Split vs Flagsmith
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 $40 per month (Start-Up, billed yearly; $45 monthly)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Paid tiers are quote-based, priced by monthly tracked keys.
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.
Free tier
Free tier with limited monthly tracked keys.
Free cloud tier with a monthly request allowance; open-source self-hosting is unlimited.
Open source
BSD-3-Clause (core)
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Established
Harness · since 2015
Established
Flagsmith · since 2018
Strengths
- Automatic metric impact on every flag catches regressions nobody thought to measure.
- Guardrail alerts stop a bad rollout before it reaches everyone.
- Strong data-platform integrations.
- 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.
Limitations
- Post-acquisition roadmap now sits inside Harness's broader platform strategy.
- Requires meaningful event instrumentation before the impact analysis is useful.
- Opaque enterprise pricing.
- Experimentation features are basic.
- Smaller company and community than the leaders.
- Fewer governance controls for large organisations.
Best for
Teams that want every release measured, not just deliberate experiments.
Teams wanting straightforward flags without LaunchDarkly pricing or Unleash's operational depth.
All of these integrate with: Segment, Datadog, Slack, Jira.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.