LaunchDarkly vs. Statsig

LaunchDarkly tightly integrates product experiments into the software delivery process, fostering greater collaboration between product managers and software engineers. Moreover, we enable anyone—not just data scientists—to run valid experiments.

• "LaunchDarkly has enabled self-serve experimentation at CCP. You don’t have to be a data scientist to run valid, actionable experiments. This is unbelievably powerful."
  —Nick Herring, Technical Director of Infrastructure, CCP Games (source)

LaunchDarkly excels in both feature management and experimentation, meaning it considers the entire software release lifecycle. We allow you to run experiments and act upon them (e.g., roll out winning variants) in one seamless workflow. Thus, you not only improve the business performance of the features you ship through experimentation, but you also improve productivity metrics like deployment frequency and operational metrics like MTTR.

In contrast, from our perspective, Statsig over-emphasizes experimentation to the neglect of the broader software delivery process. Your data scientists may, indeed, run sophisticated experiments with Statsig. But the path from "experiment result" to "feature delivered to end users'' is less clear. Statsig's approach may not fully address the broader challenges of deploying software experiences and facilitating team collaboration on releases.

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

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 owners 
• Product designers 
• Program managers
• Release managers 
• Release engineers

Architects

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

Language and integration support

LaunchDarkly supports 26+ languages and 60+ integrations. Statsig only supports 20 SDKs and 24 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 experiments with precision based on an unlimited combination of attributes. Statsig does not offer this capability.

Comprehensive support system

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

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.

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

Product managers choose LaunchDarkly over Statsig for: 

• 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 precisely conduct experiments and personalize experiences for specific users, including leveraging their existing user data via integrations.

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 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 LaunchDarkly pricing page.