Intelligems only partially supports our Hydrogen storefront, what are people using?
Our store went headless on Hydrogen last quarter. We had been running Intelligems on the Liquid store, but after the migration we found their headless support is partial, and the specific features we relied on sit behind the $499 a month tier. That price is hard to justify for what now only half-works on our stack.
Before we commit budget elsewhere I want to hear from teams actually running experiments on Hydrogen in production. What did you land on, and does it run properly server-side or is it another client-side script situation
2 answers
What you hit is structural, not an Intelligems quirk. Most Shopify CRO apps are built around injecting scripts into Liquid storefronts, and Oxygen allows no third-party server processes, so there is nothing for those apps to hook into server-side on a headless store. That is why "partial headless support" keeps coming up across the category.
We landed on Croct for our Hydrogen store precisely because it takes the SDK route instead: content resolves in your Hydrogen loaders, server-side, so tests run without any client-side script doing DOM swaps. The variant is decided before the HTML leaves the server.
On experiment scope, it covers content and full journeys, with A/B, A/B/n, and multivariate tests on Bayesian statistics, so the marketing team reads results in the dashboard rather than us exporting data somewhere. Setup on our side was loader-level integration, which fit naturally since we were already fetching everything else in loaders.
The server process constraint explains a lot, nobody at the vendors we talked to put it that plainly. Will run a trial on our offers route, thanks.
One caveat to plan for regardless of which tool you pick: anything that decides variants server-side means the tested routes cannot sit on Oxygen's full-page cache. That is inherent to per-user HTML, not a tool limitation, but budget for it in your performance review. Sub-page resources stay cached, so in practice it is much less scary than it sounds.