Easy to use and deploy
What do you like best about the product?
easy to use and deploy, simply by toggling on and off.
What do you dislike about the product?
can not support percentage rollout for mobile App
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
easy to enable and disable a feature
App config
What do you like best about the product?
Config management and custom rule support
What do you dislike about the product?
Monitoring system and local caching support
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
App config
Gets the job done
What do you like best about the product?
I like that it's fairly easy to use. My team uses LD flags for a few use cases and we've managed to use it as our flag system of choice for the past while. It's also nice that it has numerous integrations as we use the slack app + webhooks for notifications. Easy to use in code too but I wasn't involved in the setup within my team, just reading flags directly.
What do you dislike about the product?
I'm not a fan of the whole UI redesign earlier this year because I had to relearn the workflows I was used to and haven't gained anything subsequently. Also, the flag history feature should be improved for JSON flags because it's difficult to see exactly what changed without looking at details / pressing more buttons. This makes bisecting an impactful change more difficult. I was implemented a webhook integration with LD and the API docs for what you send can be improved. I learned more getting a response back from our real LD implementation than reading through the API example responses.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I've used launch darkly as a control system as well as a tool for feature rollouts. It works for all use cases as I'd expect and have no complaints on the technical side of things. It took me a little while to ramp onto this system but now I can understand the typical workflows pretty easily.
Seems to work fine mostly
What do you like best about the product?
It works for our use cases and gives the ability to dial up features and view a history of configuration. Barely have to think about it once it's integrated.
What do you dislike about the product?
Rare outages and lack of fallback conditions.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Just an easy way to turn new features on and off to reduce service outages or regressions.
Supports trunk-based development, allowing for faster development but lacks multi-region support
What is our primary use case?
We built a powerful e-commerce platform and heavily used LaunchDarkly to launch features behind a flag. This allowed us to implement trunk-based development, significantly improving our development speed. We could continuously deploy everything behind a flag and enable features only when ready, which was incredibly helpful.
There are certain features we need to keep behind a flag. Typically, there are two ways to do this: using a property file or using LaunchDarkly. With property files, we had to deploy the feature in a lower environment, update the property, and then restart the server.
LaunchDarkly, on the other hand, offers real-time changes and the ability to disable features if issues arise in production. This real-time capability is extremely beneficial.
How has it helped my organization?
Targeting rules have improved our deployment process.
Our deployment process has become much faster. We are able to keep rolling out to production even if a feature isn't fully ready. We simply don't enable it until it's complete. LaunchDarkly also helps with certain business use cases that require time-sensitive run-time decisions.
For instance, during validation processes, both conditions need to be met, but the upstream system isn't ready. We can still provide support and, in the future, transition smoothly.
Imagine a scenario where you need to accept both five-digit and ten-digit order numbers, but your system isn't ready for ten-digit numbers yet. LaunchDarkly allows you to support both initially and then, when all other services are ready, enable the ten-digit feature. This makes the rollout seamless.
What is most valuable?
It has really helped during the series of product lines and faster deployment and faster development.
What needs improvement?
LaunchDarkly currently lacks multi-region support. I strongly believe they need to develop a strategy for handling situations where LaunchDarkly goes down. They should have a backup URL and collaborate with other engineers to ensure availability. There should be a fail-over strategy in place. My understanding is that a multi-region real-time solution isn't available yet.
Another future enhancement I envision is having the entire application property load through LaunchDarkly. This integration would be advantageous but needs to be designed to be very user-friendly and serviceable.
I use a dashboard. I see some improvements happening, but it's a little bit cluttered. It even needs to be improved because certain kinds of levels of fields are added. So they need to make it very user-friendly, that kind of thing. So, LaunchDarkly really has to play around and make it very user-friendly.
I expect certain behavior from the tool, but it gives me false results. I know I need to play around with all the properties, and then I can go to what it takes.
It's not a tool that a non-technical person can use. Like, whoever is a non-technical person can also easily able to understand what they want to do; that kind of thing used to be taken as part of the dashboard (cloud dashboard), which is wherever we are enabled with your feature, like, so because If you go inside the plans, it has, like, a certain level of conditions and operations. So sometimes it works well, sometimes it doesn't work. So everyone has to understand. So, that needs to be very precise.
