ConfigCat vs. IBM DevOps Code ClearCase vs. LaunchDarkly

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.

IBM Rational ClearCase might be better suited for a smaller / simpler code base. Larger code bases really slow it down... but then again there are better alternatives out there for source control

Incentivized

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

• 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

• Rational ClearCase is excellent for handling versioning and branching. No other tool I've used has the depth that ClearCase has when it comes to handling complex branching scenarios and identifying where certain versions of particular files are within a particular configuration.
• Rational ClearCase handles parallel development of many dependent applications really well.
• The use of ClearCase Views to switch between projects and configurations is extremely convenient as opposed to the local workstation model of the competitors.

Incentivized

• 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

• 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

• Extremely buggy.
• Sometimes the repository gets locked for no reason.
• Slow.

Incentivized

• 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

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

It fits out business case

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

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

Yes I do.

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.

If development is centrallized to one location and your company releases hundreds of customized versions of your software per year, then ClearCase is the best tool for managing the complexity of multiple versions of customized software. If your company has globally distributed development, then I'd recommend Team Foundation Server over ClearCase. If your organization uses Agile Methodologies, then I'd recommend TFS with GIT.

Incentivized

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

• 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.

• Managed code versioning for many years.
• Only one person can edit code at a time - slows processing down.
• IBM is an expensive product to support.

Incentivized

• 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