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LaunchDarkly

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Overview

What LaunchDarkly does

LaunchDarkly is a feature management platform that empowers development teams to safely deliver and control software through feature flags. It enables teams to progressively deliver features to users with less risk.

What people use it for

  • Progressive delivery
  • Feature experimentation
  • Risk mitigation
  • Performance optimization
  • Infrastructure migration

The honest half

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about LaunchDarkly.

  • Pricing scales rapidly with monthly active users, becoming expensive at scale
  • Limited seats for engineers on standard plans, forcing upgrade to enterprise
  • Advanced features like experimentation and audit logs require higher-tier plans
  • Occasional reliability issues and backend delays reported by users

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of LaunchDarkly

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

  • LaunchDarkly logo
    LaunchDarkly
    vs
    PostHog logo
    PostHog

    PostHog: Open source feature flags and experimentation platform with built-in analytics for product teams.

  • LaunchDarkly logo
    LaunchDarkly
    vs
    GitLab logo
    GitLab

    GitLab: GitLab includes built-in feature flags and progressive deployment capabilities integrated with CI/CD.

  • LaunchDarkly logo
    LaunchDarkly
    vs
    Terraform logo
    Terraform

    Terraform: Infrastructure-as-code alternative for managing feature flags and deployments programmatically.

Pricing

What LaunchDarkly costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Developer

Free

  • Unlimited seats
  • Unlimited feature flags
  • A/B tests and experiments
  • 30 SDKs
  • 14 days data retention

Foundation

On request

  • $12 per connection
  • $10 per 1K MAU
  • Targeted segmentation
  • 90 days data retention

Enterprise

On request

  • Custom pricing
  • Advanced automation
  • Compliance features
  • Dedicated support

Capabilities

Features

  • Feature flags

    Feature flags capability

  • Progressive rollouts

    Progressive rollouts capability

  • User targeting

    User targeting capability

  • A/B testing

    A/B testing capability

  • Kill switches

    Kill switches capability

  • Audit log

    Audit log capability

  • Multi-environment

    Multi-environment capability

  • SDKs for all platforms

    SDKs for all platforms capability

  • Jira

    Integration with Jira

  • Slack

    Integration with Slack

  • GitHub

    Integration with GitHub

  • Datadog

    Integration with Datadog

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

What does the free Developer plan include?

The free Developer plan includes unlimited seats, unlimited feature flags, A/B tests and experiments, 30 SDKs, 10 million logs and traces, 5,000 session replays and errors, and 14 days of data retention.

Source
How does LaunchDarkly pricing scale?

Foundation plan pricing is $12 per connection plus $10 per 1,000 Monthly Active Users (MAU). Enterprise and Guardian plans have custom pricing based on usage, advanced features, and compliance requirements.

Source
Does LaunchDarkly integrate with Jira and Slack?

Yes, LaunchDarkly integrates with Jira Cloud, allowing you to link feature flags to Jira issues and create issues from observability data. It also integrates with Slack for flag notifications and allows authorized members to trigger flag changes from Slack.

Source
What is dark launching and how does LaunchDarkly enable it?

Dark launching keeps code changes hidden in production until ready to enable. LaunchDarkly enables this through feature flags that let teams safely test code in production before rolling out to users.

Source

Behind it

Who makes LaunchDarkly

Company
LaunchDarkly Inc
Based in
Oakland, CA
Founders
Edith Harbaugh, John Kodumal

Timeline

LaunchDarkly over time

  1. Funding2021-08-10$200m

    Series D of $200M at $3B valuation

    Source

Keep looking

Where to go from LaunchDarkly

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for LaunchDarkly, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.

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