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testcritic

Split vs Unleash

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 tier

From $75 per seat/month (Pay-As-You-Go, 5-seat minimum self-hosted)

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Paid tiers are quote-based, priced by monthly tracked keys.

Self-hosted open source is genuinely free within its project and environment caps. Pay-As-You-Go includes 53M API requests a month with $5 per additional million; Enterprise is an annual custom contract adding SSO, audit and change requests.

Free tier

Free tier with limited monthly tracked keys.

Open-source edition is free and self-hosted with no seat limit, but capped at 1 project, 2 environments and 5,000 flags.

Open source

Apache-2.0 (core)

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptTypeScriptPythonJavaC#GoRubyPHPSwiftKotlin
JavaScriptTypeScriptJavaPythonGoC#RubyPHP

Platforms

WebAPIiOSAndroid
WebAPIiOSAndroid

Fits teams

Scale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Established

Harness · since 2015

Widely used

Unleash / Bricks Software · since 2014

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.
  • Local evaluation means no user data leaves your infrastructure — a strong GDPR position.
  • Mature, well-documented open-source core with no artificial crippling.
  • Kubernetes and Terraform support for infrastructure-as-code workflows.

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 and analytics are thin; it is a flag system first.
  • Self-hosting means you own uptime for something in your request path.
  • Smaller ecosystem than LaunchDarkly.

Best for

Teams that want every release measured, not just deliberate experiments.

Privacy-sensitive or cost-sensitive teams that want flags without sending user data to a vendor.

All of these integrate with: Datadog, Slack, Jira.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.