Google Optimize alternatives: what to use in 2026 Google Optimize alternatives: what to use in 2026

The verdict

Google Optimize alternatives at a glance

Six of the eight can run a test today without a sales call. AB Tasty can't — its only evaluation route is a sales-run proof of concept — and Optimizely's self-serve door is free Rollouts, not the paid product. The four Google didn't name are on the list because three years of market movement earned them the slot.

Two figures are deliberately absent from that table: any Optimizely price and any VWO price. Neither publishes one, and the numbers circulating in comparison blogs are unverifiable. The absence is the finding.

One thing to be straight about. Your last testing tool cost $0, and four of these eight still do at real volumes. Mtrix is not one of them, and it's priced at the platform tier rather than the app tier. If the number in your head is under a few hundred dollars a month, the honest answer is two sections down and it isn't us.

What actually happened, and what Google put in its place

Google's stated reason, as its help centre words it today: "Optimize, though a longstanding product, did not have many of the features and services that our customers request and need for experimentation testing."

There was no read-only grace period. The pre-sunset FAQ — quoted here from the 1 September 2023 archive capture, the only place it survives — told users to "download their historical data from within the Optimize user interface before September 30, 2023," and warned that "you won't be able to access your experience inference results or your historical Google Analytics raw data after the sunset date." If you didn't export, it's gone. Any vendor selling you an Optimize importer is selling a reader for data you no longer have.

Optimize 360 customers were not migrated anywhere. From the same archived FAQ: renewals were truncated — orders with an end date past the sunset "will be revised to the product sunset date" — and customers on a GA4 contract "will not be able to sign Optimize 360 contracts." Enterprise buyers who had paid for a testing tool got a three-name list and a date, and all three of those names price by sales call today.

Google still doesn't test. This is current, not historical. From Google's own [GA4] A/B test help article, re-read live on 28 July 2026:

"To run an A/B test in Google Analytics, you must integrate with a third-party A/B test tool."

"…Google Analytics is where you can interpret the results of the A/B tests."

Their developer guide for that integration is explicit that it is "primarily intended for third-party A/B experiment solution providers." GA4 reports on tests. It does not run them.

One correction, because plenty of pages get it wrong: Google did not shut down all its A/B testing. The archived FAQ said "Firebase A/B Testing will not be impacted by the Google Optimize sunset," and the live sunset page still describes Firebase A/B Testing in the present tense. It tests mobile apps. If your tests were on a website, it was never your answer anyway.

Google named three replacements. Two of them are merging into one company.

Most pages ranking for this term predate the merger, and being refreshed hasn't fixed it. Two results in the current top set are stamped 2 April 2026 and 22 May 2026 — months after the announcement — and both still present VWO and AB Tasty as independent alternatives to each other, with no mention of it anywhere. All dates below come from the companies' own newsrooms and product updates.

Read that carefully rather than dramatically. VWO's own FAQ says "Your existing contract, subscription terms, and pricing remain unchanged," both suites are stated to continue, and Amplitude has committed to "maintain and develop the current Statsig platform." Nobody is shutting anything down. But if you're here because a vendor's decision cost you a tool you liked, ownership churn is a fair thing to price into the next choice, and no feature matrix shows it to you.

If your budget is genuinely zero, start here

Optimize was free. Four options here still are, at volumes that would run a real programme.

• GrowthBook Starter — free, no card. 3 users, 1 project, and their words: "Unlimited feature flags," "Unlimited experiments," "Unlimited traffic." Nine server SDKs and three edge SDKs on the free tier. Choose it if you have a data warehouse and someone to model metrics in it. The visual editor and multi-arm bandits are Pro, $40/seat/month.
• Statsig Developer — free, no card. 2M events a month, 50,000 session replays a month, unlimited seats, and nearly the whole statistics suite: CUPED, sequential testing, switchback and non-inferiority tests are all free. Choose it if you're an engineering team. Bandits start at Pro, $150/mo.
• Optimizely Rollouts — free, no card. Feature flags, audience targeting, staged rollouts and REST API access, with the limit stated in one sentence: "Run one concurrent experiment at a time." Choose it if you want the incumbent's stats engine on a single test.
• PostHog — free allowance every month, no card. 1M events, 1M feature-flag requests (experiments bill with flags, no separate line) and 5,000 replays. Choose it if your team is technical and you want analytics, replay and experiments in one product. Their no-code web editor is beta by their own labelling, and their docs warn it can be overwritten by re-rendering frameworks.

Mtrix is not on this list, and shouldn't be. There is no free-forever Mtrix plan: one month free, no credit card, full platform, then paid. Putting it beside these four would be the exact vendor spin this page exists to avoid.

What Optimize gave away that your replacement will charge for

Optimize's real gift wasn't the price. Nothing was tiered — redirect tests, personalisation and the visual editor came in the same free box — and objectives came straight from your Analytics goals, so there was no metric to re-plumb.

Almost every replacement re-imposes both. Here is where server-side testing, the capability that decides whether you can test anything the browser can't reach, actually starts.

