Split Alternatives for Feature Flag Management and Experimentation

Feature flags management is an essential aspect of modern software development, providing teams with the flexibility to roll out new features gradually, test in production, and revert changes without redeploying. Split is a well-known platform in this space, but what if it isn't quite meeting your needs? In this blog post, we'll explore several alternatives to Split, delving into their unique features and how they compare to other feature management and experimentation providers.

Split

What is Split?

Split is a platform designed to help software teams manage feature flags and conduct controlled rollouts. With feature flags, teams can decide who sees which features and when, making it easier to test new ideas directly in the production environment.

What can businesses accomplish by using Split?

Businesses use Split to improve their software delivery process. The platform enables a more dynamic approach to deployment, allowing for A/B testing, performance monitoring, and gradual feature rollouts that reduce risk and enhance user satisfaction.

Why choose Split?

One key reason businesses gravitate towards Split is its ability to provide detailed analytics on feature impact. This insight helps teams make data-driven decisions about which features enhance the user experience and which may require rethinking. 

How Split falls short as a feature flag management solution

While Split offers some useful features, they lack in other areas:

• Limited breadth of feature management capabilities: According to interviews with those who have used or evaluated Split, as well as our own audit of Split’s tool, Split’s feature management capabilities are less robust than some other solutions on the market. As such, Split may not be able to support advanced use cases, potentially limiting an enterprise's agility and innovation.
• Challenging to implement: According to interviews with former and current Split users, implementing Split can be a slow, cumbersome process that impedes enterprise adoption, increases onboarding costs, and delays the time to ROI.
• Third-party streaming dependency: By relying on a third-party for streaming services, Split introduces a point of potential failure. Should Split experience streaming downtime, it can affect your services. 

Exploring alternatives

LaunchDarkly

What is LaunchDarkly?

LaunchDarkly is a feature management and experimentation platform that leverages feature flags to help teams deploy safely and continuously on a massive scale. LaunchDarkly was the first feature management platform on the market and created the feature management category. LaunchDarkly enables real-time feature control, advanced targeting and personalization,  and data-driven product development.

Visit LaunchDarkly's G2 Crowd page

Why do businesses choose LaunchDarkly?

Businesses choose LaunchDarkly because: 

• LaunchDarkly offers superior performance, scale, and security, making it the best platform for large organizations and those with demanding environments and services. 
• LaunchDarkly offers a superior developer experience—enhancing productivity and ease of integration for developer teams. 
• LaunchDarkly is easy to onboard and use, accelerating time to value. 

Pros: Highly scalable, performant, and resilient, advanced targeting capabilities, easy onboarding and setup, intuitive interface to reduce learning curve, advanced security, enterprise governance, administrative features for technical debt management, progressive delivery. 

Cons: RUM, error tracking and monitoring

Top features: Feature flags, automated rollbacks, gradual feature rollouts, differentiated targeting capabilities, A/B testing, experimentation, real-time data and insights, Code References, audit logs.

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How is LaunchDarkly different from Split? 

• Ease of use and onboarding: LaunchDarkly eliminates a steep learning curve with its user-friendly interface and intuitive feature set so you can realize value more quickly.
• Secure, performant, and scalable architecture: LaunchDarkly is designed to handle large-scale feature flagging implementations and experiments with ease—ensuring that feature flags are served quickly and accurately to users. Its multiple layers of resiliency is crucial for mission-critical applications. 
• Holistic developer experience: LaunchDarkly enriches every aspect of the development process. For example, LaunchDarkly streamlines the development process by automating release workflows with templates and scheduling, while incorporating governance and granular access control. LaunchDarkly is a comprehensive platform that simplifies, accelerates, and enhances daily development tasks.

Interested in a more in-depth comparison of LaunchDarkly vs. Split? → Visit LaunchDarkly vs. Split

Optimizely 

What is Optimizely?

Optimizely is a digital experience platform known for its A/B testing and personalization capabilities, designed to optimize user engagement and boost conversion rates. Optimizely is ideal for marketing teams with its advanced analytics and large-scale experiment management.

