Optimizely vs. Croct: choose your personalization platform

With countless tools on the market, finding one that aligns with your goals and adapts to individual user behavior can feel overwhelming. The right platform should not only streamline this process but also enhance your site’s performance by delivering relevant content in real time. As personalization becomes increasingly critical for success, it's essential to choose a solution that balances ease of use with the ability to scale as your strategy evolves.

Optimizely originally started as an AB testing tool and has since become a go-to solution for growth professionals looking to optimize and personalize digital experiences. After years of leading in this space, it was acquired by Episerver, a well-known headless CMS. So, if you've been researching CMS platforms or AB testing tools, chances are you've come across Optimizely and might be considering it.

Croct, on the other hand, was built with website personalization as its core and is quickly becoming a top option for creating dynamic sites. Focused on making personalization accessible for businesses of all sizes—not just industry giants like Netflix or Amazon—Croct is emerging as a key player for mid-sized companies looking to enhance their website experiences.

In this comparison, we'll dive into the pros and cons of Croct and Optimizely to help you decide which one is right for taking your personalization efforts to the next level.

Comparative table

Here’s a snapshot of the differences and similarities between Croct and Optimizely. Afterward, we’ll dive into some of the key points in more detail.

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Pricing

Optimizely is an enterprise-focused company, which means you can expect higher prices. They don't disclose pricing on their website, but some user reviews say you can expect to pay a minimum of $36,000 per year for the smallest plan. Depending on your needs and plan features, your plan can easily reach $200,000+ annually.

Croct, on the other hand, starts at $800 per month, or $8,400 per year. Besides disclosing prices on our website, we also offer a forever-free plan for websites with up to 10,000 monthly visitors.

Market position

Enterprise e-commerce solutions often come with a wide range of features but may not specialize in any one area. Optimizely positions itself as an all-in-one marketing operating system, aiming to enhance the entire lifecycle of digital experiences, which can be costly due to the need for multiple technologies.

Is your business an enterprise e-commerce platform looking to tackle various problems simultaneously? Optimizely might be a suitable option to help you consolidate channel management.

However, if you’re a medium or large business seeking to create advanced, personalized experiences intuitively without relying on numerous integrations and at an affordable cost, Croct is likely a better fit.

Server-side experiments

Optimizely supports static content rendering on the server side, but personalization and AB test variations are managed on the client side. This means that, similar to many no-code CRO tools, it overlays the default content. Running tests on the user's browser can negatively impact tracking and page load speed—factors that directly affect SEO. For more on this, check out our blog post about how visual editors affect website performance.

Croct, on the other hand, enables server-side testing for both static and personalized content, avoiding flickering and other performance issues.

Test analysis method

Optimizely uses a frequentist approach for analyzing experiments. This method has limitations, such as not allowing you to determine a winning content variant until the test is completed, among other drawbacks.

Croct employs a Bayesian approach, which is widely regarded as the industry standard for AB testing. Here’s why many companies prefer this method:

• You can identify a winning variant before the estimated end of the experiment
• Metrics are more granular
• Results are more precise
• Interpreting results is simpler

Integrations and APIs

Optimizely was initially developed solely for AB testing but later added personalization as a key feature. Acquired by Episerver in 2020, the integration of these products remains complex, with separate APIs for AB testing and site personalization.

On the other hand, Croct offers a unified API and a streamlined integration process, allowing developers to set up quickly, often within a few hours. This reduces implementation costs and accelerates time-to-launch.

Multi-armed bandit testing

Optimizely’s AB testing tool uses a multi-armed bandit algorithm to automatically reallocate traffic to better-performing variants of an experiment in real time.

Croct, however, keeps the traffic distribution fixed according to the split set before the start of a test. That means that if needed, you will have to make manual adjustments after the experiment is finished.

Advanced native segmentation

Unlike Optimizely, Croct offers advanced native segmentation. Optimizely provides basic CDP functionality, so clients needing sophisticated targeting must integrate with their own CDP.

Croct allows you to create audiences while considering the entire user journey with data such as:

• Page URL
• UTM parameters (source, medium, campaign, content, and term)
• Comprehensive device, browser, and OS data
• Full session and user history data
• Location data (city, state, and country)
• E-commerce data, including complete cart details (products, coupons, etc.)

You can check out the full list of Croct’s segmentation variables here.

Bulk data enrichment

Both Croct and Optimizely provide data enrichment in real time. This means that if you run a fintech company, for example, and a user reads a blog post about no-fee credit cards, you can display credit card options on the homepage right after. Using this information about the user’s browsing history immediately means embracing the opportunity to act on it in the same session, which increases the chances of conversion.

While Optimizely allows you to run bulk data enrichment, Croct still doesn’t. They enable data enrichment at scale, often on large datasets, instead of doing it one record at a time. This involves using automated processes to add data across thousands or millions of records.

Data export

Croct’s dashboards offer detailed insights into your audiences and personalized experiences. However, some clients prefer to generate more granular reports themselves by combining Croct data with third-party data.

Our API supports sending data related to site events, user profiles, sessions, experiences, and tests to data lakes. This feature also allows for cross-referencing Croct data with sales, paid media, and more.

Like Croct, Optimizely also provides data export capabilities.

That's a wrap

Both Croct and Optimizely offer robust solutions for AB testing and personalization, but they cater to different needs and priorities. Optimizely excels in complex, enterprise-level environments with a wide range of features, while Croct stands out for its intuitive and cost-effective approach to advanced personalization for medium to large businesses.

If you're curious about how Croct compares with Optimizely in terms of user satisfaction, this G2 comparison gives you a pretty good overview:

Curious to see how Croct can enhance your website's personalization and optimization? Sign up for a free-forever account and experience the difference firsthand!