8 Top Google Optimize Alternatives with Pros, Cons, & Real Reviews

Google has just dropped the bomb that they’re pulling the plug on Google Optimize come September 2023 and has no plans to bring A/B testing to GA4. This news might have sent some testers into a frenzy, but here’s the thing – it’s also a prime opportunity to raise the bar on optimization and consider more robust solutions that can meet the growing needs of the market.

In this blog post, we’ll break down the strengths and weaknesses of Google Optimize and give you the lowdown on the top contenders on the market, guiding you to make the best decision for your optimization needs.

What Is Google Optimize?

Optimize is Google’s free web optimization tool that will sunset in September 2023. As we anticipated for months, on January 20th, Google announced not only 12,000 layoffs but also its sunset.

GO is a favorite of beginner testers due to its easy-to-use interface and many basic features. But it is also notorious for its roadblocks when it comes to conducting more extensive tests:

• Only 5 tests at a time
• Only 3 goals at a time
• Only test websites, not apps
• Only test for 35 days maximum

An amazing tool, no doubt, especially when you want to get your feet wet in A/B testing without committing some funds.

Google Optimize is more of a freemium tool; a limited-feature version of Optimize 360, Google’s beefed-up optimization tool that will be discontinued in September as well.

Why Do Agencies & Businesses Invest in Google Optimize?

Even with those limitations, GO used to be the tool of choice for some agencies and businesses. And rightfully so. There are use cases where GO seems like an ideal choice:

• Learning A/B testing: If you’re just starting out A/B testing and want to get a sense of how it works, it made sense to use a tool that doesn’t cost money.
  
  Because chances are, you may not be able to generate an ROI for your testing at that stage. Any ROI you get from free products will always be 100%, as long as you learn something.

• Proving a design idea or other proposed idea: Instead of arguing back and forth about whether a design idea will work with your audience, you can just test.
  
  Also, it works if you have a small business without the marketing budget to pay for a tool. This way, you can decide if a certain change helps or hurts your bottom line before implementing the change.

• Experimentation program not mature enough: If you’re only running 1 experiment a month, it wouldn’t make sense to pay for a tool and you might just refocus on other marketing efforts to something else than A/B testing. If your experimentation program grows to where you have to run several tests a week, then you need to look for alternatives.

• Digging for insights for executive buy-in: If you’re trying to convince C-suite and other stakeholders that experimentation should become part of your company culture, you’ll need to demonstrate that without a budget. That’s where a free A/B testing tool like Google Optimize came in handy. Convert’s Basic $349 plan might be able to help with that after its sunset.

How to Choose a Google Optimize Alternative

To make the right choice for your experimentation needs, follow these 3 steps:

1. Take note of what‘s missing for you in Google Optimize and realize you need to switch before September 30th, 2023:

Take a look at what Google Optimize lacks that you need to advance your conversion rate optimization program.

Are they limitations to a higher test velocity? Do you need access to expert human support to help your team grow faster? Is it transparent pricing or do you want to have a stronger grip on privacy matters?

Whatever it is, write it down. You’ll need that to go through a list of Google Optimize alternatives.

2. Compare the alternatives:

I’ve handpicked these alternatives below considering that you’re coming from a free A/B testing platform with a beginner-friendly UI. So, they’re mild step-ups but with full-range features, so you can put limits behind you.

3. Shortlist potential candidates and test them out:

You would’ve discovered 2 or 3 tools that you’d like to try. Before you commit to learning how to use a fresh tool and paying for it, find out if it’s right for you through a demo or free trial.

Newsflash: There’s something we’re introducing to help with your assessment…

Consciousness Quotient (CQ): It is a measure of how much a company or brand cares about its impact on the planet.

For example, Patagonia’s popular “anti-growth” strategy has sustainability at its core.

In the context of A/B testing or CRO tools, this will be a company that contributes to offsetting the threats facing our planet. This is more than just using less energy and recycling everything.

