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testcritic

Flagsmith vs GrowthBook

Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.

Entry price

From $40 per month (Start-Up, billed yearly; $45 monthly)

Free tier

From $40 per seat/month (cloud Pro, up to 30 users and 3 projects)

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Free covers 50k requests a month and one seat; Start-Up raises that to 1M requests and 3 seats, Scale-Up is $250/month yearly. Considerably cheaper than LaunchDarkly, and self-hosting removes usage pricing entirely.

Seat-based rather than usage-based, so cost tracks the number of people using the platform rather than your traffic — which is why it stays dramatically cheaper than the commercial platforms at scale, especially self-hosted.

Free tier

Free cloud tier with a monthly request allowance; open-source self-hosting is unlimited.

Self-hosted open source is free with unlimited users on 1 project; the cloud Starter tier is free for up to 3 users.

Open source

BSD-3-Clause (core)

MIT (core)

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptTypeScriptPythonJavaC#GoRubyPHPSwiftKotlin
JavaScriptTypeScriptPythonJavaC#GoRubyPHPSwiftKotlin

Platforms

WebAPIiOSAndroid
WebAPIiOSAndroid

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Established

Flagsmith · since 2018

Widely used

GrowthBook · since 2021

Strengths

  • Genuinely easy self-hosting with a Docker image and Helm chart.
  • Simple, comprehensible pricing.
  • Remote config alongside flags, which covers a lot of mobile use cases.
  • Warehouse-native by design — no duplicate event pipeline and no data leaving your control.
  • Self-hosting removes per-user-volume pricing entirely.
  • Both Bayesian and frequentist engines with sequential testing support.

Limitations

  • Experimentation features are basic.
  • Smaller company and community than the leaders.
  • Fewer governance controls for large organisations.
  • Requires a working data warehouse and someone who can define metrics in SQL.
  • Self-hosting is operational work you own.
  • Less polished governance and approval tooling than LaunchDarkly.

Best for

Teams wanting straightforward flags without LaunchDarkly pricing or Unleash's operational depth.

Data-mature teams that already have a warehouse and want to avoid volume-based pricing.

All of these integrate with: Segment, Slack.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.