for rapid decision-making and on-the-fly iteration.
What I personally DISLIKE about Optimizely:
- GA4 integration is somewhat limited, leading to data syncing issues if you’re planning on consulting web traffic sources from multiple platforms simultaneously.
- The UI workflow can be further refined, as sometimes you might end up going back and forth to set up a new test.
- Fees are traffic-based instead of tier-based, which might dissuade smaller businesses from using the tool in favor of established companies with bigger budgets.
Optimizely is an AI-assisted web and feature experimentation platform, with a strong emphasis on A/B, multivariate, and multi-armed bandit testing across multiple channels and devices. It’s incredibly easy to implement: simply pasting a short code snippet on pages where you want to perform tests works seamlessly. You can run tests as soon as Optimizely is properly set up.
One of Optimizely’s major selling points is its AI-driven experimentation functionality. The tool utilizes artificial intelligence to suggest variation ideas, gather data insights, and automatically move traffic to winning variations. Another notable feature is the platform’s reliance on content delivery networks (CDNs) to reduce lag, minimize latency, and deliver flicker-free pages for a consistent user experience.
Lastly, Optimizely includes a drag-and-drop visual editor that helps non-technical users create tests without needing any prior coding experience, facilitating a welcoming environment for rookie marketers.
Target Audience: AI digital marketing proponents will especially appreciate Optimizely’s broad feature set, as it helps developers overcome testing bottlenecks by instantly generating variations with a single click.
4. LaunchDarkly: Best for Quick Feature Rollouts
Pricing:
- Free forever for developers. Includes feature flagging and up to 100K monthly user test views.
- Up to $10/month to sign up for its Foundation tier, but could be more for large enterprises and product/feature releases at scale.
What I personally LIKE about LaunchDarkly:
- Gradual rollout for high-impact product features reduces the risk if and when things don’t go as planned, minimizing potential damage for worst-case scenarios and defining a strong separation between feature rollout and final deployment.
- Setting up experiments, creating new metrics, and viewing results is easy and intuitive, even when running multiple tests side by side.
- Advanced real-time toggling, coupled with a rich SDK ecosystem and low API latency, makes the tool an important part of any tester’s toolkit.
What I personally DISLIKE about LaunchDarkly:
- It can become quite complex to use at scale.
- Limited integration with external platforms like Zapier and HubSpot.
- Segments and release features could be further refined for simplicity.
Aside from the included essential kit every testing tool should provide (A/B and multivariate experimentation), LaunchDarkly is further enriched with a straightforward, silo-less system that allows teams from a wide range of industries to create and run valid tests on the go.
For example, one of the platform’s flagship features, funnily enough, comes in the form of its feature flags module. In digital marketing and experimentation, a feature flag approach is an application development technique where certain program features are automatically toggled on or off without making permanent changes to the code. An aspiring testing and experimentation platform without a feature flag capability will be at a disadvantage to competitors who offer this service.
Beyond A/B testing and feature flags, LaunchDarkly also supports funnel optimization experiments to identify and fix any blind spots in the customer’s journey, improving your conversion rate in the long run.
Target Audience: LaunchDarkly is the optimal choice for application development teams that require a clear separation between feature rollouts and deployment, capped off with a block/killswitch feature to keep unwarranted setbacks from bogging down the UX.
5. Statsig: Best for Large Dataset Testing
Pricing:
- Free Developer tier plan, includes 2M event sessions/month, unlimited flags, and 50K replay sessions or replays/month.
- Up to $150 to get the Pro subscription. Comes with 5M events/month, unlimited flags, and 100K session replays/month.
What I personally LIKE about Statsig:
- Delivers all four major aspects a contemporary QA specialist needs to achieve growth through testing, including experimentation, product analytics, session replays, and feature flagging.
- An accessible, intuitive, and friendly UI makes every project a breeze to work on, and integration is just as quick and straightforward to implement.
- It has excellent customer support, robust documentation, and a YouTube series to smooth out the onboarding process and reduce the learning curve for new users.
What I personally DISLIKE about Statsig:
- Its out-of-the-box testing templates lack the option for deeper granulation and data segmentation.
- Metric repopulation can sometimes override existing setups in new experiments, warranting a more careful approach while creating a new template or cloning an existing experiment.
- It’s designed with data science at its core rather than pure A/B testing, which means it has additional features that many conversion specialists will never use.
As Microsoft, Atlassian, and OpenAI’s tool of choice, Statsig is one of the most well-renowned testing and experimentation platforms today. It packs an unparalleled set of capabilities, including all popular test types (A/B, A/B/n multivariate, funnel experiments), as well as complex test designs (sequential, switchback, multi-armed bandit) to enable a precise measurement of feature impact and user behavior on your site.
Additionally, Statsig supports growth at scale, allowing individuals and organizations to run multiple complex experiments concurrently. For teams looking to deepen their experimentation practices, Notion’s preferred testing platform offers a comprehensive foray into advanced capabilities—cohort A/B testing being one of them.
