Item: LaunchDarkly
Rating: 10
Author: Michael Gallouedec

Overall Satisfaction with LaunchDarkly

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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

Pros and Cons

Pros

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

Cons

better splitting by user group

Return on Investment

LaunchDarkly has helped us maintain a weekly release train, which provides a level of consistency for our users
LaunchDarkly has helped us gate new features, which gives us more ability to test in production, which leads to better tested code

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.

Performance

LaunchDarkly is highly available and we have not noticed a single outage over the past year. We have not noticed any difference in load time since a lot of what LaunchDarkly does is in the background. We like that it uses a socket connection to stream updates to our servers

Alternatives Considered

I have not used any other similar products

Key Insights

Do you think LaunchDarkly delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with LaunchDarkly's feature set?

Yes

Did LaunchDarkly live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of LaunchDarkly go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy LaunchDarkly again?

Yes

Other Software Used

WebStorm, ClickUp, GitHub

Likelihood to Recommend

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

Comments

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Great product for a growing dev team