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There are so many different feature flag software options that making a shortlist of the best can be tricky. You want to phase feature rollouts and instantly disable a feature in case of critical issues or emergencies but need the right tool for the job. I've got you covered! In this post I share my personal experience managing hundreds of products, using many different platforms with large teams, and complex products, and share my picks of the best feature flag software.

Why Trust Our Feature Flag Software Reviews

We’ve been testing and reviewing feature flag software since 2021. As product managers ourselves, we know how critical and difficult it is to make the right decision when selecting software.

We invest in deep research to help our audience make better software purchasing decisions. We’ve tested more than 2,000 tools for different product management use cases and written over 1,000 comprehensive software reviews. Learn how we stay transparent & our feature flag software review methodology.

The Best Feature Flag Software Comparison Chart

Here is a table you can use to compare the tools we just covered in the overviews.

Tools Price
Flagsmith From $45/3 users/month
Optimizely Pricing upon request
Unleash From $80/month for 5 users
LaunchDarkly From $10/user/month
Harness From $100/service/month
Flagship From $175/month/15,000 monthly active users
GrowthBook From $20/month
Molasses From $50/month
DevCycle From $8/user/month
CloudBees From $1,325/month
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How To Choose Feature Flag Software

With so many different feature flag software solutions available, it can be challenging to make decisions on what feature flag software is going to be the best fit for your needs.

As you're shortlisting, trialing, and selecting feature flag software, consider the following:

  • What problem are you trying to solve - Start by identifying the feature flag feature gap you're trying to fill to clarify the features and functionality the feature flag software needs to provide.
  • Who will need to use it - To evaluate cost and requirements, consider who'll be using the software and how many licenses you'll need. You'll need to evaluate if it'll just be the product management professionals, or the whole organization that will require access. When that's clear, it's worth considering if you're prioritizing ease of use for all, or speed for your feature flag software power users.
  • What other tools it needs to work with - Clarify what tools you're replacing, what tools are staying, and the tools you'll need to integrate with, such as accounting, CRM or HR software. You'll need to decide if the tools will need to integrate together, or alternatively, if you can replace multiple tools with one consolidated feature flag tool.
  • What outcomes are important - Consider the result that the software needs to deliver to be considered a success. Consider what capability you want to gain, or what you want to improve, and how you will be measuring success. For example, an outcome could be the ability to get greater visibility into performance. You could compare feature flag software features until you’re blue in the face, but if you aren’t thinking about the outcomes you want to drive, you could be wasting a lot of valuable time.
  • How it would work within your organization - Consider the software selection alongside your workflows and delivery methodology. Evaluate what's working well, and the areas that are causing issues that need to be addressed. Remember every business is different — don’t assume that because a tool is popular that it'll work in your organization.

Best Feature Flag Software Reviews

Here’s a brief description of each feature flagging platform to showcase each tool’s best use case, some noteworthy features, and screenshots to give a snapshot of the user interface.

Best for flexible deployments & on-premises hosting

  • Free Version
  • From $45/3 users/month
Visit Website
Rating: 4.7/5

Flagsmith is an open source feature flag software that simplifies the continuous deployment of new code. The software enables your team to handle remote configs, helping them switch time-sensitive features on/off.

The solution comes with segments, A/B testing, and integrations with popular analytics engines out of the box. Its SDKs are easy to work with, and it provides hosted API to make deployment easier during development cycles. One of the things that make Flagsmith stand out is its clean interface.

You can add tags and descriptions to your feature flags, so they’re easier to manage. Flagsmith costs from $45/3 users/month.

The solution offers a free version with limited functionalities for a single user.

Digital experience platform with highly customizable tests

  • Free demo available
  • Pricing upon request
Visit Website
Rating: 4.5/5

Optimizely is feature management and A/B testing software that helps you with experimentation, server-side testing, and multivariate testing. The software has a small learning curve, but it can help your DevOps, Product, Marketing, and Design specialists if your team learns how to leverage most of its features.