For how long have I used the solution?
We started using LaunchDarkly about two years ago for a major project related to commerce and transactions in the retail domain.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We had a few issues. They have a default property system, but I don't know. Somewhere, I realize that even LaunchDarkly takes a little bit of time latency-wise.
There is somewhere an area that requires improvement because this is considered every time I go, I know it has a streaming process. It does not do it every time, but wherever it does, I realize, like, whenever I am checking with my APM tool, I can see it makes a network call every time, which shouldn't take more than five seconds. That mechanism is required. So one time, like, whenever our application loads, your vendors should come and, like, whenever we do some level of changes, that will be notified to our services and update those vendors.
Because that is, like, I should not have to check alerts every time at the API call whether a flag is false or true. So, wherever we do certain actions. But because this flag is not gonna be frequently updated. So that is gonna be the business condition. It could stay around for one month, one year, or two years in our group.
So when this comes, it should be like large lags should notify our services. So maybe their SDK should reflect this only one time. Then, we should not make any call to our server.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I don't think it's yet scalable. Because multidimensional and multi-use features are required. For scalability, everything needs to be updated. I don't think it's heavily used because we probably consider; what if we have billions of requests? So, the system should always be scalable. It should be automated and scalable. It should start using Kubernetes, which takes care of scaling in and out based on the load.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is just an SSO. You already have an SSO. I don't know whether the SSO is available, but if it is not, it needs to be introduced at the company level. The company needs to be SSO-logged.
So they don't want to collaborate and create an account and everything. Ideally, this should be logged in through the SSO. That should happen with our server only. That is one thing I believe. It was not there six months before, but I am not currently aware.
So if it is not, that should be introduced. The login should be there so they can manage product sales and non-product sales.
Set alone, we can't control as an organization. We can't provide access to everyone.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We have a license. From what I heard from my other team members, the licensing cost is a little high. So it needs to be cheaper.
If it's cheaper, any organization will involve more users.
What other advice do I have?
Overall, I would rate it a seven out of ten because it has a lot of improvements yet required.
I would recommend it until, like, there are a lot of things available in the market. It's company to company how they want to implement it.
LaunchDarkly is a great tool. But consider whatever service you need to make sure your system is scalable, multi-region, multi-area. Those things are very important whenever a company tries to onboard any new external services.
Using LD a lot for configuratuon purposes
What do you like best about the product?
It is very useful to create simple configurations quickly based on a lot of variations.
Creating rules is somewhat simple and convenient
What do you dislike about the product?
Managing a lot if rules is not that easy, it becomes very hard when I have more than 3 variations in a single flag
I would like to be able to manage one flag based on specific criteria easier.
For example be able to manage flag per client,l as high level, and then create rules separately under this specific client.
Be able to view all flag values per condition (for example, what will be all the values for client)
Client connection to LD should be more stable
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Configuration for different clients abd environments
Launch Darkly
What do you like best about the product?
Cross platform integration and feature management.
Looking forwatd to see how the experimental A/B testing evolves.
What do you dislike about the product?
Would like to see more support for an open source community and limited user time sensitive free trials.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Being able to control or roll out A/B testing in conjunction with feature management.
Works well, but the cost is very high
What do you like best about the product?
Easy ability to manage flags across enviornments
What do you dislike about the product?
The cost is too high, so my company is migrating away from it.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Across environment flag configuration
Pretty straightforward, but lacking in API reporting
What do you like best about the product?
It seems relatively straightforward to and helps streamline the feature flag process.
What do you dislike about the product?
The backend API is lacking for reporting purposes. It's very difficult to find out what segments have the feature flag enabled for example.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It helps deploy new features selectively to segments of users. We can also immediately turn off a feature if there is a problem.
Works, but ui is very confusing and misleading
What do you like best about the product?
That it works...........................
What do you dislike about the product?
The ui is very confusing. You need to simplify it a lot for LaunchDarkly to be well-understood.
Other then that - better understanding of your architecture will be appreciated (how the agent in the app effects scaling)
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
avoiding deployment for reverting new changes
