Product teams choose GrowthBook over Optimizely when they want to reduce complexity and cost with a warehouse-native experimentation, feature flags, and product analytics platform.
Product teams choose GrowthBook over Adobe Target to reduce complexity and the high cost of vendor lock-in for warehouse-native product experimentation, feature flags, and product analytics.
- Run 5X more experiments at 1/5th the price with no forced bundling
- Build full stack experiments faster with a developer-friendly platform
- Own your experiment data with transparent warehouse-native analytics and self-hosting options
- Enterprise personalization suite built for the Adobe Experience Cloud ecosystem
- Premium pricing starting at six figures annually with required Adobe Analytics integration
- Cloud-only deployment requiring weeks to months of setup and dedicated support team
GrowthBook delivers sophisticated experimentation plus feature flags and product analytics in a single, open-source platform without the vendor lock-in, complexity, or oversized price tag.
Developer-friendly, full-stack experimentation platform
Enterprise marketing suite for Adobe ecosystem
Designed For
Developers, product teams, analysts
Marketers and analysts with dedicated support team
Primary Use
Test any new feature you build in any platform
For marketing experimentation within the Adobe Ecosystem
Statistical Methods
Bayesian, frequentist, sequential (with CUPED, post-stratification)
Proprietary, black box models with no transparency
Deployment Options
Cloud or fully self-hosted
Adobe Experience Cloud only
Pricing & Plans
Per-seat pricing with unlimited tests, unlimited traffic
Premium pricing (can exceed $1M annually)
Setup Time
Hours
Weeks to months
The high cost of Adobe Target limits how much your team can learn and how quickly they can ship. Ready to build smarter and learn faster?
Customers choose GrowthBook over Adobe Target to run 5x more experiments, without the complexity and premium pricing of forced bundling.
Developer Experience
GrowthBook is designed for product teams that need to iterate quickly without the complexity and overhead of Adobe Target.
GrowthBook
- Developer-friendly, intuitive environment for fast iteration
- Chrome debugger + visual editor
- Clear documentation, AI chatbot access, and responsive support
- Flexible for both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- 24+ SDKs: JavaScript, React, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, PHP, Java, Swift, Kotlin, etc.
Adobe Target
- Requires deep knowledge of Adobe Experience Cloud
- Bloated, conflicting documentation
- Visual editing tools with a steep learning curve
- Tool complexity and integrations often requires a dedicated team
Performance & Scale
GrowthBook is built for high-velocity experimentation—no matter how much traffic you handle or how fast you ship.
GrowthBook
- Run any number of experiments on any amount of traffic
- Low-latency SDKs with rapid rule processing
- Scales from small teams to large enterprises on the same core platform
- 99.999% uptime for high traffic websites and apps
Adobe Target
- Experimentation is constrained by usage-based pricing
- Scaling often requires additional Adobe infrastructure and services, adding to cost and complexity
- UI and workflow complexity reduces testing velocity
Experimentation Depth & Flexibility
GrowthBook gives product teams the ability to test almost anything with complete control and flexibility.
GrowthBook
- Testing types: Supports A/B tests, multivariate tests, redirects, visual editor, and holdouts
- One platform for server-side, client-side, mobile, and edge experiments
- Full-stack coverage: server-side, client-side, mobile, and edge experiments
- Flexible targeting and randomization units user, location, postal code, URL path, etc.
- Statistical frameworks: Bayesian, frequentist, sequential (with CUPED, post-stratification)
Adobe Target
- Designed for testing common web UI workflows rather than advanced experimentation
- Server-side and multi-surface experimentation requires implementation and monitoring
- Analyzing tests must occur in Adobe Analytics, a separate product
- Statistical models are proprietary and black-box, making results difficult to explain or defend
- It's very hard to integrate external data sources with experiment data
Feature Flagging & Flag-Based Experiments
GrowthBook unifies feature flags and experiments so teams can ship safely without extra tooling.
GrowthBook
- World-class feature flags at the core
- Controlled rollouts, gradual exposure, and instant kill switches
- Zero network call SDKs for low latency and high reliability
- Unified system for flags and experiments
Adobe Target
- Separate feature flags and experimentation platform
- Engineering-led rollouts often require workarounds compared to flag-native systems
- Network-dependent delivery can add latency and risk
- Not built for CI/CD and progressive delivery workflows
Transparency & Warehouse-Native Architecture
GrowthBook keeps experiment analysis in your warehouse, so you can trust your results and avoid vendor lock-in.