This solution tends to be better suited for websites rather than apps, and it’s not ideal for those who want to use feature flags for backend rollouts. However, its mix of features makes it a good choice for companies that want to test out different customer pipelines in order to improve their CRO.

One of the things that make Optimizely shine is the fact that it allows you to add custom JS and CSS per test, so you can refine your tests with ease.

Optimizely offers custom pricing upon request.

Best for its role-based access controls

  • 14-day free trial + free demo available
  • From $80/month for 5 users
Visit Website
Rating: 4.7/5

Unleash is an open-source, enterprise-ready feature management solution built with privacy in mind. Companies use Unleash to decouple the release process from deployment to production.

The software operates as an API client, meaning it integrates with a codebase via APIs to be updated in real-time. The platform gives developers a centralized dashboard to quickly change feature flag configurations. Additionally, it tracks metrics and collects data on how users interact with any new feature. Its role-based access controls ensure that only authorized members can approve, test, and launch new features, providing a secure and streamlined release process.

The platform's toggling feature allows developers to switch features on or off without releasing new code. Businesses can offer early access to users, A/B test features, and change back-end connections on the fly. The software lets developers segment the user base at various levels, making it easy to control who gets what. Feature rollouts can help companies ease into new features before they’re fully ready.

Developers can release features gradually to a subset of users, and then work up to full releases. This way, users can monitor adoption before committing to an entire release. Moreover, context-based rollouts enable users to toggle features based on specific contexts, such as a user’s location or environment.

Pricing starts at $80 per month for 5 users, and a 14-day free trial is available.

Best for detailed user targeting

  • 14-day free trial
  • From $10/user/month

LaunchDarkly is feature management and A/B testing software that enables your dev team to wrap code with feature flags and deploy it safely, without impacting your users. The solution helps you segment your user base based on various attributes, and you can ship your feature rollouts to specific user subsets if you want to test them out.

LaunchDarkly stands out thanks to its straightforward UI, simple SDK integrations, and extensive documentation. Not only that, but the tool’s A/B tests are easy to set up, so your Product or Marketing specialists can run them.

The software’s insight graph does a great job of showing you which variants different user segments are currently receiving, so you can identify and remove ineffective flags.

LaunchDarkly costs from $10/user/month. The solution offers a free 14-day trial and a live demo.

Best for analytics and triage reports

  • Free version available
  • From $100/service/month

Harness was founded by former engineers from companies like Apple, Yahoo, and Splunk, who were frustrated with the limitations of traditional CI/CD tools and wanted to build a more modern, cloud-native solution that would enable faster and safer software delivery.

Harness feature flag software allows development teams to release new features safely and efficiently by decoupling code deployment from feature release through controlled feature toggling.

Harness provides a comprehensive feature flagging solution that enables development teams to release new features in a controlled and safe manner. Harness feature flags offer a flexible and scalable approach to feature releases, allowing teams to decouple code deployment from feature releases and gradually roll out new functionality to targeted users. With Harness, teams can easily create and manage feature flags, track flag performance metrics, and quickly roll back changes if necessary.

Harness has a free, open source community editon. Paid plans start at $100/month.

Feature flagging and feature experimentation software

  • 30-day free trial
  • From $175/month/15,000 monthly active users

Flagship is a feature flagging software that enables your engineers to ship code faster, reduce risk, and constantly improve your users’ experience. The solution supports most popular technology stacks, including Java, JS, Python, and more. You can choose the best implementation method for your team, via the tool’s agnostic API or the available SDKs.

Flagship helps your team decouple deployment from the release of a feature and experiment extensively before rolling something out to all your users. The experimentation platform focuses on outcomes, not outputs, and you can run A/B tests to track the impact of your releases.

Flagship costs from $175/month/15,000 monthly active users.

The platform offers a free 30-day trial.

Open source feature flagging and A/B testing platform

  • Free Version
  • From $20/month

GrowthBook is an open source feature management and experimentation platform that helps your engineering team adopt an experimentation culture. The software enables your engineers to use feature flags to deploy new code after interpreting user data and metrics.