It involves adopting and sticking strongly to sustainable business practices, supporting eco-friendly partners, and minimizing carbon footprint (into negative values, if they can). This way, when you use such tools, you’re optimizing and experimenting in a way that keeps the planet healthy.

Now, what are those alternatives? Considering where you’re coming from and your unique needs, what’s the most natural and beneficial A/B testing tool to switch to?

1. Convert Experiences

2. Zoho PageSense

3. Explore by Omniconvert

4. VWO Testing

5. Kameleoon

6. SiteSpect

7. Adobe Target

8. Dynamic Yield

Best Google Optimize Features

• A/B, A/B/n, Multivariate and Split URL Testing:

These are the essentials of most experimentation programs. The only limitations come when you want to run a number of these tests at the same time.

• Visual (WYSIWYG) Editor:

You don’t have to hardcode your way to any test, you could just use the visual editor to make simple changes. Whether you’re editing your headline or changing the position of a page element, you can do without writing a line of code.

• In-Built Code Editor:

What if you don’t mind writing the code? GO comes with HTML/CSS/JS code editor for your added layer of flexibility. It’s just maxed at 10,240 characters.

• Simple Beginner-Friendly UI:

Lots of features come with lots of options. Google Optimize is lightweight with only the essential features you need to run A/B, A/B/n, MVT, and split tests. So, for a beginner, it is a focused environment that doesn’t make your learning curve steeper.

• Activity Log and Experiment Scheduling:

Track changes for team collaboration or just to know what you did in the past. Also, you can manage start and end dates for your experiments ahead of time.

• Integration with Google Analytics:

Of course, it makes perfect sense that Google Analytics and Optimize will have the smoothest sync. But that’s the case 100% of the time. Regardless, this is one of the easiest integrations to implement.

As of now, there is no alternative to Google Optimize in GA4, despite Google hinting at some A/B testing features being added to its analytics product. And what is the likelihood of it being ready by September 30th?

Google Optimize & Privacy

Privacy concerns are rising and strict regulations are in play. The fines are heavy, so you’ll want to be on the safe side when A/B testing, even if it was free.

Many A/B testing vendors are gearing up for when cookies will no longer be allowed and their customers, the marketers, have got questions. You can experiment and respect visitor privacy at the same time. Convert does it.

However, is that the case with Google Optimize?

Google continues to roll out privacy-safe solutions that respect user consent choices. You’ll find them stating that they comply with local data protection laws in the country where their products and services are used.

And when handling users’ data involves third parties? They add they will work with third parties and data protection authorities to keep users’ data safe and respect consent.

Main Issues with Google Optimize

Despite Google Optimize’s benefits, there are issues that made CRO specialists and marketers shift to other tools. In fact, we’ve compiled a handy list of 9 (little known) Google Optimize limitations that further throttled testing capacity. 

But returning to the purpose of this blog, here is a re-fresher: 

1. Feature limitations

Google Optimize is a throttled version of Google Optimize 360 as you can see in the comparison chart above. The free version can only take you so far in a small experimentation program. You’ll hit a wall when you wanted more than:

• 5 tests at a time
• 3 goals at a time
• 90 days runtime
• 16 variables in multivariate tests
• 10,240 characters in the code editor

And if you want to test complex features, add goals while your test is running, and customize a Google Analytics audience, you’re just going to bump into more blockades.

We have migrated, all the customers we initially planned to migrate (two of them). Thanks to the no-limits on Convert compared to Google Optimize. If it was not for Convert we would not have been able to retain those customers.

Jonny Longden

JourneyFurther

2. The sampling issue

When you have a lot of web traffic (i.e. millions of visitors), running tests and extracting results for those tests will demand significant resources on the part of your tool.

A free tool runs on computing, network, and storage resources and for such a test, you’ll be drawing a lot of those resources. They can save on those resources with sampling – reports will load faster and they’ll spend less on infrastructure.