GrowthBook
- Bring your data architecture Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Postgres, etc.
- Analyze all your product and experimentation data in one place
- Customize metrics using SQL, use metric libraries, and even add metrics retroactively
- Reproduce and confirm any GrowthBook calculation
Adobe Target
- Measurement is tied to Adobe Analytics, increasing suite dependency
- Integration errors and sampling limitations can lead to erroneous results
- Black-box models and calculations limit visibility into how results are produced
- Limited support for adding or recomputing metrics after experiments launch
Privacy, Security & Deployment
GrowthBook works well with AI, financial services, healthcare, education, and other industries with strict privacy and compliance requirements.
GrowthBook
- Fully self-hosted, air-gapped option for data residency requirements
- Meets strict privacy compliance requirements GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, SOC 2 Type II certified
- No end-user PII required. Your data stays in your data warehouse
- Open-source code is publicly available for security review on GitHub
Adobe Target
- Cloud-only deployment managed by Adobe
- Data flows through Adobe infrastructure
- Strict data residency and infrastructure control requirements are harder to meet
- Privacy governance requires additional configuration across Adobe systems
AI-Ready & Future-Proof
GrowthBook gives teams building AI software the control they need to test and optimize features for better engagement and outcomes.
GrowthBook
- 3 of the 5 leading AI companies use GrowthBook to optimize their chatbots and APIs
- Design highly customized metrics to measure engagement, usage and outcomes
- Tune AI responses per use case with very targeted experiments
- MCP integration for natural language access to GrowthBook directly in IDE Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code
Adobe Target
- Does not give product teams the deep control to optimize AI in their products
- ML-driven decisions are difficult to audit or explain outside Adobe systems
Cost of Ownership
GrowthBook's per seat pricing and flexibility reduces the cost of experimentation without costly add-ons and services contracts.
GrowthBook
- Predictable per-seat pricing with unlimited experiments and unlimited traffic
- Free tier and open source options
- Enterprise self-hosting gives customers flexibility and control
- Warehouse-native architecture means you do not pay twice to capture the same data
Adobe Target
- Expensive enterprise contracts priced by products, channels, and scale
- Often requires significant investment in the larger Adobe Suite
- Complex integrations even with other Adobe products require dedicate resources and management
- The complexity of the product requires a full team to support
What do GrowthBook users say?
“Experimentation is now part of how we think, build, and improve. GrowthBook made that possible.”
Marek Maciusowicz, Treatwell
"GrowthBook has changed the way we think about experiments... It allowed us to uplevel our code, speed up decision-making, and focus on what we do best."
Diego Accame, Upstart
“Talk about bang-for-buck.”
FAQs
Can GrowthBook and Adobe Target both support enterprise scale, security, and privacy requirements?
Yes, both can support enterprise requirements, but with different deployment models. GrowthBook supports self-hosting and strict data residency, while Adobe Target runs on Adobe-managed cloud infrastructure with less control over deployment.
How easy is it to move from Adobe Target to GrowthBook?
Most teams migrating from Adobe Target to Growthbook can start running feature flags and experiments in hours by integrating an SDK and connecting their data warehouse. Migrate incrementally without rebuilding existing experiments all at once.
Do I need Adobe Analytics to use Adobe Target, and how is this different with GrowthBook?
Yes, Adobe Target relies on Adobe Analytics for experiment analysis. GrowthBook analyzes experiments directly in your data warehouse without requiring additional tools.
What type of team is required for GrowthBook compared to Adobe Target?
GrowthBook can be run by a small product or engineering team. Adobe Target typically requires a larger team of developers, analysts, and specialists to manage the platform.
Why do companies choose GrowthBook over Adobe Target for experimentation and A/B testing?
Companies choose GrowthBook to run experiments faster with more transparency and lower cost. GrowthBook avoids ecosystem lock-in and lets teams analyze results directly in their own data warehouse.
What is the main difference between GrowthBook and Adobe Target?
GrowthBook is built for fast product experimentation, while Adobe Target is built for enterprise personalization. GrowthBook uses warehouse-native analytics and flexible deployment, while Adobe Target is tightly tied to Adobe Experience Cloud and typically requires premium pricing and longer implementation.
