Item: LaunchDarkly
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Feature toggling
A/B
User segmentation

NodeJS SDK is very poor
Way less logging in NodeJS than in C# SDKs

Return on Investment

Less environments
Less downtime
Less outages

Usability

I find the UI a bit bloated and it is getting worse as new features are added. For big companies like ourselves there are a ton of projects going but in reality you only work on your teams projects, so [there is] very little need to be able to see all others. Just having a permission based read system would help a lot clearing out the UI.

Performance

I think it's pretty good.

Alternatives Considered

Flagsmith

We were considering changing to Flagsmith as they presented us with a way cheaper quote than LaunchDarkly. We ended up not doing so as the cost of migrating would be quite high.

Key Insights

Do you think LaunchDarkly delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with LaunchDarkly's feature set?

Yes

Did LaunchDarkly live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of LaunchDarkly go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy LaunchDarkly again?

Likelihood to Recommend

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

It's like going to Tesco and buying 100g of blueberries for £4. Very expensive but well worth it

Overall Satisfaction with LaunchDarkly