The solution is modular. You can use it for feature flags, experiments, or both. Its modular build makes it ideal for SaaS startups that don’t have enough traffic to run full experiments but want the benefits of using feature flags.

The software impresses with its lightweight SDKs and allows you to evaluate everything you do locally, without network requests.

Growthbook costs from $20/user/month.

The software also offers a free version with limited capabilities.

For client-side and server-side SDKs

  • Free Version
  • From $50/month

Molasses is a feature management tool that helps you deploy code with fewer incidents. The software offers a good mix of feature flags and A/B testing tools, so you can test your code extensively without affecting your user base.

This solution supports SDKs for programming languages such as JavaScript, React, Go, Node, Python, and Ruby, and plans to add others in the future. You can create a detailed audit logging, so you can have a clear picture of who did what and why. You can also set up alerts and receive Slack notifications in real-time when someone changes the code.

Molasses is great if you want to speed up your development process with SDKs in different languages.

Molasses costs from $50/month. The software also offers a free version with limited capabilities.

Powerful dashboard to capture all your live feature testing data

  • Free-forever version
  • From $8/user/month

DevCycle is a feature management platform that helps your team to release features faster while focusing on usability and risk reduction. The software offers a clean interface that makes it easy for all your team members to understand which feature flag is running or not.

The solution has full SDK coverage and enables you to create customized workflows. The tool allows you to track feature flags across the product’s development cycle, so you can turn them off if necessary.

DevCycle’s analytics features do a great job of organizing your data, so you can present the reports to management or other departments without further effort.

DevCycle costs from $8/user/month. The platform offers a free-forever version with limited functionalities.

Best for environment management

  • Free version available
  • From $1,325/month

CloudBees is another software delivery platform with out-of-the-box integrations and good feature flagging capabilities. The solution helps you manage release workflows and simplifies cross-team communication.

This solution has a nice-looking build that allows you to improve your continuous delivery process. Its tracking and predictive analytics features help you identify risks and opportunities in good time, and automatically collect data across your software development lifecycle.

CloudBees stands out thanks to its pipeline and environment management features. You can create custom pipelines, test your code and get real-time reports about the deployment success, failure, throughput, and runtime.

CloudBees offers customized pricing upon demand.

Other Feature Flag Software

Here are a few more tools that did not make it to the top but are still worth your consideration.

  1. Apptimize

    For feature rollout on native mobile apps

  2. Split

    For enhanced feature flag targeting

  3. Harness Feature Flags

    Software delivery platform that speeds up your feature rollouts with templates.

  4. VWO FullStack

    Feature management and A/B testing software that helps you run in-depth experiments.

  5. ConfigCat

    Feature flag platform that enables you to decouple your future releases from code deployment.

  6. Taplytics

    Feature management tool that enables you to ship your releases to specific user groups to minimize risk.

If you still haven't found what you're looking for here, check out these tools closely related to feature flag software that we've tested and evaluated.

Selection Criteria for Feature Flag Software

When selecting feature flag software, it's vital to focus on functionality that meets the most critical use cases for your organization. This involves evaluating how a platform can alleviate common pain points such as deployment risk, feature testing inefficiencies, and challenges in managing feature rollouts across various environments. Through my extensive trials and research into these tools, I've developed a set of criteria that directly relate to these needs, which I then weighted based on their importance to my overall evaluation.

Core Feature Flag Software Functionality (25% of total weighting score): To be considered for inclusion on my list of the best feature flag software, the solution had to support the ability to fulfill common use cases:

  • Gradual rollouts to mitigate deployment risks
  • Targeted feature releases to specific user segments
  • A/B testing for evaluating feature impact
  • Environment-specific flagging for safer testing and development
  • Real-time feature toggle management for operational agility

Additional Standout Features (25% of total weighting score): Additional features that exceed the standard offerings can distinguish a good platform from a great one. As such, this part of the evaluation focuses on unique and innovative functionalities that enhance user experience, provide deeper insights, or integrate more seamlessly with existing workflows, offering buyers a competitive edge. This includes:

  • Advanced targeting capabilities for more nuanced user segmentation
  • Detailed analytics and reporting tools for deeper insights into feature performance
  • Integration capabilities with other development and monitoring tools for a more cohesive workflow

Usability (10% of total weighting score): Usability testing ensures that the platform is accessible and efficient for users of all skill levels, making it a crucial factor in the adoption and effective use of the software. This criterion assesses the balance between powerful features and a user-friendly interface, highlighting software that combines sophistication with simplicity. Here, I evaluate:

  • The software's interface design and ease of use, prioritizing intuitive navigation and clear, accessible feature management options
  • The balance between powerful capabilities and user-friendliness, ensuring that the platform is approachable for users of all skill levels

Onboarding (10% of total weighting score): A smooth onboarding process is essential for users to quickly get up to speed and start benefiting from the software. This evaluation looks for comprehensive training resources, intuitive setup processes, and immediate support mechanisms that facilitate a seamless transition to the new tool. I look for:

  • Comprehensive training materials such as videos, product tours, and webinars
  • Interactive guides and chatbots that facilitate immediate, hands-on learning
  • Clear documentation and support for migrating from other systems

Customer Support (10% of total weighting score): Reliable customer support is a lifeline for resolving issues and minimizing disruptions in software development processes. This criterion examines the availability, responsiveness, and quality of support services, ensuring users have access to timely help when they need it most. My criteria include:

  • Availability of support through multiple channels (e.g., chat, email, phone)
  • Responsiveness and quality of support received
  • Access to a knowledgeable community or forum for peer assistance

Value For Money (10% of total weighting score): Evaluating value for money involves looking beyond the price tag to consider the richness of features, scalability, and the overall return on investment. This criterion attempts to identify which software offers the best balance of price and performance for businesses of all sizes. Assessing value also involves comparing:

  • Pricing structures against the depth and breadth of features offered
  • The flexibility of pricing plans to accommodate different sizes and types of teams
  • The overall ROI, considering both direct and indirect costs and benefits

Customer Reviews (10% of total weighting score): Customer reviews provide real-world insights into the software’s performance, reliability, and user satisfaction. This evaluation considers both positive and negative feedback, focusing on trends that indicate the software’s strengths and areas for improvement. I consider:

  • Overall satisfaction ratings and the prevalence of positive versus negative reviews
  • Specific praises or criticisms that align with key use cases for feature flag management
  • Trends in feedback that indicate the platform's evolution and responsiveness to user needs

Through this detailed and methodical approach, I ensure that my recommendations for feature flag software are well-suited to the diverse needs of businesses seeking to enhance their software development and deployment processes. By prioritizing these criteria, buyers can make informed decisions that align with their specific goals and challenges, leading to more successful outcomes and greater satisfaction with their chosen solution.

As the feature flag software market evolves, additional trends emerge, reflecting the industry's response to new challenges and opportunities. These trends are shaping the way product management professionals activate, test, and manage features in their software applications:

  • Collaboration and Team Enablement: Enhanced collaboration features within feature flag platforms are becoming crucial as cross-functional teams require seamless communication and shared access to flag configurations. Platforms are incorporating features like comment threads, flag change notifications, and shared dashboards to facilitate better team collaboration and decision-making.
  • Environmental Consistency: Tools are now offering more sophisticated environment management features to ensure that flags behave consistently, reducing the risk of errors during rollouts. Advanced environment segmentation and synchronization features ensure that configurations remain consistent across all stages of development and deployment.
  • Self-Service Capabilities: There's an increasing demand for self-service capabilities within feature flag platforms, allowing non-technical team members to manage flags and understand their impacts without deep technical knowledge. This democratization of feature flag management is intended to empower broader teams to contribute to the product development process. These capabilities include user-friendly interfaces, simplified flag management workflows, and accessible analytics.
  • Predictive Analytics and AI: Integrating artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to forecast the impact of feature releases before they are fully deployed enables teams to make more informed decisions about feature rollouts. AI-driven predictions on feature performance and potential system impacts also allow users to make proactive adjustments.
  • Sustainability and Efficiency: As sustainability becomes a more significant concern, feature flag platforms are emphasizing features that help reduce resource consumption and improve the efficiency of development processes. This includes minimizing the computational overhead of feature flag evaluations and optimizing the efficiency of flag-related operations.