So "server-side testing is enterprise-only" is false, and distrust any page that says it. Four of the six rivals above put server-side SDKs on their entry or free tier. The real pattern costs more than that: everyone gives you the pipe, and almost nobody gives you the controls at the price you'd pay. Server-side at every vendor above means a developer installing an SDK and writing evaluation code — the visual editor and the no-code path are client-side. And the capabilities that make a server-side programme work get gated first: multivariate is off Convert Growth and off VWO Growth, bandits are above the free tier at GrowthBook and Statsig, and holdout groups and mutually exclusive groups are Enterprise-only at VWO.

Where Mtrix fits — and what you give up

Mtrix isn't a testing app. It's the platform a DTC store runs on, or one script on the store you already have, with the test and the numbers in the same product.

That's the actual bridge from Optimize. What you liked was that objectives came from Analytics goals: no second tool, no event mapping, no two dashboards disagreeing. Most replacements here reinstate that tax — install a testing tool, wire its conversion events, then argue with GA4 about whose revenue number is right. PostHog is the honest exception: analytics, replay and experiments in one product, on one bill. Mtrix is the other one, and for a store it goes further — the experiment, the analytics, the replay, the errors and the orders are one data model, so there is no revenue number to reconcile with anything.

• Four test types — A/B, multivariate, split URL, mask URL — plus bandit allocation, with no cap on experiments: not concurrent, not monthly, not by plan. The nearest thing to Optimize's just-run-tests feel that exists in a paid product.
• Server-side bucketing by default — the allocation decision is made in Mtrix's backend, and the assignment is held against your visitor ID with a 30-day server-side lookback rather than in the experiment cookie a client-side tool writes. The integration guide documents setting that visitor-ID cookie from your own server, which is what keeps it past Safari's seven-day cap on script-set cookies.
• Revenue per visitor as a first-class metric, beside conversion rate and add-to-cart rate, reported as probability-to-be-best. Change the split mid-flight; auto-complete on a visitor count, a date or a revenue threshold.
• Open the sessions from the losing variant. Replay filters by experiment and by variant arm, and 100% of sessions are captured — sampling is opt-in, not a plan tier.
• Your code stays yours. Code export is supported, so the lock-in question has an answer rather than a promise. SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified, with GDPR, CCPA/CPRA and HIPAA/HITECH compliance programmes. Retention: 3 years on events and purchases, 1 month on replay and errors.

Four things to weigh against that. No free tier — one month free, then paid; replacing a $0 tool on a $0 budget is what the four options above are for. Web only — no native iOS or Android SDK, where Optimizely, VWO, AB Tasty and PostHog all ship one. Server-rendered variants need a developer once — assignment is server-side on every install, but rendering the variant on the server, the part that removes the flash entirely, is about 35 lines in a server load function, documented for Hydrogen, Next.js and SvelteKit and not possible on a Shopify Liquid theme. No managed service — onboarding, a shared Slack channel and a named contact, but Mtrix will not run your programme. If what you lost when Optimize died was the person who ran it, hire that, not this.

Choose Mtrix if…

You already pay for a testing tool, a replay tool and an analytics tool and the wiring between them is your problem. You want to test pricing, bundles, cart and checkout rather than headline swaps. Or a percentage point of conversion is worth more to you than the subscription, and you'd rather stop reconciling three dashboards than save $40 a seat.

Who should not switch to a platform

• If budget is the binding constraint. All four free options above are card-free and serious — GrowthBook Starter and Statsig Developer are the most generous on the axes that matter for a small programme. Take one.
• If you're on Shopify and haven't bought anything yet. Since 5 June 2026 Shopify Rollouts A/B tests whole themes and whole checkout and customer-account configurations, included in your plan fee, with experiments on Grow or higher. Whole configurations, never elements — but it's the cheapest honest first step. Every Shopify testing option, and where each stops.
• If you test a native mobile app. Mtrix is web only.
• If your team is engineers and your metrics already live in a warehouse. That's GrowthBook's entire premise, and Mtrix has no answer to warehouse-native computation.
• If you need content, commerce and testing on one enterprise contract. Optimizely's suite spans a CMS, commerce, a CDP and personalisation. Mtrix doesn't.

Moving off a tool that's already gone

There's no migration, which is the one advantage of being three years late: nothing to export, no parallel run, no deadline. What you're really doing is deciding what counts as a conversion and where that definition lives from now on. Two ways to answer that with Mtrix, and they're genuinely different.

Keep the store you have. Install Mtrix as an npm package or a CDN script and you get experiments, session replay, analytics, error tracking and real-user performance monitoring on your existing storefront. The boundary matters: on a store that stays on Shopify, Mtrix does not edit your theme with its builder, does not vary prices, and does not replace Shopify's checkout. It measures and it tests.

Or move the store onto Mtrix. Automated import from your GitHub repo (the preferred route), from your live site's URL via Mtrix's own scrapers, or from Figma if you're starting fresh — then Mtrix helps finish the setup rather than handing over a half-built store. The most complex stores are fully live within one week; that's the outside case, not the average. That path also brings the visual builder, native products and variants, multi-currency, multi-language and tax, a staging environment, a custom domain with SSL, and a checkout you can test.

Either way, the decision needs an afternoon rather than a migration plan: talk to us about pricing and fit, or take the free month and run a test on your own store before anyone gets on a call with you.

FAQ

Run the test and read the result in the same product