Google has denied sampling occurred on the free and paid version of Optimize and Analytics but optimizers still encounter the problem:

At Speero, most of the sites we work with have a rather large number of visitors, generating millions of hits every month. Naturally, most of those sites have Google Analytics and not all of them have the premium GA360 version. This means that sampling is a problem we deal with on daily basis, especially when analyzing the results of A/B tests using custom segments. Be it Optimize or some other tool, sampling is still a problem when it comes to analyzing this data in Google Analytics. That being said, the numbers you see within Google Optimize’s reports are not sampled but those don’t allow for any advanced analysis. While data in Google Optimize reports isn’t sampled and it doesn’t say it clearly in its ToC, I believe that this data is still being affected by the data collection limits mentioned in Google Analytics ToC. This belief is supported by the fact that Optimize is based on the same dataset as is Google Analytics and we’ve seen some rather weird numbers in Optimize for sites that receive massive amounts of hits (100 million and more a month).

Silver Ringvee

CTO, Speero

Furthermore, there is another pitfall that fewer optimizers know of or pay attention to. And that is the introduction of the “user” metric toggle button to the Google Analytics ecosystem. With this, you can, in theory, pull valuable user-level data that session-based metrics don’t provide.

However: 

1. This toggle button is set to “ON” by default, contrary to the documentation. 
2. The user metric setting does not provide an exact count of users, it is a probabilistic estimate. 
3. GA4 has done away with the session-based setting. This means probabilistic counts are all you get when you shift over to GA4. 
4. It will sunset on September 30th.

Georgi has done an exceptional job of explaining this in his blog.

Sampling or no sampling, Google Optimize worked on the same dataset as Google Analytics 4 might spell more inaccuracies for experimentation experts using the former free tool.

3. Lack of customer support

Being a free tool, there’s no reason for Google to pay a dedicated support team to help users with problems when using Optimize. Although they offer an extensive knowledge base and a community to answer questions you can’t find answers to, this means your solutions arrive too late. Before the shutdown was announced, hundreds of questions remained unanswered.

Only the paid 360 version offers phone, live chat, and email support.

Other A/B testing tools, like Convert Experiences, offer 24/7 support via active forums, live chat, email, and phone calls on most plans. You get to talk to a real human being without jumping through several hoops.

4. Tested visitor count inflation

When someone visits your site in the morning and logs back in 5 hours later, Google Optimize and Analytics record that as two unique visits. That’s because sessions are recorded as lasting 30 minutes to 4 hours.

Why so short? To minimize the use of resources for a free tool.

You can imagine how this inflates the number of unique visitors and ruins your conversion rate.

5. Problem with flicker

Flicker is when a visitor gets a glimpse of the original page before the variant loads on their browser. This is a common problem, but most testing tool vendors have figured it out and now offer flicker-free testing.

But Google Optimize’s solution is quite different. Instead of being an in-built feature, it requires you to install an anti-flicker snippet that affects your page loading time significantly. This problem won’t only mess with the user experience but will also impact your site’s SEO.

6. Real-Time: Reality or Illusion?

There is no doubt here. Google’s documentation states this, loud and clear. There can be up to a 12-hour delay between the time an event (conversion) occurs in the Google Optimize served experiment, and when it shows up in the reports. 

This is because the data is first pushed to Analytics for processing, and then sent to the Google Optimize reports. 

Can you really wait for half a day to get insights (when needed)? Or to potentially spot a problem in the experiment setup? Isn’t A/B testing supposed to make you agile?

Next Steps

Google Optimize was a great tool while it lasted, but don’t wait until the last minute to switch. With the tool no longer being updated, it’s important to find a replacement as soon as possible. There are many A/B testing alternatives that have the features you need in the list above.

Take note of the features that matter most to you and are missing from Google Optimize. Shortlist the tools that meet that need and then weigh them against your criteria. I’m willing to bet your next A/B testing tool is on this list. Bookmark it.