As feature flag software continues to mature, these trends will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of software development, offering product management professionals advanced tools to navigate the complexities of modern application deployment and management.

What is feature flag software?

Feature flag software, also known as feature toggles or feature switches, is a tool used in product management and software development to enable or disable specific features within an application or system. It allows development teams to control the release and visibility of features independently, separate from the overall code deployment.

This capability enables product managers to implement gradual rollouts, A/B testing, and targeted feature deployments, allowing for more agile and data-driven decision-making. It also provides the flexibility to respond quickly to issues or changing user requirements by enabling feature toggles, ensuring a smoother and more controlled product development and release process.

Features of Feature Flag Software

Feature flag software has become an indispensable tool for modern software development teams, allowing them to seamlessly activate, test, and manage features within their applications. This enables developers to roll out new features to select user groups or environments without deploying new code, thereby minimizing risk and facilitating smoother user experiences. Here, I outline the most important features to look for in feature flag software.

  1. Easy Integration: The software easily integrates with existing development workflows. This ensures developers can quickly implement feature flags without significant changes to their development processes, making the adoption seamless.
  2. Fine-Grained Targeting: It allows for targeting specific user segments. This is crucial for conducting A/B tests or rolling out features to a subset of users, enabling more personalized experiences and better understanding of user behavior.
  3. Real-Time Control: The feature provides the ability to toggle features on and off in real-time. This flexibility is vital for quickly addressing issues or making adjustments based on user feedback without needing to redeploy.
  4. Environment-Specific Flags: Supports separate flags for different environments (e.g., development, staging, production). This allows teams to test features extensively in non-production environments before releasing them to users, reducing the risk of errors.
  5. Auditing and Analytics: Offers comprehensive auditing and analytics capabilities. Understanding how features impact user behavior and system performance helps in making data-driven decisions and improving feature implementations.
  6. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): It enforces role-based access control. By restricting who can create, modify, or delete feature flags, you ensure that only authorized personnel make changes, thereby maintaining system integrity.
  7. Scalability: The software scales with your application. As your user base grows and your application becomes more complex, the feature flag system should be able to handle the increased load without performance degradation.
  8. SDKs for Multiple Languages: Provides SDKs for various programming languages. This ensures that regardless of the technology stack your application uses, you can implement feature flags without significant hassle.
  9. Fallback Strategies: It includes fallback strategies for feature flags. In case of failures (e.g., network issues), the system should default to a predefined state to ensure the application remains functional.
  10. Customizable Flag Lifecycles: Allows for customizable flag lifecycles. This enables teams to define stages for each feature flag, from creation to retirement, ensuring that flags are managed effectively throughout their lifecycle.

By focusing on these key features, teams can ensure they choose a solution that both enhances their development process and provides a robust framework for feature management, ultimately leading to more controlled, efficient, and successful software releases. This strategic approach to feature management empowers teams to deliver superior software experiences while maintaining the flexibility to adapt to user feedback and market demands swiftly.

Benefits of Feature Flag Software

By enabling developers to toggle features on and off without deploying new code, feature flag tools offer unparalleled control over the software development lifecycle. For organizations considering the adoption of feature flag software, understanding its core benefits can help underscore its value. Here are five primary advantages of feature flag software:

  1. Increased Deployment Safety: By gradually rolling out changes to users, businesses can minimize disruptions and swiftly revert any feature that doesn't perform as expected, thereby safeguarding user experience and system stability.
  2. Faster Time to Market: Developers can push features into production but disabled, enabling other work to proceed without waiting for each feature to be perfect, thus accelerating the overall development cycle and allowing businesses to innovate more rapidly.
  3. Enhanced User Experience Customization: Organizations can target specific features to specific groups based on user behavior, location, or other criteria, enhancing satisfaction and engagement through a more tailored experience.
  4. Simplified Testing and Feedback Loops: By enabling feature toggles for testing environments or specific user groups, teams can gather insights and iterate on features more effectively, leading to higher quality outcomes and more informed development decisions.
  5. Greater Operational Resilience: Feature flags allow for the quick disabling of problematic features without rolling back entire deployments, ensuring that the application remains operational and user impact is minimized during incidents.

