VWO earns its reputation: it's a comprehensive conversion-optimization suite used by thousands of serious teams. But "comprehensive" is exactly the problem if you're a small business — you end up paying every month for heatmaps you glance at once, surveys you never send, and enterprise seats you don't fill. Paid testing plans in this category typically start in the hundreds of dollars per month.
What you actually use in an A/B testing tool
Talk to small teams that run experiments consistently, and the list of features they touch weekly is short:
- A visual editor to build variants without a developer,
- Split-URL tests for bigger redesigns,
- Targeting (URL, device, geo, UTM),
- Statistics they can trust — and crucially, that tell them when not to call a winner,
- Revenue tracking, if they sell anything,
- An integration with their store or CMS.
Heatmaps, session recordings and survey tools are genuinely useful research instruments — but they're also available free or nearly free elsewhere, and bundling them into your testing bill is how a $50 job becomes a $400 subscription.
The one thing the big suites can't do
Here's the irony: for all their breadth, VWO, Optimizely and AB Tasty share a blind spot. They're client-side tools, so they can change what your pages look like — but not what your products cost. Pricing is the single highest-leverage variable a store controls, and it's untestable with the enterprise standard.
ProveLift was built around that gap. Its store plugins (WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Magento) apply price variants server-side, through the platform's own pricing system: the price shown is the price charged, every visitor keeps their price consistently, and orders are attributed to variants on the server. Tests are decided on revenue per visitor — the number that actually pays your bills. More detail in our WooCommerce price-testing guide.
A right-sized comparison
- Experimentation core (visual editor, A/B/n, split-URL, targeting, scheduling): both. This is table stakes.
- Statistics: both run serious engines; ProveLift adds explicit anti-peeking guardrails and SRM alerts surfaced in plain language.
- Research suite (heatmaps, recordings, surveys): VWO yes, ProveLift no — by design.
- Price testing: ProveLift yes, VWO no.
- Price of entry: ProveLift has a real free plan and SMB-priced tiers; VWO's paid testing starts at mid-market budgets.
The full feature-by-feature table is here: ProveLift vs VWO.
When VWO is the right call anyway
If you have a dedicated CRO/research team that will genuinely live in heatmaps and surveys, need enterprise procurement (SLAs, security reviews, CSMs), or run experimentation programs across many large properties — buy the suite. That's what it's for.
But if you're a store or a small team that mainly wants to run honest experiments and grow revenue, you can get the 20% of features that deliver 80% of the value — plus price testing the suites don't have — for a fraction of the price. Try ProveLift free and see if you miss anything.