Azure DevOps vs. ConfigCat vs. LaunchDarkly

Azure DevOps works well when you’ve got larger delivery efforts with multiple teams and a lot of moving parts, and you need one place to plan work, track it properly, and see how everything links together. It’s especially useful when delivery and development are closely tied and you want backlog items, code and releases connected rather than spread across tools. Where it’s less of a fit is for small teams or simple pieces of work, as it can feel like more setup and process than you really need, and non-technical users often struggle with the interface. It also isn’t great if you want instant, easy programme-level views or a very visual planning experience without putting time into configuration.

Incentivized

If you are looking for an experimentation/feature flag style tool that is quick to adopt and provides enough functionality for light/medium use cases, then this is the tool for you. Additionally, they are growing and expanding their functionality and feature set so they can grow alongside you and your needs. The publicly accessible roadmap is also a great benefit to see where time is being spent on which feature next.

If a new feature should be added but unsure of how it will actually work or how users will accept the new enhancement or change, this tool allows you test and measure initial results. This saves so much time and energy knowing the results before it is deployed and might have low user adoption or acceptance.

Incentivized

• Utilize Git as a repository to share work between multiple users
• Ability to configure Pipelines to build containers to run virtual deployments and testing scripts.
• Split individual tasks and relate to master documents for quick navigation and ability to see overall picture of project.
• Track status of each task
• Integrate with Git to utilize branches, merging, approvals, history, etc.

Incentivized

• Fast and easy feature toggling that gets developers developing
• World class support in both speed and quality for how to best use the service
• Great ear for customer needs and fast paced development

• A/B or Multi Variant Testing as a methodology to gather insight from customer usage. Experimentation as a feature within LaunchDarkly offers information around the success of one variant over another and whether the experiment has reached statistical significance.
• Being able to decouple deployment of code from the release of a feature is hugely valuable.
• Development teams are empowered to manage features within their production applications for reliability or testing purposes.

Incentivized

• I did mention it has good visibility in terms of linking, but sometimes items do get lost, so if there was a better way to manage that, that would be great.
• The wiki is not the prettiest thing to look at, so it could have refinements there.
• It could improve the search slightly better.

• No automatic push for flag changes - have to write our own webhooks
• No scheduling interface for flipping flags automatically on a schedule
• Interface is a bit cluttered for people who are just flipping flags

• Limited number of users on cheaper plans that is limiting our ability to audit log who is making changes.
• Some of our engineers are confused between flags and segments and have set up items incorrectly.
• Better documented support for React with Typescript.

Incentivized

I don't think our organization will stray from using VSTS/TFS as we are now looking to upgrade to the 2012 version. Since our business is software development and we want to meet the requirements of CMMI to deliver consistent and high quality software, this SDLC management tool is here to stay. In addition, our company uses a lot of Microsoft products, such as Office 365, Asp.net, etc, and since VSTS/TFS has proved itself invaluable to our own processes and is within the Microsoft family of products, we will continue to use VSTS/TFS for a long, long time.

Incentivized

ConfigCat has done the job, and has been great to work with.

It fits out business case

Incentivized

It's a great help to get more information about new feature release and stay updated on what the dev team is working on. I like how easy it is to just login and read through the work items. Each work item has basic details: Title, Description, Assigned to, State, Area (what it belongs to), and iteration (when it’s worked on). See image above.They move through different states (New → Discovery → Ready for Prod → etc.).

Incentivized

Just everything from the website to locating what i need (docs) specific to my platforms is super easy. Not to mention the support articles answering previous questions

It's very easy to create new feature flags and set them properly. It is more difficult to get LaunchDarkly integrated within a distributed system so that flags can be used. Especially on stateless servers where gating features by user is not easy. Overall though, it is very easy to get started and I like how simple it is to use.

Incentivized

No issue with availability at all

Incentivized

From what I have seen, LaunchDarkly integrates well with your code and also services you might have in your tech ecosystem. We use Jenkins for automation and we were able to use it to build pipelines to automate the control of LaunchDarkly toggles in our code.

Incentivized

When we've had issues, both Microsoft support and the user community have been very responsive. DevOps has an active developer community and frankly, you can find most of your questions already asked and answered there. Microsoft also does a better job than most software vendors I've worked with creating detailed and frequently updated documentation.

Incentivized

They have a community Slack channel that is open to anyone. They always seem to have people in there, even over the weekends and are always happy to answer any questions you have,

The overall support is very responsive

Incentivized

Was not part of the process.

Incentivized

Yes I do.

Incentivized

Microsoft Planner is used by project managers and IT service managers across our organization for task tracking and running their team meetings. Azure DevOps works better than Planner for software development teams but might possibly be too complex for non-software teams or more business-focused projects. We also use ServiceNow for IT service management and this tool provides better analysis and tracking of IT incidents, as Azure DevOps is more suited to development and project work for dev teams.

Incentivized

At iBinder we searched for and vetted several suppliers of a feature toggle service to handle feature toggling in our production environment. In addition to our functional requirements, it was crucial for us to find a partner that could deliver an EU-compliant service. We finally decided to sign a service agreement with ConfigCat. This has been a real success story for us – in addition to being compliant, ConfigCat delivers an amazing, flexible, and reliable service. They continue to impress by also being very transparent and having a fantastic support and they are very solution oriented and accommodating when it comes to our feature requests etc. We have now used ConfigCat for approximately 2 years and we give our warmest recommendations to anyone who needs a stable, reliable and EU-compliant feature toggle service.

LaunchDarkly stood out to us because it put control of the application within the hands of our engineers. We didn't want to allow business users to manipulate the production site via a third-party tool. Instead, our focus was on delivering faster as an engineering team.

Incentivized

The platform didn't go down since we implemented it

Incentivized

• We have saved a ton of time not calculating metrics by hand.
• We no longer spend time writing out cards during planning, it goes straight to the board.
• We no longer track separate documents to track overall department goals. We were able to create customized icons at the department level that lets us track each team's progress against our dept goals.

Incentivized

• Allowed us to migrate seamlessly from a major customer communication system to another, reducing end-user friction and production bugs by being able to turn features off if they didn't work as intended.
• We went from zero experimentation to running 10-20 experiments concurrently across systems. Engineering teams are thinking in an experimentation mindset.

• Improved developer experience with some teams moving to Trunk-based Development.
• Increased deployment frequency due to smaller code releases.
• Validation of the technical and business value of work is achieved more quickly through smaller pieces of work and through experimenting with a small group of users before a feature gets to 100% of customers.

Incentivized