Optimizely vs Flagsmith

Quote on request

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

Enterprise annual contracts, commonly in the tens of thousands and up. Priced by traffic and modules.

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.

No free tier.

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

Widely used

Optimizely · since 2010

Established

Flagsmith · since 2018

• The most capable visual editor for non-technical experiment authoring.
• Deep personalisation and audience-targeting features.
• Established statistics with sequential testing, so peeking is handled correctly.

• 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.

• Expensive, with a suite-oriented sales motion that pushes adjacent products.
• Client-side testing causes flicker and is increasingly blocked by browsers and blockers.
• Heavyweight for teams that only need a handful of experiments.

• Experimentation features are basic.
• Smaller company and community than the leaders.
• Fewer governance controls for large organisations.

Large marketing organisations running continuous experimentation on high-traffic sites.

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