LaunchDarkly vs ConfigCat
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
Free tier available
Free tierFrom $110 per month (Pro)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
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.
Plans run Free, Pro $110, Smart $325, Enterprise $900 and Dedicated $4,500 a month. Unlimited seats and unlimited flag reads on every plan, including free — unusual and genuinely valuable for wide access; paid tiers mainly raise flag, environment and product limits.
Free tier
Developer plan is free forever with unlimited seats.
Free forever plan with a monthly config-request allowance and unlimited members.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
LaunchDarkly · since 2014
Established
ConfigCat · since 2018
Strengths
- 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.
- Unlimited team members at every tier, so product and support can toggle flags too.
- Very simple to adopt — an afternoon, not a project.
- Broad SDK coverage including Dart and Elixir.
Limitations
- 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.
- No experimentation or analytics to speak of.
- Limited targeting sophistication compared to LaunchDarkly.
- Small vendor.
Best for
Engineering organisations where flags are critical infrastructure and governance is required.
Teams that want simple, cheap flags accessible to the whole company.
All of these integrate with: Datadog, Slack, Jira, Terraform.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.