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LaunchDarkly

LaunchDarkly

Overview

What is LaunchDarkly?

LaunchDarkly provides a feature management platform that enables DevOps and Product teams to use feature flags at scale. This allows for greater collaboration among team members, and increased usability testing before full-scale feature deployment.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

LaunchDarkly is a versatile software that has been utilized by a variety of users to tackle different challenges and improve their …
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Great product!

10 out of 10
May 04, 2021
Incentivized
We use LaunchDarkly to control features in our authenticated web and mobile applications. It allows us to test features in production, …
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Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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What is LaunchDarkly?

LaunchDarkly provides a feature management platform that enables DevOps and Product teams to use feature flags at scale. This allows for greater collaboration among team members, and increased usability testing before full-scale feature deployment.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://launchdarkly.com/pricing

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

What is ConfigCat?

ConfigCat allows the user to launch new features and change software configuration without (re)deploying code. ConfigCat SDKs enable easy integration with any web, mobile or backend applications. The ConfigCat website enables non-developers too to switch ON/OFF application features or change…

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Product Details

What is LaunchDarkly?

LaunchDarkly is a feature management platform that aims to empower all teams to safely deliver and control software through feature flags. By separating code deployments from feature releases, LaunchDarkly enables users to deploy faster, reduce risk, and iterate continuously. The vendor states that over 1500 organizations around the world -- including Microsoft, Atlassian, and IBM -- use LaunchDarkly to control the entire feature lifecycle from concept, to launch, to value.

LaunchDarkly Features

  • Supported: Change Management
  • Supported: Requirements Management
  • Supported: Audience Targeting
  • Supported: Campaign Segmentation
  • Supported: Split Testing
  • Supported: Statistical Relevance Analysis
  • Supported: Test Scheduling
  • Supported: Deployment Management
  • Supported: Software Development
  • Supported: Web App Development
  • Supported: Reporting/Analytics
  • Supported: Release Management
  • Supported: Quality Assurance Management
  • Supported: Continuous Delivery
  • Supported: Continuous Deployment
  • Supported: Testing Management

LaunchDarkly Screenshots

Screenshot of DashboardScreenshot of Dashboard - Feature Flag New SearchScreenshot of Target Individual UsersScreenshot of Target Users By Rule MatchScreenshot of Approval Settings Per EnvironmentScreenshot of Experiments DashboardScreenshot of Scheduled ChangesScreenshot of Code References

LaunchDarkly Videos

Explainer Video
Testimonial
LaunchDarkly Demo
Code References

LaunchDarkly Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

LaunchDarkly provides a feature management platform that enables DevOps and Product teams to use feature flags at scale. This allows for greater collaboration among team members, and increased usability testing before full-scale feature deployment.

Optimizely Web Experimentation, ConfigCat, and Firebase are common alternatives for LaunchDarkly.

Reviewers rate Performance highest, with a score of 8.1.

The most common users of LaunchDarkly are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(53)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

LaunchDarkly is a versatile software that has been utilized by a variety of users to tackle different challenges and improve their development processes. One of the primary use cases is implementing and testing features without full deployment, which reduces risk and increases user acceptance. Users have found that LaunchDarkly allows them to address individual problems by introducing new features and ensuring they meet needs and resolve issues. By hiding incomplete features from end users, the software enables more frequent code deployment, reducing code conflicts.

Another common use case for LaunchDarkly is facilitating Trunk Based / Continuous Deployment workflows and targeting specific user segments. Users rely on the software to run UI experiments and determine the optimal customer experience. It has been particularly valuable for software development teams in managing released features in customer-facing products. Feature flags are used to hide large feature sets until they are complete, documented, and ready for customer use. Additionally, LaunchDarkly enables the rollout of new code variants and passing new features to a limited number of users before a full release, thanks to its ability to set up targeting based on different values.

Despite its wide-ranging benefits, some users have mentioned that the limited number of seats for engineers has slowed down the adoption of LaunchDarkly. However, those who have integrated it into their workflows have observed significant improvements in their product development process. The software has allowed development teams to deploy code faster and with more confidence, ultimately improving quality standards by enabling selective feature rollouts to internal testing accounts before broader releases.

In addition, LaunchDarkly has proved invaluable for feature flagging, testing, and hiding of features, allowing for constant deploys without affecting production systems. It ensures stability during structural changes and enables effective management of feature rollouts across different teams or platforms. Testing features in production has been beneficial for identifying issues that may not have been caught in QA. Furthermore, LaunchDarkly serves as an environment for CI/CD pipelines, providing control over what is seen live without mimicking a live environment on staging.