Why do businesses choose Optimizely?

Businesses choose Optimizely because: 

• Optimizely excels in enhancing user experiences and increasing conversion rates through detailed A/B testing and personalization.
• Optimizely manages extensive experiments across multiple touchpoints, ideal for data-driven enterprises focused on growth.
• Optimizely offers analytics that help businesses make informed decisions to improve customer engagement and achieve business objectives.

Pros: Extensive experimentation capabilities to optimize features, strong reporting interface

Cons: High cost, not as developer-centric as other solutions (more marketing-focused)

Top features: Full-stack experimentation, progressive delivery, comprehensive A/B testing 

How is Optimizely different from Split?

• A/B testing and experimentation: Optimizely has a wider set of tools designed to test and optimize user experiences across digital platforms. This makes it particularly valuable for marketing and product teams looking to drive user engagement and conversion rates through personalized experiences.
• Focused on marketers and product managers: Optimizely has extensive experimentation capabilities. Its tools are designed to be accessible to non-technical users, facilitating collaboration across different teams.
• Detailed analytics and insights: With a strong emphasis on conversion optimization, Optimizely allows users to measure the impact of different experiments and personalizations on business outcomes.

Interested in seeing how LaunchDarkly stacks up against Optimizely? → Visit LaunchDarkly vs. Optimizely

Statsig

What is Statsig?

Statsig is a modern experimentation platform that also has feature flag capabilities. Statsig enables growth teams to make data-driven decisions on their software releases. Their platform is particularly beneficial for product managers and data scientists who prioritize advanced testing frameworks and statistical models. 

Why do businesses choose Statsig?

Businesses choose Statsig because:

• Statsig has advanced experimentation capabilities, allowing businesses to test and refine new features. 
• Statsig offers automated analytics tools to provide deep insights into user behavior, enabling data-driven decisions on product adjustments.
• Statsig prioritizes data flexibility—enabling users to define, analyze, and manage their data however it suits them. 

Pros: Analysis of experiment results, advanced statistical engine, data flexibility 

Cons: Steep learning curve, effectiveness hinges on high-quality data inputs, extensive functionality may be too much for most organizations, resulting in underutilization

Top features: Advanced experimentation, data warehouse native, deep analytics, feature flags

How is Statsig different from Split? 

• Advanced experimentation: Statsig focuses more on product experimentation and insights, offering a more in-depth analysis of how to optimize user experiences. Statsig’s platform caters to more growth, product, and data science teams. 
• Integrated data analysis: Statsig integrates data from multiple sources and allows businesses to leverage their existing data warehouse to run experiments. This allows more flexibility and reduces complexity in leveraging and analyzing data. 
• Usage-based pricing: Statsig’s pricing model is usage-based while Split’s is seats-based, which may scale better with a business’ needs. 

Interested in seeing how LaunchDarkly stacks up against Statsig? → Visit LaunchDarkly vs. Statsig

Unleash

What is Unleash?

Unleash is an open-source feature flag management platform with both on-prem and cloud deployment options, that provides developers with feature flag capabilities to control rollouts. 

Why do businesses choose Unleash?

Businesses choose Unleash because: 

• Unleash is open-source which allows companies to customize the platform as needed to fit their specific and unique requirements. 
• Unleash has an on-premise deployment option which integrates well with legacy systems or strict regulatory requirements.
• Unleash is both easy to use and highly customizable.

Pros: Open-source, cost-effective solution for small teams, flexible deployment options (on-prem, cloud), customizability 

Cons: Operational overhead for on-prem deployments, dependency on community for updates, analytics, minimal integrations, complex for smaller teams. 

Top features: Open-source, on-prem feature flagging option, gradual rollouts

How is Unleash different from Split? 

• Open-source: Unleash is an open-source platform which is geared towards organizations who prioritize customization.
• Flexible deployment options: Unleash supports on-prem (self-hosted) and cloud deployments, allowing enterprises to choose based on their infrastructure needs. 
• Community support: Unleash provides community-driven development and support which can be great for knowledge sharing, rapid innovation, and cost-effectiveness. 

