The 12 top feature flag management tools in 2024
Feature flags help engineering and product teams reduce the risk associated with feature releases, test changes in production, and ship features quickly.
Because of their many benefits, feature flags are ubiquitous in product and software development. This ubiquity necessitates management to reduce the technical debt associated with old and outdated feature flags.
Feature flag management tools help your product team control your feature flags — creating flags, turning them ON/OFF, and removing them from your code after the feature has shipped.
In this article, you will learn about free and open-source feature flag management tools:
- Flagsmith
- GrowthBook
- Flipt
- Unleash
- Flipper Cloud
- FeatBit
As well as robust paid feature flag management tools:
- Kameleoon
- LaunchDarkly
- Optimizely
- DevCycle
- Statsig
- Split
6 Free and open-source feature flag management tools
Open-source feature flag management tools offer you a chance to avoid huge upfront costs while getting the benefits of using feature toggles for canary releases, continuous delivery, and risk mitigation.
If a lack of budget prevents you from using feature flag management tools, open-source tools will give you the benefits of feature lifecycle management and feature experimentation.
Flagsmith
Flagsmith is a feature flag management software that is offered as open-source, cloud-based, and on-premises. Its open-source platform is under the BSD-3 Clause and MIT licenses.
Features
- Feature flags
- Remote configuration, which allows you to alter your app in real-time without waiting for app store permissions
- User segmentation
- A/B and multivariate testing
- Role-based access, change control, and security
Libraries supported
Server-side software development kits (SDKs): Python, .NET, Java, Node js, Ruby, PHP, Go, Rust, and Elixir.
Client-side SDKs: JavaScript, Android (Kotlin), Flutter, iOS (Swift), React and React Native, and Next.js
Pricing
Flagsmith has both free and paid options. Its free plan allows you to make 50k requests monthly, with unlimited flags, segments, and environments. Its paid options include self-hosted, managed hosting, and enterprise versions.
GrowthBook
GrowthBook is an open-source feature flag management tool that offers feature flagging, experimentation, and experiment analysis.
Features
- Feature flags
- Advanced user targeting
- Experimentation and analysis
Libraries supported
Client-side SDKs: Android (Kotlin), iOS (Swift), Flutter, JavaScript, Vue.js and React.
Server-side SDKs: PHP, Java, Go, Ruby, Python and C#
Pricing
GrowthBook’s open-source platform is free as long as you host it yourself, with unlimited flags and experiments. It has paid plans for both its cloud and self-hosted platforms.
Flipt
Flipt is an open-source feature flag management software licensed under MIT. It allows you to store your feature flags in Git, which eliminates the need for a database. Flipt offers both self-hosted and managed hosting options to users.
Flipt is an open-source feature flag management software licensed under MIT. It allows you to store your feature flags in Git, which eliminates the need for a database. Flipt offers both self-hosted and managed hosting options to users.
Features
- Feature flagging
- User segmentation
- Percentage thresholds for deployment
Libraries supported
Flipt offers SDKs for both client-side and server-side applications. For client-side SDKs, Flipt currently supports Python, Go, Typescript, and Ruby.
Server-side SDKs: Python, Go, PHP (beta), Java, .NET, Rust, and Ruby.
Pricing
Flipt is distributed under a GPL-3.0 license and is completely free.
Unleash
Unleash is an open-source feature flag management platform with a large community of developers that maintain several less common programming languages.
Features
- Feature flags with gradual rollout to users
- Advanced user targeting and segmentation
- Experimentation
- Technical debt management
Libraries supported
Unleash supports both client-side and server-side SDKs with its developer community supporting several more.
Server-side SDKs: Go, Java, PHP, .NET, Ruby, Rust, Python and Node.
Client-side SDKs: Android, Flutter, iOS, JavaScript, React, Next.js, Vue and Svelte.
Community-supported SDKs: Angular, C++, Dart, Elixir, Laravel -PHP, NestJS - Node.js, and more.
Pricing
Unleash offers 2 environments with unlimited feature flags for its free open-source plan.
Flipper Cloud
Flipper Cloud is a feature flag tool owned and managed by former GitHub engineers. At GitHub, they maintained the open-source version of Flipper which changed how GitHub handled feature releases.
Flipper Cloud is open-source and offers boolean flags, group flags, and rollout for a percentage of users/accounts.
Features
- Boolean activation to turn all features ON/OFF
- Group activation of multiple flags for people, accounts, and users
- Testing features in production.
- Turning features ON for a percentage of people, accounts, and users
Libraries supported
Flipper only supports Ruby.
Pricing
Flipper Cloud is free to use. They have a paid version with cloud-hosted services for $20 per seat per month.
FeatBit
FeatBit is an open-source feature flag management and A/B testing software that is distributed under the MIT license. It helps developers ship code faster and without risk.
Features
- Feature flag management
- A/B testing capabilities
- Targeted experiences for users with segment management
- Technical debt reduction and management
Libraries supported
FeatBit has both client-side and server-side SDKs. On the client side, FeatBit supports JavaScript/TypeScript, Vue, React, and Angular. Its server-side SDKs include Node.js, .NET, Java, Go, and Python.
Pricing
FeatBit is free to use with unlimited seats, monthly active users (MAUs), and APIs. It also offers paid support which starts at $399 per month with a 4-hour first reply service level agreement (SLA) during business hours.
6 Best paid feature flag management tools
The platforms in this category do not have any limitations of their open-source counterparts. These paid feature flag management tools offer robust platforms where cross-functional collaboration can take place.
Kameleoon
Kameleoon is the only optimization solution with Web Experimentation and Feature Experimentation, including feature flag management capabilities, in a single unified platform.
Kameleoon supports both product and marketing-led teams to increase their experimentation velocity and leverage their tech stacks.