Notably, LaunchDarkly's ease of use has been widely appreciated by users, contributing to improved team productivity. The software allows for controlled rollouts to different user groups and helps manage new feature development effectively. With its ability to speed up time to delivery by deploying changes behind feature flags until ready for customer exposure, engineers have found it to be an invaluable tool. Feature flags also allow for showing specific customers specific features, further enhancing the flexibility provided by LaunchDarkly.

Users of LaunchDarkly have provided several recommendations based on their experiences with the product. The three most common recommendations are as follows:

  1. Many users suggest getting a trial version of LaunchDarkly to experience its ease of use firsthand. This allows potential customers to evaluate the platform and determine if it aligns with their needs.

  2. Another common recommendation is to leverage the tagging service provided by LaunchDarkly. This feature allows users to group and organize their flags, making it easier to manage and track different features and configurations.

  3. Several users recommend exploring the latest news and updates from LaunchDarkly. Staying informed about new features, best practices, and industry trends can help users make the most of the platform and stay ahead in their feature flagging efforts.

It is important for potential buyers to consider these recommendations when evaluating LaunchDarkly as a feature flagging solution for their development and release management needs.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-23 of 23)
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Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
LaunchDarkly is a very good product, basically we use the feature flag from LaunchDarkly in implementing the feature driven software development at our organization. It is easy to use and delivers the best services. With use of LaunchDarkly we are able to manage the new feature development very effectively. It helps you in creating one code branch and use it with feature flag, that's how it improves the team productivity.
  • Easy to use
  • Feature flag management is very helpful.
  • Integration with other products.
  • Add more security features when we deal with production code.
  • Focus more on testing part for API
  • We need a facility to use common feature flag with the team, when same code has to be deployed. We need that smooth duality while moving the code to production.
LaunchDarkly is good in terms of feature flag management, it helps in driving the test and feature driven software applications. Feature flags are more effective in terms of managing our code base in many environments like locally, staging and production. Monitoring is good. But we need some notification based alerts while dealing with production environment.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
LaunchDarkly is used for maintaining feature toggles for our production services. We have been using it for a year now and haven't had any issues so far. We have a toggle framework that abstracts away the complexity of Launch Darkly so we don’t actually interact with it directly. LaunchDarkly provides a clear insight into the state of your toggles in production.
  • Easy automated way to flip the state of a toggle in production.
  • Easy access to the state of a toggle in production.
  • Ability to run A/B tests using a toggle in production.
  • The framework needs to support an easy way to remove toggles in the code and in production.
Suitable for feature toggle management at scale. It can be used to run A/B tests for your services. If your application or service only has a few simple feature toggles, then this is not the framework for you and you are better off using your own custom toggle management system.
Michael Gallouedec | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use LaunchDarkly to help hide incomplete features from end users. This allows us to deploy code to production more often, which reduces code conflicts and leads to a healthier codebase
  • Separate Flags by Deployment Environment
  • target specific users or user groups with flags
  • allows us to subscribe to changes in feature flags while a session is ongoing
  • better splitting by user group
LaunchDarkly is great when you need to deploy frequently for teams that are experiencing growing pains because there are more and more developers beginning to contribute to the same code base. It is less important when you have very few users or very few developers. It is also less important when you deploy infrequently, because you are more likely to deploy fully complete and tested code to production in that case
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently use it in a couple of ways:
1. Use for configuration values that are shared across multiple applications
2. Feature Flagging for new features can deploy and test while still being developed.
3. Used it as a feature kill switch if we need to disable a feature during peak traffic/season.
  • Tracking if a feature flag is in use.
  • The API is straight forward before basic tasks.
  • The UI is easy to understand.
  • Customer support at times is hard to work with.
  • The ability to create a feature flag in one environment and publish to others.
1. It is not too hard to do LaunchDarkly if you need feature flags and scaling rollout. However, IF you have CDN in front of your application, it gets interesting.
2. Sharing configuration across multiple applications makes it easy.
3. Using it as a kill switch for components on your site, you can disable it during peak seasons (e.g. Black Friday) to improve the performance and stability of your site.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
While LaunchDarkly delivers a huge set of features, we use it mainly as an environment. Our CI/CD pipelines push our code straight to live, with our new features encapsulated in a LaunchDarkly toggle. That gives us huge control over what can be seen on live without the overhead of having to mimic a live environment on staging.
  • Feature toggling
  • A/B
  • User segmentation
  • NodeJS SDK is very poor
  • Way less logging in NodeJS than in C# SDKs
We found that it helps a lot with our CI/CD processes, helps with our time to market, and allows us to show progress in an easier way. We feel that it suits what we do perfectly. The only downside is the very high cost which makes all senior staff wonder about ROI. Apart from that, it's all good
Daniel Yefet | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We predominantly use LaunchDarkly to facilitate our Trunk Based / Continuous Deployment workflow, enabling us to deploy multiple times a day and target specific user segments. We also use it to run UI experiments that help us determine the optimal customer experience.
  • Feature management
  • A/B and multivariate testing
  • Segmentation
  • More support for Edge-side solutions
It's hard to imagine building applications without LaunchDarkly - it's become an integral part of our deployment process. The frequency with which we can deliver to production wouldn't be possible without it. I highly recommend LaunchDarkly for any professional engineering team who wants to deploy often and simultaneously minimise risk.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Ours is a provider-facing application. We were needing a tool that could toggle between features that providers get to see. And on that search, we landed on LaunchDarkly for feature toggle management. One of the best tools that fit our use case. The ease of use is very straightforward. The support team is excellent in providing immediate support while setting up the tool and during development. I would highly recommend this for any organization that needs a feature toggle use cases. We currently use this tool across our organization.
  • Feature toggle mechanism
  • Support from LaunchDarkly team
  • Ease of setting up user on-boarding and integration with SSO
  • Clear cut support documentation
  • Could be easier to define Custom role creation.
The best scenario is wherein you create a feature and would like to test it before it goes to production. You make use of feature toggles in lower environments, test them out thoroughly without impacting other features. Once verified, you may then publish the same to PROD environment for feature to be enabled.
May 04, 2021

