LaunchDarkly vs. Optimizely

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.)
• 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

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

LaunchDarkly is the premier choice for software, platform, and operation engineers thanks to its developer-centric approach to feature management and experimentation. This allows developers to effectively control and manage their deployment and release process. Another differentiator of LaunchDarkly is its custom streaming architecture and global flag delivery network, which ensures real-time updates, crucial for managing high-traffic and complex enterprise environments. Additionally, LaunchDarkly is the most secure feature management and experimentation platform in the market, making it an ideal choice for operations teams.

Product managers choose LaunchDarkly over Optimizely for: 

• LaunchDarky's effective integration of feature management and experimentation in a single platform—enabling product managers to more easily run and ship experiments in tight alignment with the development team.
• LaunchDarkly’s real-time feature control—enabling product managers to instantly turn features on/off without redeploying code, reducing dependency on engineering teams.
• LaunchDarkly's intuitive release management capabilities—enabling product managers to control their feature launches through progressive rollouts, percentage deployments, beta tests, and more. 
• LaunchDarkly’s architecture, which 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. 
• LaunchDarkly’s strong focus on development and operations through in-depth integrations—a deciding factor for product teams that must align with the development process and workflows.
• LaunchDarkly’s advanced targeting and customization capabilities—enabling product managers to deliver personalized experiences to users, including through integrations with existing user data.

"LaunchDarkly won out, primarily because of two things. One, is the developer affinity and the desire for us to also do feature flagging, and feature flagging is done best by LaunchDarkly.”

—Product Manager, Midmarket Software company

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 flag 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 or 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 in a single platform. In doing so, LaunchDarkly takes experimentation and A/B testing 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 also choose LaunchDarkly because, unlike visual editors, it lets engineers run back-end (server-side) and infrastructure optimization experiments. For example, engineers can measure the impact of a new API on page load times, the impact of a new database implementation on system performance, etc.

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.