Which is better?LaunchDarkly vs Flagsmith

LaunchDarkly and Flagsmith are two popular feature flags platforms, but which one is better? In this comparison, we'll look at the features, pricing, and ease of use of both platforms to help you decide.

Features
Pricing
Ease of use
Conclusion
LaunchDarkly logo
vs
Flagsmith logo

Side by side comparison

LaunchDarkly
Flagsmith

Platform limitations

Free trial
14 days
14 days
Unlimited feature flags
Unlimited monthly active users (server)
Unlimited monthly active users (client)
Unlimited environments
Unlimited seats
Unlimited projects
From $1 000/yr

Features

Progressive rollout
Kill switch
Remote config
A/B testing
Scheduling
$$$
Unlisted pricing
From $540/yr
Custom roles
$$$
Unlisted pricing
From $2 400/yr
Duplicate flags
From $1 000/yr
Multi factor authentication
From $540/yr
Audit log
30 days
From $2 400/yr
Advanced traffic splitting
Templates
Reviews
From $1 000/yr
From $2 400/yr
JSON editor for flags

PricingIs LaunchDarkly cheaper than Flagsmith?

Yes. LaunchDarkly is actually cheaper than Flagsmith. This is true for small and larger teams, if you are concerned about the price, LaunchDarkly may be the way to go (we've alo included a third option below).

Here we are comparing prices for LaunchDarkly and Flagsmith for the cheapest plan when available, you might need to pay more if you are interested in more advanced features:

Unlike LaunchDarkly, Flagsmith is open source. This means that you can host a version of Flagsmith yourself without paying a monthly fee. The only downside is that you only have access to very limited features, have to pay for the hosting yourself, and need to allocate engineers to setup and maintain the service.

Hosting a service like Flagsmith can cost between $75/mo (cheapest Dyno + Postgres on Heroku) and $120/mo (cheapest AWS Fargate + RDS). This value can be significantly higher based on your usage and reliability constraints, so let's compare the hosted version of the two.

LaunchDarkly logo

LaunchDarkly

Starts at: $100/yr
Price for 5 seats: $500/yr
Price for 10 seats: $2 000/yr

LaunchDarkly's pricing page
Flagsmith logo

Flagsmith

Starts at: $540/yr
Price for 5 seats: $2 400/yr
Price for 10 seats: $3 600/yr

Flagsmith's pricing page
Tggl logo

Tggl

Looking for a cheaper option than LaunchDarkly and Flagsmith?

Starts at: 180/yr
Price for 5 seats: 180/yr
Price for 10 seats: 530/yr

Tggl's pricing page

Ease of useIs LaunchDarkly easier to use than Flagsmith?

The whole point of using a feature flags platform is to make it simple to manage and deploy feature flags. We'll look at the ease of use of both LaunchDarkly and Flagsmith to help you decide which one is more suited to your needs.

Setup time is also an important metric that we look at. A long and tedious setup process is often an indicator of a complex product.

Video comparison: to help you decide which platform offers the best experience, we try to enable a feature for 20% of users in France on both platforms.

LaunchDarkly logo

LaunchDarkly

LaunchDarkly Demo

LaunchDarkly ratings for setup time and ease of use.

Setup time: 4.1/5
Ease of use: 3.5/5

Go to LaunchDarkly
Flagsmith logo

Flagsmith

Flagsmith Demo

Flagsmith ratings for setup time and ease of use.

Setup time: 4.2/5
Ease of use: 3.4/5

Go to Flagsmith

Final thoughtsConclusion

While both solutions offer similar features, pricing can get expensive really fast. For small teams that might not be an issue at first, but as your grow the costs can add up quickly.

Another important aspect we have looked into is the product itself. Developers often find LaunchDarkly and Flagsmith confusing and tedious to setup, while product managers are simply not the target audience.

Tggl.io is often cited as a great alternative to Flagsmith for its ease of use and competitive pricing. So we've recorded a third video where we enable a feature for 20% of users in France to compare to Flagsmith and LaunchDarkly:

Tggl logo

Tggl

Tggl Demo

Tggl ratings for setup time and ease of use.

Setup time: 4.8/5
Ease of use: 4.9/5

Go to Tggl