GrowthBook vs LaunchDarkly

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

Free tier available

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.

LaunchDarkly has dropped per-seat pricing: Developer is free with unlimited seats, and Foundation is pay-as-you-go on service connections and client-side monthly active users with no platform or seat fee. High-traffic consumer products still get expensive, but now through MAU rather than seats. Enterprise is quote-based.

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

Developer plan is free forever with unlimited seats.

Widely used

GrowthBook · since 2021

Category standard

LaunchDarkly · since 2014

• 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.

• Extremely reliable flag delivery with offline fallbacks — this is infrastructure you can trust in the request path.
• Best-in-class governance: approval workflows, audit logs, role-based access.
• Code references and stale-flag detection actually help you remove dead flags.

• 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.

• Still the expensive option once client-side MAU volume is real, even after the move off per-seat pricing.
• Experimentation is competent but less sophisticated than dedicated statistics platforms.
• Usage-based billing on service connections and MAU is harder to forecast than a seat count.

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

Engineering organisations where flags are critical infrastructure and governance is required.