Interested in seeing how LaunchDarkly stacks up against Unleash? → Visit LaunchDarkly vs. Unleash

Harness 

What is Harness?

Harness is a Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) platform that automates software deployments, ensuring rapid and reliable delivery across multiple environments. Harness aims to improve engineering efficiency and deployment strategies by streamlining development operations and identifying performance bottlenecks.

Why do businesses choose Harness?

Business choose Harness because:

• Harness offers a strong set of Continuous Delivery capabilities, helping businesses automate deployment processes and keep their infrastructure up-to-date. 
• Harness provides an extensive list of integrations—integrating well with various tools commonly used in software development. 
• Harness leverages machine learning algorithms to predict deployment outcomes.

Pros: Continuous Delivery orchestration, integration options, automation capabilities 

Cons: Customer support quality, steep learning curve for new users, buggy experience

Top features: Continuous delivery, pipelines, automation 

How is Harness different from Split? 

• CI/CD: Harness specializes in Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery—focused on automating delivery of applications to infrastructure environments and running automated builds and tests. 
• Automated deployments: Harness has advanced automation to deploy applications across multiple environments and can also predict the outcome of deployments. 
• Different set of integrations: Harness integrates with a wider range of CI tools, cloud providers, and container orchestration platforms—helping address deployment strategies. 

PostHog

What is PostHog?

PostHog is an open-source product analytics platform aimed to help product and growth teams understand user behavior so they can build better products. PostHog is flexible because it can be deployed on-prem or in the cloud. 

Why do businesses choose PostHog?

Businesses choose PostHog because: 

• PostHog provides a comprehensive suite of analytics such as session replay, Real User Monitoring (RUM), bounce rates, user retention, UTM tracking, and more. 
• PostHog has a relatively easy set up process. 
• PostHog offers feature toggles, experimentation, and product analytics in a single tool. 

Pros: Flexible deployment options, product analytics, real-time insights, easy set-up, data privacy

Cons: Operational overhead for on-prem deployments, limited integrations, steep learning curve, complex interface

Top features: Product analytics, A/B testing, session recordings, event autocapture,  feature flags

How is PostHog different from Split? 

• Product analytics: PostHog primarily focuses on product analytics and user behavior insights which include features like: session recordings, heatmaps, and user journeys.
• Flexible deployment options: PostHog deploys as on-premise and cloud—giving business control over their data and infrastructure and perhaps a smoother experience integrating with legacy infrastructure. 
• Data privacy: PostHog emphasizes data privacy. With an on-prem option, PostHog gives businesses the ability to keep sensitive data within their own server.

GrowthBook

What is GrowthBook?

GrowthBook is an open-source platform for feature flagging and A/B testing built for data teams, product managers, and engineers. GrowthBook gives teams the power of a customizable platform without requiring them to build it themselves. 

Why do businesses choose GrowthBook?

Businesses choose GrowthBook because:

• GrowthBook is data warehouse-native and eliminates the need to ship data to experimentation platforms ultimately avoiding charging users per event.
• GrowthBook offers a comprehensive suite of tools for data analysis, experimentation, and optimization to support every phase of the growth process.
• GrowthBook provides a unique visual editor for experimentation—enabling both developers and the less tech-savvy members to easily create and run A-B tests 

Pros: Open-source, flexible deployment options, developer-centric

Cons: Operational overhead for on-prem deployments, steep learning curve, limited built-in features 

Top features: Feature flags, A/B testing, open-source, gradual roll-outs 

How is GrowthBook different from Split? 

• Open-source: GrowthBook is an open-source platform which is geared towards organizations who prioritize customization.
• Flexible deployment options: GrowthBook supports on-prem (self-hosted) and cloud deployments, allowing enterprises to fully control their data and integrations.
• More control: GrowthBook allows users to integrate whatever makes sense for their existing workflow systems and manage their own resources.