Great product!

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use LaunchDarkly to control features in our authenticated web and mobile applications. It allows us to test features in production, gradually rollout new features to users & gather feedback, and disable new features if there is a problem. We are currently using it in one department, but other departments have seen our success and are working on their own POCs.
  • LaunchDarkly's rule-based targeting is a game changer
  • The system is incredibly reliable
  • Developer/technology focused with clear business value
  • The workflow/approval features are a bit green but improving
LaunchDarkly is well suited for any runtime decisioning within an application. This can be automated based on rules or manual. It's also a great way to separate business logic from application logic.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use LaunchDarkly to separate the Deploy and Release aspects of changes. The R&D team implements LaunchDarkly flags in code, and then by using the user targeting functionality the QA team can validate the changes with the flag on and off. The main point is testing with the flag off, as this means that the master can be deployed to production at any point with the flag remaining off, so we don't have to worry about breaking existing functionality by using these flags.
  • Easy to use UI
  • Great resiliency
  • Good documentation
  • Forward thinking improvements
  • Good performance
  • Large language support in SDKs
  • Add an option to mandate change requests.
  • Allow segments to be used in the professional plan.
It is well suited when you are making changes in areas that are already being used and do not want to impact existing customers in any way. Being able to hide all new code behind a flag means your master branch can be deployed even when your new code is not fully finished. It also means you can focus on testing when the flag is off and almost ignore when the flag is on to ensure the master is production-ready.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
LaunchDarkly has been used as the proof of concept to use feature flagging. It has been used in my department for some POC work as currently we use Azure Devops pipeline configuration for feature flags. It solves feature toggling in production to switch on and off features which are not stable or completely finished. It gives full control in deciding what features whether it is backend or frontend to be used in production environment. Further, feature toggling can also be used dynamically to change some features without recompiling the code or reload the page.
  • It delivers 100% uptime for customers.
  • Dynamically control features in real-time.
  • Automate your workflows.
  • LaunchDarkly can probably be integrated with Devops pipelines.
  • LaunchDarkly can provides its own observability features so that it can integrate monitoring and traces in a single unified environment.
It can be used in following scenarios:
1. Feature toggling
2. Sunset unused features
3. Upgrade microservices
4. Migrate infrastructure & databases
5. Automate workflows.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use LaunchDarkly to separate deploy and release processes and allow for a test in production mentality. It allows us to internally target new features for test in production before releasing to external customers.
  • Test in production
  • Safety net for targeting internal testing
  • Prevents long term incidents as you can switch of features instantly
  • API responses are a little fun to get your head around
Feature flag is pretty much always a go to thought and the times when you don't flag is pretty much always the time you have an issue and wish you had flagged. Not having to redeploy to roll back a release due to a problem or to release a feature to targeted customers.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
When making structural changes to our systems, our operations teams use the feature management to maintain stability while undergoing these processes. The fact that we can use feature flags in place throughout our systems [means] we can put our applications into maintenance mode and make the necessary system updates and be at ease of mind.
  • Feature management.
  • Feature flags.
  • It takes some practice for the real power of LaunchDarkly to "click" for everyone within your organization.
After seeing LaunchDarkly's approach you can save your dev teams from reinventing the wheel many times over.
April 13, 2021

