LaunchDarkly vs. Unleash

LaunchDarkly is the preferred choice thanks to its:

• Ease of use and intuitive UI (suitable for devs and product managers)
• Real-time control and updates delivered consistently across all platforms, environments, and applications
• Industry-leading architecture built for massive scale with several layers of resilience
• Tight integration of experiments with your development workflow (i.e., removing experimentation silos) 
• Powerful targeting engine that lets you target any object you choose—device, user, geography, etc.—when running experiments and releasing features
• Release automation capabilities that let you schedule releases, automatically issue change approval requests, and automatically remediate production errors
• Support of enterprise administration, security, and governance:
  -Reduce technical debt by finding every feature flag in your codebase and scrubbing as needed (Code References)
  -Keep an audit log of every flag change to share with regulators
  -Stay secure and compliant with LaunchDarkly’s industry-leading security program, which operates in accordance with SOC II, GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, FedRAMP, and other standards

LaunchDarkly is the best choice for enterprises that demand a feature management and experimentation platform offering unmatched scalability, performance, security, and reliability. 

Experimentation 

LaunchDarkly unites experimentation and feature management capabilities in a single platform. In doing so, LaunchDarkly transforms experimentation (traditionally an isolated activity) into a core component of the development process. By tightly integrating product experiments into the software delivery process, LaunchDarkly promotes a collaborative environment for all product delivery teams to excel. Moreover, we enable anyone—not just data scientists—to run valid experiments.

Scalability and Performance

LaunchDarkly's ability to manage over 20 trillion feature flags daily showcases exceptional scalability. This capability ensures that businesses can handle any volume of feature management tasks without compromising on performance, making it a perfect fit for demanding enterprise environments. 

Engineering

• Software engineers, Software developers (front-end, back-end, full-stack)
• Platform developers/engineers
• Software reliability engineers 
• DevOps engineer
• Cloud platform engineer 
• Operations engineer 
• Infrastructure engineer

Product

• Product management 
• Product owner 
• Product designer 
• Program manager
• Release manager 
• Release engineer

Architects

• Software architects 
• IT architects 
• Cloud architects
• Solution architects

Language and integration support

LaunchDarkly supports 26+ languages and 60+ integrations. Unleash has built support for 15 SDKs and 6 integrations, according to their documentation at the time of writing this. Our comprehensive platform support facilitates easier incorporation of feature flags into existing workflows, experiments, and infrastructures. We fit seamlessly into your stack.

Out-of-the-box experimentation 

LaunchDarkly experimentation allows you to quickly and safely test new features in production without redeploying code. Developers and product management teams find greater alignment and productivity when working together on a single platform that addresses both development workflow efforts and product delivery optimization. LaunchDarkly improves product quality and user satisfaction through iterative feature development based on actual user feedback and behavior. 

Advanced targeting 

LaunchDarkly offers advanced targeting with custom contexts, a differentiated capability that enables you to target your experiments and releases with precision based on an unlimited combination of attributes. With this approach, product managers can precisely conduct experiments and personalize experiences for specific users, including leveraging their existing user data via integrations. Unleash does not offer this capability. 

Edge SDKs for peak performance

LaunchDarkly builds Edge SDKs to extend feature flagging to edge and serverless environments, emphasizing real-time management and experimentation without traditional server infrastructure.

Comprehensive support 

“Most importantly their customer support and account management is very good, it's a partnership and they offer support where many others will leave you to it.”

 - Joe H., Enterprise customer 

LaunchDarkly provides extensive documentation, training resources, community support, and customer service, offering a more responsive and comprehensive support system.

Product managers choose LaunchDarkly over Unleash because LaunchDarkly tightly integrates experimentation into the software development workflow. This close alignment of feature flagging with experimentation enhances product development agility and enhances user experiences.

LaunchDarkly offers product managers significant advantages such as:

• A smooth transition from feature management to A/B testing—eliminating the need to alternate between different tools. 
• A faster method to detect issues and understand user experiences—enabling quick decision making on rollouts and rollbacks as well as continuous feature iterations.
• A more granular way of targeting specific audience segments for experiments—resulting in more relevant insights that lead to releasing even better features.
• Reducing the need for additional tools and processes—accelerating development cycles and feature releases.
• Strengthened collaboration between product management and software development teams—enabling happier, cross-functional communication and efficiency.

In addition to LaunchDarkly’s strong focus on unifying experimentation with feature management,  LaunchDarkly’s architecture is designed for high scalability and performance, making it suitable for large-scale and high-stakes enterprise applications where managing numerous flags across different environments is critical.

Companies select LaunchDarkly over other solutions for feature flag management for its:

• User-friendly and intuitive interface—providing a clear overview of flags and environments, drag-and-drop functionalities, and a clean design to accommodate both technical and non-technical users.
• Technology-agnostic architecture—supporting a wide array of technologies and platforms, from web and mobile applications to back-end services, allowing teams to implement feature flags in diverse environments regardless of technology stack.
• Proven and exceptional performance—empowering over 5K companies globally and updating 20 trillion feature flags every day, with enterprise features like edge computing to reduce latency, real-time updates without impacting user experiences, and more.
• Superior technical support—offering 24/7 support, a customer service team, an active developer community, a rich repository of best practices, technical documentation and guides, and a dedicated LaunchDarky Academy program for continuous education.

Feature management provides users with a host of benefits including:

• Gradual rollouts to reduce risks and allow improvements.
• Instant rollbacks to quickly disable unexpected performance outages and bugs.
• Testing in production to enhance software reliability and the user experience.
• Ability to precisely target specific features to different segments to personalize the user experience.
• Simplified, standardized product delivery processes and workflows to maximize efficiency at scale.

Companies choose LaunchDarkly because it unites feature management and experimentation into a single platform. In doing so, LaunchDarkly takes experimentation from being a siloed practice and tightly integrates it into your development workflow. LaunchDarkly fosters collaboration between developers and product managers. Devs can build a feature, wrap it in a feature flag, and then hand it off to product managers, who can then add an experiment to the feature. They can run valid multivariate experiments, get actionable results, and then perform a gradual rollout of the winning feature variation. This all happens in one seamless implementation in LaunchDarkly.

Teams that recognize feature management as foundational to experimentation will also choose LaunchDarkly due to its expertise in feature management and its being the leading choice for software development teams.

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