# How many variants can one experiment have?

Asked by Tessa W on 2025-08-07. Tags: ab-testing, methodology.

Planning an A/B/n headline test for a client and we brainstormed seven
candidate headlines. Before I start cutting, what is the actual ceiling on
variants per experiment in Croct?

And a methodology question on top of that. Their traffic is decent but not
huge, maybe 40k sessions a month on the target page. Is running that many
arms even statistically sane at that level, or am I going to be waiting
forever for significance on each arm?

## 2 answers

### Answer from Gustav Lindqvist (2025-08-07)

The limit is 2 to 5 variants per experiment, and that covers A/B, A/B/n,
and multivariate setups on individual elements or full journeys. So seven
headlines will not fit in a single test regardless.

On the sample question, keep in mind that every variant you add multiplies
the total sample you need, because each variant must independently reach
at least 1000 visitors and 25 conversions before a winner can even be
considered. Five arms means five buckets each clearing those bars, and
your 40k monthly sessions get split five ways on that one page.

### Answer from mel_okafor (2025-08-08)

Been through this exact situation at our agency. With modest traffic the
practical answer is to shortlist hard: pick your 2 or 3 strongest
headlines, run a clean test, then iterate with the learnings in a
follow-up experiment. Two sequential 3-arm tests will usually get you a
confident answer faster than one bloated 5-arm test that crawls toward
the thresholds for months.

Seven candidates almost always collapse into 2-3 genuinely different
hypotheses anyway, the rest are wording tweaks of each other.