Deploy fast and easy

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The platform allows us to implement and test features without full deployment. In turn, the risk is greatly reduced and user acceptance is much higher when deployment occurs. Currently it is being used internally. LaunchDarkly allows us to address individual problems one issue at a time by introducing a new feature and make sure it meets the needs and resolves the problem.
  • Measures performance of new app features.
  • Turn off features that might be causing problems in production.
  • Delivers true continuous integration.
  • Manage features without full deployment.
  • Overview across environments could be enhanced in the tree view (add a button) similar to dashboard UX.
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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are building a new customer-facing platform that spans all products in the company and has multiple teams working on features. LaunchDarkly allows us to manage our rollout of new features by different teams so they can be deployed independently and slowly released to the interested beta users.
Having features wrapped in flags has allowed us to test in production before anyone sees it. This has allowed us to find issues that we could not have seen with QA data.
  • Easy to implement by engineers.
  • Easy to set up flags.
  • Segments that allow us to group users to easily open up new features to a select set.
  • 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.
Great for rolling out features slowly for beta testing in production. I would say it is less well suited for toggling features permanently for users as this requires more integration with our backend and billing systems that would be a lot of work to set up.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using it in my department as a part of deploying and releasing chat application features. We are still in early phases of adoption, but it is currently helping us with controlling access to beta testing features.
  • Easy to use dashboard UI.
  • Supports a wide array of SDKs.
  • Well articulated documentation.
  • Improve documentation around serverless setups.
From my experience it is well suited for web applications, and serverless services and API's. I haven't encountered a scenario where it is less appropriate.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used with the Software Development department to test the value of features in small iterations, ensure implementations are working as expected before rolling out to all customers, to perform A/B tests of features and to have kill switches to enable/disable functionality on a permanent basis. Data gathered by the ability to use feature management in this way informs business decisions and the priority of the work being undertaken.

Through being able to decouple a deployment of code to the release of a feature the development teams and business teams can more effectively decide when, how and to whom a feature is being enabled. This makes work easier to implement and the value of the feature can be understood more effectively.
  • 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.
  • Some areas of the Experimentation functionality aren't as feature rich as other analysis platforms.
  • Managing specific permissions, roles and the teams sometimes requires configuration within LaunchDarkly itself rather through another system (such as through Azure AD).
  • Decoupling a deployment of new code from the release of a feature.
  • A/B and/or Multi Variant testing.
  • Rolling out a feature to a percentage of customers or to certain groups.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Every team can decide for themselves if they want or need to use LaunchDarkly. We do offer a company-wide subscription to everyone that wants to use it. In our team, we use it to support us in the continuous deployment of features in our portal. In the future, we want to extend our use of the different features.
  • Real time update of the status
  • Nice front end
  • Clear overview of all the feature flags
  • Easy to implement
  • We haven't figured out the integration with AAD B2C.
We have tested multiple solutions, and, right now, we think this is the best solution for feature flags if you don't want to build everything yourself.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
LaunchDarkly is used by engineering for testing in production. It is used to deploy code to customers in a safe manner.

It addresses the issue of deploying code and allowing a easy way of reverting if something is needed. This is important for StockX where the businesses needs to serve customers around the world 24/7, and a small code change can cause outages which lead to failed orders.
  • Easy to integrate, one-two liners
  • Supports multiple environments
  • No free tier - expensive investment for businesses just starting up
LaunchDarkly is dependent on a network call so it's good if latency is not an issue.

However for applications that are low-latency, high calls, it will not work because it needs to keep calling LD every time. Think High Frequency Trading.

