Product
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Cloud costs
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released
April 25, 2022
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3
min read
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LaunchDarkly Info, Pricing, & Alternatives

Updated
9/15/2023

LaunchDarkly is a feature flag management solution that engineering and product teams use to accelerate development cycles and software releases while reducing risk. They do this by leveraging the power of feature flags to build better software without the burden of running a homegrown system.

With a feature flag management platform such as LaunchDarkly, Split, or Harness, software teams are able to separate code deployments from feature releases to launch features separate from the deployment cycle. This improves developer productivity and increases collaboration between engineering, account management, and product teams. 

LaunchDarkly Pricing

LaunchDarkly pricing is based on the number of developers and the number of MAUs (Monthly Active Users). The pricing model mirrors the industry standard of other feature management solutions, with volume-based pricing rather than fixed prices. Users will be counted as members of the engineering teams, operations teams, product management teams, or account teams that will have access to the tool.  

Supported Technology

Like all feature management tools, LaunchDarkly supports both client and server-side SDKs, as well as both web and mobile apps - providing essentially a full stack solution. LaunchDarkly has an SDK that will work for almost any major tech stack on web, desktop, and mobile, and has no major gaps in application, infrastructure, or container orchestration support, like Kubernetes.

LaunchDarkly SDKs


Without further ado, let's learn about a few LaunchDarkly alternatives.

LaunchDarkly Alternatives

Harness Feature Flags

Harness Feature Flags Logo

One of the primary differences between LaunchDarkly and Harness Feature Flags is in the concept of standalone vs platform. Both companies provide a feature flagging platform, but Harness’ is integrated into the wider Harness toolchain that includes CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery), cost management, governance, reliability, security, and more. This means with Harness, teams have global governance, auditing, compliance, team management, and visibility across all stages of the software development life cycle, with a particular focus on increasing developer productivity.

LaunchDarkly, in contrast, is a standalone solution that must be manually integrated with all other DevOps tools. This requires combining data sources, managing teams and access in multiple places, and other forms of complexity. LaunchDarkly has a strong feature set, and both products deliver on the core feature flagging experience as market leaders.

Split

LaunchDarkly Alternatives: Split

Split.io is another feature management platform that uses feature flags as a way to make data-driven decisions, and is especially useful for the product manager and ops team roles. Split lets you use data to define metrics around your feature flags and use these metrics, targeting specific user segments and new features to mitigate release risk and separate code deployments from feature releases.

It is a feature flag focused way of getting A/B tests working, and should help a modern engineering team and their product managers use data to learn and respond.

Optimizely

LaunchDarkly Alternatives: Optimizely

Similar to Split, Optimizely indexes on experimentation and A/B testing rather than the engineering workflow around feature flagging. Optimizely was an early mover in the multivariate testing market, and has a strong solution around experimentation and testing.

Conclusion

As feature flags have increasingly become a standard part of development teams’ software development processes, LaunchDarkly emerged early as a great standalone option. While it lacks the benefits of an integrated, end-to-end approach that combines testing, access control, data, and management all in one platform, it has a strong feature set despite needing to be manually integrated with the rest of a team’s toolchain.

Want to continue your reading journey? We have a couple pieces to recommend: Learn all about Feature Flag Best Practices, or learn more about other LaunchDarkly alternatives in our article on the Best Feature Flag Tools on the market today.

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