unleash.unleash/website/docs/advanced/feature-toggle-variants.md

---
id: toggle_variants
title: Feature Toggle Variants
---
<div class="alert alert--info" role="alert">
  <em>Feature toggle variants</em> were introduced in <em>Unleash v3.2.0</em>.
</div>
<br/>

Every toggle in Unleash can have something called _variants_ ...

Variants help facilitate A/B testing and experimentation by ... [read more about that in the discussion topic]

## How well do my variants perform?



## What is it?

Do you want to facilitate more advanced experimentations? Do you want to use Unleash to handle your A/B experiments? Say hello to feature toggle variants!

You can now extend feature toggles with multiple variants. This feature enables you to extend a feature toggle to divide your traffic among a set of variants.

![toggle_variants](/img/variants.png 'Feature Toggle Variants')

## How does it work? {#how-does-it-work}

Unleash will first use activation strategies to decide whether a feature toggle is considered enabled or disabled for the current user.

If the toggle is considered **enabled**, the Unleash client will select the correct variant for the request. Unleash clients will use values from the Unleash context to make the allocation predictable. `UserId` is the preferred value, then `sessionId` and `remoteAdr`. If no context data is provided, the traffic will be spread randomly for each request.

If the toggle is considered **disabled** you will get the built-in `disabled` variant.

A json representation of the empty variant will be the following:

```json
{
  "name": "disabled",
  "enabled": false
}
```

The actual representation of the built-in the client SDK will vary slightly, to honor best practices in various languages.

> If you change the number of variants, it will affect variant allocations. This means that some of the users will be moved to the next variant.

_Java SDK example:_

```java
Variant variant = unleash.getVariant("toggle.name", unleashContext);
System.out.println(variant.getName());
```

## Variant payload types

## Client SDK Support {#client-sdk-support}

To make use of toggle variants, you need to use a compatible client. Client SDK with variant support:

- [unleash-client-node](https://github.com/Unleash/unleash-client-node) (from v3.2.0)
- [unleash-client-java](https://github.com/Unleash/unleash-client-java) (from v3.2.0)
- [unleash-client-ruby](https://github.com/Unleash/unleash-client-ruby) (from v0.1.6)
- [unleash-client-python](https://github.com/Unleash/unleash-client-python) (from v3.3.0)
- [unleash-client-dotnet](https://github.com/Unleash/unleash-client-dotnet) (from v1.3.6)
- [unleash-client-go](https://github.com/Unleash/unleash-client-go) (from v3 branch)
- [unleash-client-php](https://github.com/Unleash/unleash-client-php) (from v1.0.0)

If you would like to give feedback on this feature, experience issues or have questions, please feel free to open an issue on [GitHub](https://github.com/Unleash/unleash/).