LaunchDarkly vs. Split

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

Scalability and performance

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

• LaunchDarkly’s SDKs and global Flag Delivery Network support real-time updates, ensuring minimal runtime overhead. This means that applications remain responsive, even under challenging conditions, allowing businesses to deliver a consistent and high-quality user experience.
• Security is a paramount concern for any business, and LaunchDarkly excels in this area. As the only solution in the market that is FedRAMP-authorized and supports HIPAA compliance, LaunchDarkly exceeds industry standards in safeguarding customer data. These industry-leading security measures ensure your business and your customers' information is protected against evolving threats.

Developer-first approach and reliability

LaunchDarkly is designed with a developer-first approach and provides an exceptional developer experience. We provide platform integrations, advanced targeting, and feature-level observability, all of which fit seamlessly into the developer workflow. LaunchDarkly’s architecture ensures resilience and reliability, offering fast and dependable flag evaluations. This is essential for businesses that need to make real-time decisions based on user behavior, experiment results, or operational conditions. LaunchDarkly allows companies to dynamically tailor their applications to different user segments, test new features safely, and roll out changes gradually to mitigate risks.

With a 99.99% uptime guarantee and a proven track record of supporting over 5000 companies worldwide, LaunchDarkly sets the benchmark for feature management performance.

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

Better overall developer experience

"In the landscape of feature management and experimentation tools, LaunchDarkly is the most robust with the software development team in mind. It's everything from how the platform lets you implement and control feature flags and run experiments to Flag Insights and Code References for flag cleanup, even to newer features like Scheduling, Approvals, and Flag Triggers that automatically disable flags based on New Relic alerts.

Honestly, adopting LaunchDarkly was one of the best decisions we've made as a software development team."

-Daniel Archer, VP of Engineering, Ritual

Language and integration support

LaunchDarkly supports 26+ languages and 60+ integrations. Split only supports 20 SDKs and 40 integrations, according to their website 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.

Advanced targeting 

LaunchDarkly offers advanced targeting with Custom contexts, a capability that enables you to target your features and experiments with precision based on an unlimited combination of attributes. Split has limitations around their targeting. You can review the feature comparison chart for more details on the differences between our functionalities.

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 system

“LaunchDarkly’s support is better. Where I would say a general support question might take a full day to 2 days with Split. It may take 1-2 hours with LaunchDarkly.” - Director of Product, Energy Company 

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

“As a product manager, I recommend using LaunchDarkly” - Enterprise Legal Services Customer

Product managers choose LaunchDarkly over Split 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 to understand user experiences – enabling quick decision making on roll outs, roll backs, or continuous iterations of a feature,
• A more granular way of targeting specific user 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, and 
• 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:

• Progressive rollouts to reduce risks and enable greater control when delivering software
• 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 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.

Visit our pricing page.