For potential buyers of feature flag software, these benefits highlight the strategic advantage of incorporating such a tool into their development and operational workflows. Adopting this approach can lead to significant improvements in deployment safety, market responsiveness, and overall user satisfaction, making feature flag software a compelling consideration for any organization looking to refine its software development practices.

Costs & Pricing for Feature Flag Software

When exploring feature flag software options, it's essential to understand the various available plan and pricing structures to ensure you select a solution that best aligns with your team's size, needs, and budget. Feature flag platforms typically offer a range of plans to cater to different types of users, from startups to large enterprises, with each plan designed to offer specific features and capabilities that match the scale and complexity of your projects. Here’s a breakdown of common plan options and pricing:

Plan Comparison Table for Feature Flag Software

Plan TypeAverage PriceCommon Features Included
Enterprise$500 - $2000/monthAdvanced targeting and segmentation, Full analytics suite, Unlimited feature flags, Premium customer support, SSO/SAML integration, Customizable roles and permissions
Pro$100 - $500/monthStandard targeting and segmentation, Basic analytics, Unlimited feature flags, Email support, Basic SSO integration
Team$50 - $100/monthLimited targeting and segmentation, Basic analytics, Limited feature flags, Community support
Free$0Basic feature flagging capabilities, Community support, Limited number of feature flags

Each plan is tailored to fit different stages of growth and development needs. Enterprise plans are suited for large teams requiring comprehensive feature management and analytics capabilities, while Pro plans cater to mid-sized teams needing a balance of functionality and support. Team plans are ideal for small teams or projects just starting with feature flags, offering essential tools without a significant investment. Finally, the Free option usually allows individuals or small teams to experiment with basic feature flagging functionalities before committing to a paid plan.

When selecting a plan, it is important to consider your team's size, the complexity of your projects, and the level of support you might need. It's also worth considering the scalability of the platform, ensuring it can grow with your needs over time.

Feature Flag Software Frequently Asked Questions

What is a feature flag?

A feature flag is a process used by software development teams to enable or disable certain software functionalities without deploying code. This process helps DevOps teams test new features, make updates, and modify system behavior without affecting user experience.

Feature flag management can help you ship your product quickly and safely. It’s a critical part of the product roadmap, as it empowers your team to work incrementally on new features.

Why should I use a feature flag?

There are many reasons why feature flagging is important in product development. However, here are the top 3 in my opinion.

  1. It allows you to gradually roll out features to users. Therefore, you can start small, monitor, and make any required adjustments before rolling them out to everyone.
  2. Feature flags can help you A/B test. This lets you release different versions of a feature to two distinct user groups and see which one performs better.
  3. It prevents unnecessary risks. Feature flagging is ideal for mitigating risks. Think of this, you can release a new feature and turn it off as soon as you see problems that could translate into downtime for users.

Can I read other related content to feature flagging?

Yes! We have very interesting articles you can read to further your knowledge on the topic.

What's Next?

Feature flags help you validate and measure performance before shipping the feature to broader audiences, so you can reduce the risk of failure and constantly improve customer experience. You can learn more about product lifecycle management software on our blog.

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By Ben Aston

Ben Aston is an online media entrepreneur and founder of Black & White Zebra, an indie media company on a mission to help people and organizations succeed.

Ben applies his expertise in design and strategy to enable businesses to deliver innovative products and services that delight customers. Ben is passionate about understanding customer needs through design research, identifying opportunities based on those insights, and empowering designers and technologists to create solutions. He is driven to develop and uncover new opportunities for clients, establishing strong connections with their customers through product solutions that create lasting value.