LaunchDarkly also has limitations when there are certain SQL calls and network calls to LD fails, causing certain constrains to fail to meet.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
LaunchDarkly is used within the Engineering department to speed up time to delivery. We use feature flags so that we can deploy changes, and hide them behind feature flags until we are ready to show customers. We also use feature flags to show specific customers specific features.
  • Web socket-based live updates
  • Test environment
  • Dynamic rules
  • React client SDK
  • Flag change tracking
LaunchDarkly is perfect for application-wide feature flags, and well-supported for per-user feature flags. More permutations than that—such as based on internal data—will be cumbersome and pricey.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Teamworks implemented LaunchDarkly over a year ago and it has been a game-changer for our product development process. It has allowed our development team to move faster, we deploy code to production with confidence knowing that we can roll out features at our own discretion with feature flags. Our quality standards have improved as well since we can selective rollout features to internal testing accounts in production as a final check before a broader GA release.
  • Feature Flag Management: It's like magic. With a flip of a switch, you can manage feature rollouts to visitors or accounts across the web and mobile applications!
  • Segmentation: Create a segment of visitors or accounts and then use that to target a feature flag rule. Really easy to use and saves so much time.
  • Ease of Use: Seamless copy/paste functionality, really clear status indicators so you can find what is on and for whom.
  • I wish it was better synchronizing the feature flag configurations across the development environments. We want to stage to match production and local dev to match that. When you have many feature flags, this can get a bit difficult to maintain consistently.
  • When a new dev is hired it can be difficult getting them plugged into LD and knowledgeable of that process.
Well suited for SaaS companies that are moving fast and want to have a safety value for rolling out features in a measured and fail-safe manner. Great for companies that experiment. LaunchDarkly may not be well suited for companies that have long development processes. That don't move quickly or that do not care about quality.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use LaunchDarkly as a key part of our shipping & QA process. Let's us ship features behind a feature flag, first roll out internally to employees, then a controlled roll out to a percentage of users, before turning on for all users. Each of the steps only takes a few seconds, without any code changes. Being able to safely roll out features in this way helps us move faster.
  • Very customized, detailed flag targeting (e.g. only 10% of users with a given attribute).
  • Immediately having flag changes pushed out to clients, rather than polling every few minutes.
  • Letting you know when flags are now "stale" and can be removed.
  • Dashboard UI could use some improvement, not always obvious which environment you're in.
  • Would be nice to have a better high level overview in the dashboard.
LaunchDarkly is great for controlled roll-outs and feature flagging for web apps. One main drawback is LaunchDarkly's pricing is not well suited for website a/b testing or feature flagging. The pricing is based on MAU (monthly active users), which for your true "app users" makes sense, but if a website visitor counts as an MAU, the pricing doesn't make sense.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use to:
- enable or disable features in our 3 different environments (Dev/Test/Prod), to manage testing and deployment
- display or configure an outage banner
- set some values (to override system values)

This gives us excellent flexibility without having to modify deployment configs or rebuild code.
  • Manage different environments.
  • Create and update feature flags/values.
  • Report end users (so we potentially group them and configure flags by group).
  • It would be nice to see a feature flag's settings against all environments at once.
  • It would be to have a "array" type flag for related but different settings (eg, enableA and enableB could be enable: [a, b]).
  • It would be nice have customizable columns on the Users page (eg, if I want to inject a new meta data).
Very likely to recommend, though I know nothing about -- and am concerned about -- cost.

Also -- and I haven't looked -- but in a future project I will look for alternatives, just to make sure I'm using the best solution.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our engineering team is using it to set feature flags for both testing and hiding of features. This is helpful to allow us to do constant deploys and not have it affect production. Furthermore, we can run tests with those flags to determine the impact of each feature. It's working really well for us!
  • Feature Flagging.
  • A/B Testing.
  • Giving any users access to edit feature flags.
  • Simple UI to interact with.
  • The messaging around features - especially those that turn on/off traffic for prod - could be clearer.
  • It's a little clunky to switch between projects & doesn't remember my default project for some reason.
  • I would like to make changes on my phone - not sure if they have a mobile app.
It is so much better than our old system which was a custom built system, always took very long to use, and required engineering resources to implement, adjust, update, etc. Now we can simply leverage LaunchDarkly. It is fast and easy. Anyone, not just engineers, can make updates. A particular use case for us is to modify traffic for tests. Turn up the participation or turn it down. Declare a winner. Now our analysts can directly do that as soon as they have the results. It is so much better!
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