LaunchDarkly

What do you like best about the product?

The biggest win for us has been how much control it gives the product and engineering teams without needing a deploy every time we want to change something. We use feature flags constantly to roll things out gradually, test with specific user segments, and kill a feature instantly if something looks off in the metrics. As someone who lives in the data, I appreciate that I can tie flag rollouts directly to experiment results instead of relying on engineering to ship a new build every time we want to iterate. The integrations with our existing stack (Slack, Datadog, Jira) make it easy to get visibility into flag changes without having to log into the platform constantly, alerts show up where the team already works. We've also started using some of the AI-assisted features for flag cleanup and identifying stale flags, which has saved us a decent chunk of manual auditing time as our flag count has grown across teams.

What do you dislike about the product?

Not much that frustrates me day-to-day. The native dashboards are decent, but we usually export data to view alongside our other product metrics for deeper analysis. Onboarding new team members on flag naming and project structure also takes a little hand-holding early on, just due to the flexibility of the tool. Minor friction points, nothing that's affected our decision to keep using it.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Before LaunchDarkly, shipping a feature meant a full deploy and finger crossing, rolling back fast if something broke wasn't really an option. Now we ship code dark and turn it on for specific user groups whenever we're ready. For example, when we rolled out a new pricing flow recently, we turned it on for 5% of users first, watched conversion and drop-off for a few days, then ramped it up once we were confident it wasn't hurting anything. That kind of staged rollout would've been a nightmare to coordinate manually before. As an analyst, it's made my life easier too, I can trust that a rollout was clean instead of trying to untangle a messy, all-or-nothing launch.

What do you like best about the product?

Honestly, the thing that's made the biggest difference for me is just being able to control who sees what without having to rope in an engineer every single time. We're juggling a lot of moving parts —HR, IT, payroll—and before LD, getting a feature in front of a specific set of customers meant coordinating deploys, syncing across teams, the whole thing. Now I can target a specific customer segment, set a rollout percentage, and go. The experimentation piece has also been really useful, I use it to gut-check whether something is actually working before we fully commit. And the audit log sounds boring but I reference it more than I expected to. Stakeholders ask "why did this change" and I can just show them. That alone has saved a few awkward conversations.

What do you dislike about the product?

Nothing major honestly. If I had to nitpick, the initial setup and the whole projects/environments structure takes a little getting used to, new people on the team sometimes need a bit of hand-holding at first. But once it clicks it's fine. More of a onboarding thing than an actual issue with the product. Overall it's been pretty smooth for us.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

The big one for me is that it's closed the gap between when something is built and when we actually feel confident putting it in front of customers. That used to be a stressful handoff, lots of back and forth, timing pressure, hoping nothing breaks. Now the flag is already in prod, we control the switch, and we can move at our own pace. I'll typically start with a small beta, maybe 10 or 15 customers, get some signal, and then expand from there. It also makes cross-team coordination easier. I can tell customer success exactly what's going out and when, without waiting on release notes or a deploy window. It's made the whole release process feel a lot less chaotic honestly. Less firefighting, more intentional shipping.

What do you like best about the product?

I can view all aspects of the events in a customer’s journey. This is especially helpful when I need to find specific moments around an issue by using filters, such as the name of a button the user clicked. From there, it’s easy to extend the search to other customer journeys and see whether they encountered the same issue as well. Overall, this is straightforward to do because the UI is very well presented.

What do you dislike about the product?

It’s unfortunate that we’ve lost the ability to share individual session captures with external users. There are times when we want to provide customers with evidence of an issue or of a user’s actions, but in Launch Darkly this isn’t possible.

We hoped we could work around it by adding customers as users on the platform with custom access levels. However, that also isn’t possible with Launch Darkly, which seems to offer an all-or-nothing level of sharing when it comes to sessions. This is disappointing, especially because it’s something we were very used to when using Highlight.io.

Additionally while the Dashboards are fine, we would prefer this data to be exported to Grafana where we would be able to use their panels to display and transform the data as we would like. We are working on this ourselves at the moment.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Speaking from the position of the support team, Launch Darkly allows a singular platform that we can use to troubleshoot the customer and end user journey issues. It also provides the tools for our developers to enhance the level that we can do this via custom fields. It's integration with Linear makes it easy for Issues to be raised linked to the journey and the Dashboards allow a holistic view across the front end so we can be proactive with bug investigation and fixes.

What do you like best about the product?

LaunchDarkly is relatively easy to set up and has a straightforward learning curve compared to the other platforms we explored.

What do you dislike about the product?

So far, I haven't come across any major drawbacks, at least with the features I've worked with and explored.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Most of my exploration has been around feature flags and user lifecycle–based experiment setup.

My main use case for LaunchDarkly  is feature flagging and gradual rollouts. Instead of releasing a new feature to all users at once, we can first enable it for internal users, then for a small group of customers, and only later roll it out to everyone.

When we released a new feature, we first turned it on only for internal users. After that, we enabled it for a small percentage of real customers, which helped us test that feature in production without taking too much risk. If something went wrong, we could simply turn the flag off in LaunchDarkly  without doing a full rollback.

We use flags for gradual deploying and testing, then rolling out. For example, we enabled a feature, tested it in a specific environment, then turned off this flag.

The best feature LaunchDarkly offers is the flag that allows rollouts.

What I appreciate about LaunchDarkly is that the setup was easy, it had a clean user experience, and the control allowed us to manage the features without deploying them to everyone. We could deploy it gradually and then roll out easily. I particularly value the ability to click to turn the feature on and off.

LaunchDarkly has positively impacted my organization by reducing the risk of releasing new features because we did not have to expose everything to all users at the same time. It eventually resulted in faster releases and more confidence. It also saved engineering time because in some cases, we did not need to do a rollback or hot fixes; we could simply disable the feature flag. Additionally, it reduced the QA time since they could only test a specific area.

LaunchDarkly can be improved by managing old flags. We have an issue with old flags; it became very messy very fast and we need to be very disciplined about managing these flags. I also heard from the manager that it was very expensive when the usage grew.

Perhaps LaunchDarkly could mark old flags somehow or add a tag to these flags when they are not in use or have not been used for a long time. We found ourselves after a short period of time having too many flags.

I have been working in my current field for above ten years.

I used LaunchDarkly in my previous company for several months.

Overall, LaunchDarkly saved our engineering time and helped us manage features very smoothly, allowing us to gradually deploy and roll out.

My advice for others looking into using LaunchDarkly is to manage the flags carefully, as it can become messy very fast.

I believe LaunchDarkly is a very useful tool for teams wanting to release features quickly and safely; it gives a lot of control and helps reduce the risk around production releases. I would rate this product an eight out of ten.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services  (AWS )