Breaking down the Build vs Buy dilemma

Our latest whitepaper breaks down the many considerations dev teams must take into account when upgrading from homegrown feature management solutions.

Things to consider

Functionality

Feature breadth, regulatory compliance, and integrations.

Build

It’s one thing to support basic Booleans, but supporting user targeting, percentage rollouts, experimentation and other complex use cases are another thing entirely. Additionally, tech debt and “sunsetted” feature flags clog up teams’ code and make feature management difficult or impossible without the right guardrails and administration.

Buy

LaunchDarkly supports the widest range of feature management use cases. Roll out flag variations to a percentage of users, target specific users with flag rules, and add user details to flag evaluation code while maintaining enterprise-grade security. Quickly identify and remove outdated flags down to the line of code to keep good hygiene. Release confidently with the ability to rollback poor performing features in 200 ms. Automate multi-step release workflows to minimize context switch and reduce toil.

Performance at scale

Speed, scalability, and reliability.

Build

A feature management platform is essential to delivering experiences for mission-critical applications. As your adoption grows, maintaining the performance your customers expect can quickly overwhelm the capabilities of your in-house solution. Slowly propagated flag updates stall rollbacks and diminish MTTR. Poorly designed resiliency of your homegrown tool causes unacceptable downtime when even minor issues occur. And seemingly innocuous flag updates can inadvertently reveal poorly secured user, feature, or business logic data. All of which slow your teams down and put the business at risk.

Buy

LaunchDarkly is the developer’s choice supporting 20+ trillion flags for a reason. It’s flexible, scalable, secure, and powerful. We see feature flags as critical infrastructure and have designed our platform with that in mind. LaunchDarkly’s first-class architecture processes flag changes in 200ms, offers several layers of redundancy, and ensures consistency and security with every flag update across any device and region. When you make code changes in production, they happen instantly anywhere in the world.

Resources

Time, money, and energy.

Build

Building and maintaining an in-house feature flag system comparable to LaunchDarkly is expensive, time-consuming, and often unfeasible. Engineers pour energy into feature toggles when they could be developing revenue-generating features. Moreover, it’s hard to build a solution that reliably supports practices like trunk-based development. This hurts developer productivity.

Buy

LaunchDarkly frees you from worrying about feature flags. Developers can focus on innovation. No matter your platform, application, or architecture, you can trust that LaunchDarkly will work reliably, further boosting your confidence in using feature flags. The more you use flags for modern development practices like canary testing, percentage rollouts, and CI/CD, the greater your overall developer productivity.