Optimizely vs LaunchDarkly

Quote on request

Free tier available

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

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.

No free tier.

Developer plan is free forever with unlimited seats.

Widely used

Optimizely · since 2010

Category standard

LaunchDarkly · since 2014

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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