With feature flag management and experimentation in one platform, all of your teams can work seamlessly together on developing, testing, and launching features.
Features
- Progressive and targeted delivery for segments of your users.
- Rollout (or rollback) features on any application or device using Kameleoon’s extensive SDK libraries.
- Effective technical debt management via a dashboard where you can see all your flags’ health.
- Feature experimentation capabilities that enable teams to run experiments and track performance metrics.
- Customizable deployment environments for you to connect and use feature flags on.
- Plug-and-play integrations to analytics tools
- Advanced in-app reporting capabilities
Libraries supported
Client-side: Android (Kotlin/Java), iOS (Swift), Flutter, React/React Native and JavaScript/TypeScript.
Server-side: Java, NodeJS, JavaScript/TypeScript, React, C#, Go, PHP, Python and Ruby.
Pricing
Kameleoon offers unlimited seats, audience sizes and variations on an annual license. Try Kameleoon’s Feature Experimentation and feature flags solution free for 30 days. Start your trial here.
LaunchDarkly
Established in 2014, LaunchDarkly is a feature flag management platform made for developers. With over 70 integrations and 25+ SDKs, LaunchDarkly smoothly integrates with your current technology stack for product and feature releases.
Features
- Feature flag capabilities with release management
- Integrations with other software in your stack
- Experimentation of proposed features
- Targeted experiences and delivery
- Custom APIs
Libraries supported
On the client side, LaunchDarkly supports SDKs for .NET, Android, iOS, C++, Electron, Flutter, Roku, React, Node.js, and JavaScript.
Server-side SDKs: Python, Ruby, Rust, .NET, Apex, C++, Erlang, Go, Haskell, Java, Lua, and PHP.
Pricing
The Starter plan is $8.33 per seat for each month billed annually and supports unlimited feature flags and environments, a dashboard, and access to 25+ SDKs. The Pro plan offers more functionality with unlimited projects, reusable segments, API controls, and peer-reviewed flags. The Pro plan starts at $16.67 per seat monthly, billed annually.
Optimizely
Optimizely is an experimentation platform. Its full stack option offers feature flag management for teams that want to control feature releases, test those features and make data-driven decisions about new features.
Features
- Feature flagging with configuration
- Random and targeted rollouts to a segmented user base
- Feature experimentation
- Intuitive dashboard for feature flag management.
Libraries supported
Optimizely offers both client- and server-side SDKs.
Client-side: Android, iOS, JavaScript, and React.
Server-side: C#, Go, Java, Node, PHP and Python.
Pricing
Optimizely doesn’t share its pricing publicly. To get a custom quote tailored to your needs, contact Optimizely’s sales team.
DevCycle
DevCycle is a feature flag tool geared toward developers and engineering teams. Built by the folks behind Taplytics, DevCycle was born in 2021 to enable engineering teams to continually push changes to their product.
Features
- Feature flagging capabilities
- Multi-environment feature flag configurations
- User targeting and segmentation
- Easy-to-use dashboard
Libraries supported
On the client-side, DevCycle offers SDKs for JavaScript, React, Next.js, iOS,Android, React Native and Flutter.
For server-side SDKs, DevCycle offers Node.js, PHP, Go, Ruby, Python, .NET and Java (both cloud and local bucketing).
Pricing
DevCycle has a free plan with unlimited seats with up to 1,000 MAUs. Paid plans start at $20 per month, billed annually, for 1,000 MAUs and go up from there.
Statsig
Statsig is a feature flag management and experimentation software that enables teams to make data-driven decisions on feature launches, releases and experimentation.
Features
- Feature flagging with dynamic configuration
- Multi-environment control
- Scheduled rollouts and holdouts
- Advanced user targeting
- Feature lifecycle management
Libraries supported
Statsig offers both client-side and server-side SDKs.
Client-side SDKs: JavaScript, React, React Native, Swift, Android, .NET, Roku, Unity, and Dart/Flutter.
Server-side SDKs: Node.js, Java/Kotlin, Python, Go, Ruby, .NET, PHP, Erlang/Elixir, Rust and C++.
Pricing
Statsig has a free plan for developers with 1 million metered events per month, unlimited seats, user targeting, and feature flags. Paid plans start at $150 per month with everything in the free plan plus unlimited custom metrics/queries, rollout alerts, unlimited custom environments, and more.
Split
Split is a platform with feature flag management, experimentation and continuous delivery capabilities. It helps teams launch new features without risk, as well as test features in production.
Features
- Feature flag release and management
- Target and segment users
- Monitor rollout automatically
- Feature experimentation
Libraries supported
Split offers client-side and server-side SDKs.
Client-side SDKs: Android, Angular, Flutter, iOS, JavaScript, React, React Native and Redux.
Server-side SDKs: Java, .NET, Node.js, PHP, Python, and Ruby.
Pricing
Split has a free plan for up to 10 seats with 50k monthly tracked keys, 2 environments, and flag traffic types. Its paid plans start at $33 per seat monthly with a minimum of 10 seats, 1 workspace, and unlimited feature flags and environments.
Other pricing plans are also available on their site.
What comes next?
Increased demand for continuously available systems drives the adoption of feature flag management tools and feature flags.
In the Hype Cycle for Agile and DevOps 2023 report, Keith Mann, an analyst at Gartner, noted:
Your users expect to always have access to your platform and its exciting features. Feature management platforms like Kameleoon ensure that you can:
- Continuously deliver features your users love
- Establish valuable feedback loops between your users and your engineering team
- Track and compare the values of features in your software — this means you will never wrongly retire features that customers love and use.
To change how you approach feature flag management with a robust Feature Experimentation and Feature Flag management platform, try Kameleoon for free for 30 days!
