GrowthBook vs Optimizely

From $40 per seat/month (cloud Pro, up to 30 users and 3 projects)

Quote on request

Seat-based rather than usage-based, so cost tracks the number of people using the platform rather than your traffic — which is why it stays dramatically cheaper than the commercial platforms at scale, especially self-hosted.

Enterprise annual contracts, commonly in the tens of thousands and up. Priced by traffic and modules.

Self-hosted open source is free with unlimited users on 1 project; the cloud Starter tier is free for up to 3 users.

No free tier.

Widely used

GrowthBook · since 2021

Widely used

Optimizely · since 2010

• Warehouse-native by design — no duplicate event pipeline and no data leaving your control.
• Self-hosting removes per-user-volume pricing entirely.
• Both Bayesian and frequentist engines with sequential testing support.

• The most capable visual editor for non-technical experiment authoring.
• Deep personalisation and audience-targeting features.
• Established statistics with sequential testing, so peeking is handled correctly.

• Requires a working data warehouse and someone who can define metrics in SQL.
• Self-hosting is operational work you own.
• Less polished governance and approval tooling than LaunchDarkly.

• Expensive, with a suite-oriented sales motion that pushes adjacent products.
• Client-side testing causes flicker and is increasingly blocked by browsers and blockers.
• Heavyweight for teams that only need a handful of experiments.

Data-mature teams that already have a warehouse and want to avoid volume-based pricing.

Large marketing organisations running continuous experimentation on high-traffic sites.