Cohort A/B testing is a hybrid experimentation method that groups users into cohorts, compares their behavior, and tries to identify repeatable patterns over time. Unlike traditional A/B testing, which tracks short-term metrics, cohort-based A/B tests are designed to measure changes that occur over a larger time frame, giving you a more complete picture of your site or app’s performance.
Target Audience: Statsig is great for product managers, engineers, and enterprise-level teams that require reliable experimentation tools at scale for rapid product testing, product iteration, and data analysis.
6. Unbounce: Best for Quick Content Iteration
Pricing:
- 14-day free trial.
- Up to $187/month to get all the advanced testing features, or more for enterprise-level plans.
What I personally LIKE about Unbounce:
- While non-technical folks might find it a bit daunting at first glance, you can easily pick up on its drag-and-drop UI after some hands-on time with the tool.
- Advanced A/B features like page variant duplication and traffic splitting are just a few clicks away, rendering an enjoyable UX all around.
- One of the best-performing tools on this list when it comes to page speed and report delivery, with servers that are automatically configured to meet your needs.
What I personally DISLIKE about Unbounce:
- Pages that haven’t been updated since February 3rd, 2023, won’t work with Google Analytics 4.
- It can get a bit expensive, especially if you’re serving a high number of monthly visitors on your pages.
- The platform’s design philosophy errs more on the cautious side, which can lead to a slower adoption of new features.
While advertised as a powerful page-building platform, Unbounce’s A/B testing prowess is nothing to sneeze at. It comes with all the tools and features a professional experimentation software needs, and then some.
In particular, its AI-powered Smart Copy and Smart Traffic features can offer ideas, tips, and suggestions to create the best possible version of your copy. From there, you can jump straight into testing to distill it even further using real-time visitor feedback. Technically, you can do this until you’re completely satisfied with your results, as the platform supports unlimited page variant testing and iteration.
On top of that, Unbounce offers a fully unlocked 14-day free trial to take the platform for a spin and determine whether it’s the right choice for your team.
Target Audience: Unbounce is particularly suitable for digital marketers, bloggers, and organizations that warrant agility, adaptability, and effective conversion strategies in their projects. It’s also great for building and testing out new landing pages on the fly.
7. AB Tasty: Best Add-On for GA4 Power Users
Pricing:
- Customizable pricing plan depending on your needs. You must reach out to get a quote.
What I personally LIKE about AB Tasty:
- Modern, slick, and intuitive UI provides a welcoming A/B environment for pop-up, banner, page text, and CTA testing.
- Tool flexibility allows for quick variant changes (like the size and color of a button) without deploying live code.
- Rapid test deployment, shared use case feature, and quick integration create even more incentives to pick AB Tasty over its competing rivals.
What I personally DISLIKE about AB Tasty:
- In some cases, performing more complicated tests calls for additional knowledge of development code.
- Selecting the correct div element to test on a page might need some trial-and-error to get it right.
- Viewing the tests might be challenging on different devices, such as a tablet or a mobile device.
In addition to its core testing features, AB Tasty offers an improved approach to experimentation, in large part driven by its Bayesian statistics engine. Bayesian A/B testing is a slightly more evolved experimentation methodology, or one where your results constantly adapt to reflect the current state of the collected testing data.
Another standout feature is the tool’s sequential testing alert. It detects underperforming variations early in the testing phase, using a customizable sensitivity threshold you configure yourself.
Lastly, AB Tasty is currently one of only three recommended A/B testing alternatives in GA4’s official statement on the sunsetting of Google Optimize, which must stand for something, right?
Target Audience: AB Tasty can help SaaS providers, digital marketing agencies, and ecommerce shops refine their products through rapid feature iteration, paving the way for serving highly personalized content based on real user behavior and feedback.
My Verdict: Which Is the Best A/B Testing Tool?
After all’s said and done, ONE A/B testing tool has to come out on top. In this case, there are THREE main categories in which the listed tools excel.
Best Overall: Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg’s A/B Testing Tool is the overall winner of the pack. Its lightning-fast setup, intuitive visual editor, and native GA4 integration gel together to make testing quick, easy, and error-proof. Other notable features include multi-armed bandit testing, fully customizable conversion goals, advanced editing with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, plus codeless element swapping for hassle-free tweaks.
Best for product feature rollouts: LaunchDarkly
As an industry-leading feature management testing and experimentation platform, LaunchDarkly’s strengths easily surpass its setbacks, offering a tried-and-true approach to multivariate (A/B/n) testing, traffic segmentation, and a rapid feature shipping workflow for quick deployment. It’s my preferred choice for the best feature rollout tool.
Best for conversion specialists on a budget: GrowthBook
GrowthBook is the most cost-effective option on the list, offering unlimited feature flags and traffic included in its free plan. It’s a reliable choice for conversion specialists, product managers, and startup founders looking to get the most out of their testing tools without breaking their wallets.
Why Trust Crazy Egg?
Crazy Egg’s toolset has stood the test of time, earning its reputation as a dependable testing platform backed by 100+ glowing reviews from real users on G2, TrustRadius, and Capterra. In fact, even one of its direct competitors—Hotjar—has called Crazy Egg easier and simpler to use. Combine that with its impressive range of premier experimentation features, and it’s 100% clear: Crazy Egg isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
