The Top 6 Feature Flag Management Tools

Are you comparing feature flag management tools? We took a look at different options your organization may want to consider using.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus once proclaimed, "The only constant in life is change." This profound proclamation is especially true within the world of technology. Adopting this type of mindset can help individuals manage newfound innovations and capabilities.

The complexities involved in the world of software development make for constant change and progression. Implementing an enhanced software infrastructure requires us to continuously fine-tune digital ecosystems with experimentation and feedback.

Feature flag management tools provide developers a vehicle for deploying features and changes that can be turned off or on. Feature toggle switches can be implemented by development teams for continuous deployment and simplification of feature rollbacks, ensuring that features fail safely when issues arise. As an example, tech giants such as Facebook implement dark launches to ensure app stability, gather usability testing insights, and evaluate test results.

Testing feature rollouts is critical for helping product teams deliver reliable and updated software to the end user. In this blog, we'll help you discover which feature flag management tools may be best suited for your organization.

Tool #1: Harness Feature Flag Management Tool

Harness Feature Flags is a module within the Harness Software Delivery Platform that helps organizations deliver features quickly and efficiently, with less risk. Designed for simplicity and speed, Harness Feature Flags focuses on the developer experience. Harness helps teams maintain secure, compliant and functioning systems with the help of easy-to-use pipelines and automated progressive delivery.

Features

• Simplified user-interface based feature release workflows allow teams to standardize processes across feature flags with similar operational functionalities.
• Helps organizations meet predefined governance and verification standards while minimizing production issues that may be encountered.
• Easily integrated into CI/CD as a unified pipeline that helps maintain feature flags as part of the software development lifecycle.

Use Cases

• Harness Feature Flags can be easily integrated with existing workflow tools such as Jira and Slack. Reusable feature release templates can be standardized across features and applications.
• Use Harness Feature Flags to manage governance needs using RBAC and audit logs for complete control and visibility.
• Developers can use Harness Feature Flags to integrate directly into workflows with YAML, GitOps, and config as code.

Tool #2: LaunchDarkly

LaunchDarkly is a feature flags-as-a-service platform that can be implemented into an organization's ongoing development process. The tool provides DevOps teams and others with the ability to communicate and collaborate with other users. System behavior can be controlled and modified for certain groups of people or the entire user base by using feature switches and flippers.

Features

• Separates code deployment from feature releases creating an environment that allows for safety testing and production feedback.
• SDKs that can be utilized for various programming languages and platforms.
• Can be integrated with other tools to improve monitoring and increase collaboration.
• Utilizes A/B testing in production for data-driven decision making.

Use Cases

• Use LaunchDarkly if you want to implement a variation on a canary release to new system architectures without rerouting traffic. 
• LaunchDarkly can be used to deploy applications to app stores prior to a full release. Full functionality can be enabled once code is completed and the team is confident about the release.
• Use LaunchDarkly to perform progressive delivery, run canary tests, and issue gradual production rollouts prior to full-scale release.

Tool #3: Taplytics

Taplytics is a cross-platform A/B testing solution that helps developers, marketers, and product managers test and implement features within a simplified user interface. Companies can use feature branches to closely target, test, and time the release of different functionalities. If a feature fails to go as planned, things can be rolled back as necessary. After adequate testing, features can be published to small audiences before being scaled to larger populations. 

Features

• Performs A/B testing without coding and development resources.
• Staged feature rollouts can be segmented to various audiences and populations.
• Flexible deployment options can be integrated with various SDK, API, and on-premise technologies.

Use Cases

• Use Taplytics as an integration tool to perform analytics that track product usage and metrics.
• Taplytics can be used to optimize landing pages without using any coding or software development resources.
• Use Taplytics as an integration tool with Shopify or Magento to accelerate CRO initiatives and decrease runtime.

Tool #4: Split.io

Split is a platform designed as a multi-purpose tool that uses data to measure the impact of each feature. Split helps teams reduce latency, minimize risk, and optimize business operations using logic-driven data insights. By closely analyzing the impact of individual features, organizations can determine if changes should be implemented on a wide-scale or rolled back.

Features

• Feature changes can be made without altering code.
• Identifies issues before they become widespread - a kill switch can be used to minimize and disable failed features.
• Scalability across multiple teams and environments.
• Audit logs perpetually keep records of all changes on an ongoing basis.

Use Cases

• Split can be integrated with popular tools such as Slack and Jira.
• Use Split to calculate metrics obtained from data sources such as Google Analytics and Sentry.
• Use Split for performing multivariate testing and receiving realtime data statistics

Tool #5: CloudBees Feature Management

CloudBees Feature Management is a platform that allows teams to manage toggle features within various groups of users. CloudBees assists teams with designing and managing various types of applications. By using release toggles, teams can temporarily turn features off and on for various segments. This enables groups to closely manage functionalities amongst different users.

Features

• Highly-targeted user testing that provides feedback from real customers.
• Dynamic release features that can be delivered to users in various splits.
• Allows developers to create a configuration file without using dashboards.

Use Cases

• Use CloudBees as a risk mitigation tool that can turn off functionality with a kill switch or discreetly test new features within existing applications.
• CloudBees can be used as a progressive delivery tool that can be selectively rolled out to certain segments of the user base.
• Use CloudBees to improve visibility and governance across teams as a means of improving collaboration and release speed.

Tool #6: Optimizely

Optimizely is a digital experience platform Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tool that helps companies make data-driven decisions. As part of their full stack Optimizely offers feature management tools that help launch features safely and efficiently without deploying code. Teams can manage and control feature flags to various users and applications to optimize user experiences. This tool is primarily used for A/B testing by Product and Marketing teams.  

Features

• Supports advanced feature flagging through unique key identifiers.
• Integrates data from any channel that can be tested instantly.
• Manages all feature flags within a single interface.
• Delivers new features to different segments while controlling variables of time and users.

Use Cases

• Use Optimizely to obtain customer feedback by using feature flags and private beta solutions.
• Optimizely can help your team build permissions platforms that can control who manages data operations in your applications.
• Optimizely can be used to create dynamic pricing structures for differing customer needs.

One Unified Pipeline with Harness

Did you know that Harness Feature Flags can be used in conjunction with our CI and CD modules? That’s right - a single, unified pipeline from build to deploy to feature rollout! Harness provides you with end-to-end visibility to easily govern and manage your pipelines, all in one place. 

The complete one-stop approach of Harness helps organizations release features more quickly, safely, and efficiently than ever before. If you would like to learn more, feel free to review our other blogs about feature flag management tools. Here's a great piece on Feature Flag Management basics, and a much more detailed free eBook on the same topic.