Choosing the Right Feature Flag Management Service

Split, LaunchDarkly, and ConfigCat are some of the feature flag management platforms that will make your life much easier when it comes to testing new pieces of code. Are you interested to find out which platform offers a free payment plan?

Why Feature Flags?

If you’ve been using feature flags before, you then already know how they make development faster and safer for all developers, by making feature releases much easier and pain-free. Keep on reading to find out which platform gives the best returns to teams and developers.

Key Features at a Glance

Basic Feature Flag Use Cases

Sometimes one doesn’t know how to implement or use feature flags within their project, therefore Split, LaunchDarkly, and ConfigCat all showcase different use cases to highlight how feature flags could be used to help you better organize your development lifecycle.

A/B Testing is one of the most common use cases when it comes to feature flags. But what is A/B testing? It’s a technique for comparing two or more versions of a product or project that allows you to gather comparative performance data to assess which iteration performs better. Keep in mind that by addressing the majority of your business questions, you will gain a deeper understanding of your product and audience.

Feature Flag Management

All three providers offer feature flag management as a service.

Support

Even though all providers offer support, there are some differences between them. For instance, with LaunchDarkly, the quality of their support is based on subscription plans, whereas ConfigCat offers good and qualitative support for all their plans. Now, you may be wondering what does this mean?

• The free plan gets basic support.

• The next 2 tiers offer standard support.

• The most expensive tiers offer premium support.

Pricing - Best Value for Your Money

When it comes to pricing, all three platforms offer different payment plans so there’s a variety to choose from. As mentioned earlier, Split and ConfigCat provide free plans, however, Split has a 30-day FREE account that is reserved capped at 10 seats only, whereas ConfigCat's FREE plan gives you an unlimited team size.

Are you looking for a free trial on any of these providers?

• Split offers a free plan for up to 10 seats, but which don't have all premium features available, such as SSO, role-based access control and rollout dashboard.

• LaunchDarkly - every new account is given a 14-day trial of their Pro services.

• ConfigCat - the Forever-Free subscription gives you unlimited seats so that your entire team can test it out at the same time.

Take a look at the screenshots below for more details.

Split Payment Plans

Split has changed its pricing policy and it's now based on a price-per-seat pricing plan, similar to LaunchDarkly.

LaunchDarkly Payment Plans

As you can see below, LaunchDarkly also offers their payment plans per seat:

ConfigCat costs less than LaunchDarkly for almost the same features:

SDKs

There are open-source Software Development Kits, or SDKs for short, for all major platforms and languages. If you’re working with JavaScript, Python, Java, React, .NET, and other popular languages, all three providers have SDKs for them.

Out of the three feature flag providers, Split has the least number of SDKs, but if you are working with Redux or Ruby on Rails - Split should do just fine.

Besides all the popular languages listed above, ConfigCat is the only one that has documentation for Angular, Nuxt.js, Laravel, Deno, Elixir, and Dart.

LaunchDarkly has the most SDKs available, here’s a small list of other platforms and languages LaunchDarkly has documentation for Gatsby, Roku, Rust, Electron, etc.

Wrapping Things Up

Here are a few things to take into consideration when choosing the best feature flag management software for you and your team:

• The language or platform that you’re working with

• Size of your team

• Budget

• Other needs or requirements you and your team might have

You should take into consideration that there’s no real right or wrong platform when it comes to feature flag management. If you feel like you are ready to maximize productivity and your team’s potential, you should definitely take a closer look at any of these feature management services to see which one fits your needs better.