Which is better?Unleash vs LaunchDarkly
Unleash and LaunchDarkly 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.
FeaturesPricing
Ease of use
Conclusion
Side by side comparison
Platform limitations
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Features
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PricingIs Unleash cheaper than LaunchDarkly?
Here we are comparing prices for Unleash and LaunchDarkly for the cheapest plan when available, you might need to pay more if you are interested in more advanced features:
Unlike LaunchDarkly, Unleash is open source. This means that you can host a version of Unleash 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 Unleash 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.
Unleash
Starts at: $960/yr
Price for 5 seats: $960/yr
Price for 10 seats: $1 860/yr
LaunchDarkly
Starts at: $100/yr
Price for 5 seats: $500/yr
Price for 10 seats: $2 000/yr
Tggl
Looking for a cheaper option than Unleash and LaunchDarkly?
Starts at: €180/yr
Price for 5 seats: €180/yr
Price for 10 seats: €530/yr
Ease of useIs Unleash easier to use than LaunchDarkly?
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 Unleash and LaunchDarkly 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.
Unleash
Unleash ratings for setup time and ease of use.
Setup time: 3.8/5
Ease of use: 3.2/5
LaunchDarkly
LaunchDarkly ratings for setup time and ease of use.
Setup time: 4.1/5
Ease of use: 3.5/5
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 Unleash and LaunchDarkly confusing and tedious to setup, while product managers are simply not the target audience.
Tggl.io is often cited as a great alternative to LaunchDarkly 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 LaunchDarkly and Unleash:
