LaunchDarkly vs Homegrown
Your homegrown feature system wasn’t built for production scale.
Feature flags start simple until hundreds of services, environments, and teams depend on them. Manual toggles, brittle configs, and missing audit trails turn release control into operational risk. LaunchDarkly provides the infrastructure reliability engineers expect: safe rollouts, instant rollback, and full visibility across every environment.
Get more with LaunchDarkly.
Feature Management
Homegrown reality
Manual configs, hardcoded prompts, and environment drift make it unclear what’s live—or safe to change. Ownership is scattered, and every tweak (from flags to AI prompts) risks a redeploy, slowing teams down and increasing risk.
How LaunchDarkly fixes it:
- A unified control plane gives a single view of every flag, AI config, environment, and owner.
- Manage feature flags, prompts, models, and parameters at runtime, no code changes required.
- Target, experiment, and roll out changes safely so teams can evolve product and AI experiences with confidence.
Feature Flags
AI Configs
Guarded Releases
Homegrown reality
DIY systems can enable you to toggle features, but they can’t protect you when things go wrong. Without guardrails, a single bad deployment can impact thousands of users before anyone notices.
How LaunchDarkly fixes it:
- Guarded Releases integrates targeting, monitoring, and rollback into one workflow.
- Set thresholds for performance/errors; automatically pause failing rollouts.
- Recover instantly, before users are affected.
Guarded Releases
Experimentation
Homegrown reality
Impact is hard to measure; experiments run offline, and disconnected data makes it difficult to link changes to outcomes.
How LaunchDarkly fixes it:
- Run statistically valid A/B and multivariate tests directly inside the release workflow.
- Tie feature exposure to behavior and engagement, see results in real time, and automatically roll out winning variations.
- Help every team learn continuously as they build.
Experimentation
Product Analytics
See the LaunchDarkly difference.
Homegrown Reality
LaunchDarkly Advantage
Simple toggles and config files work for one team, but lack visibility and governance.
SDKs scale across environments with instant updates and clear ownership.
Internal APIs and scripts connect teams, but flag sprawl and manual rollouts create friction.
Centralized dashboards bring lifecycle management and automation.
Cross-team adoption leads to outages, compliance gaps, and slow recovery.
Guarded Releases provide safe rollouts, rollback, and audit trails by default.
Observability exists at the app, infra, and service levels, but not at the feature level, leaving teams blind to the real impact of releases.
Gain real-time visibility into feature performance, trace issues to specific flags or rollouts, and connect feature changes directly to business outcomes.
A/B tests live in spreadsheets; insights arrive too late to guide releases.
Integrated experimentation turns every rollout into a learning loop.
Internal tools hit scale limits and stall innovation.
LaunchDarkly unifies control, insight, and AI configuration in one platform.
Dior shortens time to market from 15 minutes to instant updates.
< Zero
minutes to release
/ /
LaunchDarkly allowed us to progressively deliver features with confidence, creating a safety net for developers.
Read more
Read storyWorld Kinect increases release velocity by 400%
400%
increased releases and deployments
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It’s clear that LaunchDarkly is by far the premier feature flagging solution. It has helped accelerate our digital transformation and understand how our features are performing in real-time.
Read moreHulu performs targeted rollout of major UI launch to 39 million users.
Improved
customer experiences
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We were able to use five rules with five segments configured using custom attributes from our servers to target all the rules in the right places at the right time.
Read more
Read storyDunelm streamlines experimentation and digital commerce
60s
rollout increments
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LaunchDarkly has significantly improved our development process. We've developed something we're proud of — what we consider to be a highly effective experimentation platform.
Read more
Watch to learn how it all works.
Build with confidence, experiment with ease.
