GitLab DevSecOps platform enables software innovation by aiming to empower development, security, and operations teams to build better software, faster. With GitLab, teams can create, deliver, and manage code quickly and continuously instead of managing disparate tools and scripts. GitLab helps teams across the complete DevSecOps lifecycle, from developing, securing, and deploying software. Differentiators, as described by Gitlab:
Simplicity: With GitLab, DevSecOps can…
$0
per month per user
LaunchDarkly
Score 7.6 out of 10
N/A
LaunchDarkly provides a feature management platform that enables DevOps and Product teams to use feature flags at scale. This allows for greater collaboration among team members, and increased usability testing before full-scale feature deployment.
$12
per month per Service Connection per month, or $10 per 1k client-side MAU per mo
Pricing
GitLab
LaunchDarkly
Editions & Modules
GitLab Essential
$0
per month per user
GitLab Premium
$29
per month per user
GitLab Ultimate
$99
per month per user
Foundation
$12
per month per Service Connection per month, or $10 per 1k client-side MAU per mo
Enterprise
Custom
Guardian
Custom
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GitLab
LaunchDarkly
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
Optional
Additional Details
—
Discount available on the Foundation plan for annual pricing.
It is well-suited for any project that needs VCS. It's an excellent choice for teams that might be remote or have to collaborate across teams. Plenty of features allow for async working. With its dashboards and reporting features, it is also suitable for nontechnical PMs or stakeholders. It allows for very bespoke customization and can most often do much more than you need it to.
Great for rolling out features slowly for beta testing in production. I would say it is less well suited for toggling features permanently for users as this requires more integration with our backend and billing systems that would be a lot of work to set up.
Feature Flag Management: It's like magic. With a flip of a switch, you can manage feature rollouts to visitors or accounts across the web and mobile applications!
Segmentation: Create a segment of visitors or accounts and then use that to target a feature flag rule. Really easy to use and saves so much time.
Ease of Use: Seamless copy/paste functionality, really clear status indicators so you can find what is on and for whom.
I really feel the platform has matured quite faster than others, and it is always at the top of its game compared to the different vendors like GitHub, Azure pipelines, CircleCI, Travis, Jenkins. Since it provides, agents, CI/CD, repository hosting, Secrets management, user management, and Single Sign on; among other features
I find it easy to use, I haven't had to do the integration work, so that's why it is a 9/10, cause I can't speak to how easy that part was or the initial set up, but day to day use is great!
It's very easy to create new feature flags and set them properly. It is more difficult to get LaunchDarkly integrated within a distributed system so that flags can be used. Especially on stateless servers where gating features by user is not easy. Overall though, it is very easy to get started and I like how simple it is to use.
I've never had experienced outages from GItlab itself, but regarding the code I have deployed to Gitlab, the history helps a lot to trace the cause of the issue or performing a rollback to go back to a working version
GItlab reponsiveness is amazing, has never left me IDLE. I've never had issues even with complex projects. I have not experienced any issues when integrating it with agents for example or SSO
From what I have seen, LaunchDarkly integrates well with your code and also services you might have in your tech ecosystem. We use Jenkins for automation and we were able to use it to build pipelines to automate the control of LaunchDarkly toggles in our code.
At this point, I do not have much experience with Gitlab support as I have never had to engage them. They have documentation that is helpful, not quite as extensive as other documentation, but helpful nonetheless. They also seem to be relatively responsive on social media platforms (twitter) and really thrived when GitHub was acquired by Microsoft
GitHub is an inferior product from most points of view. We had to use it and the teams finds no positives about it. Everything is a downgrade from our previous GitLab solution. GitLab CI\CD is vastly superior to workflows, for example doing a manual node is just "when : manual" in GitLab while you have to do clickops in GitHub to achieve the same. No overview of code in branches is a minus when we tried to figure out what our colleagues are trying to merge as it looked off.
Rollout is another dedicated feature flag tool that can be used to manage features. LaunchDarkley offers all the features of an enterprise level tool, unlike Rollout, reserves the security features for the Enterprise plan. Out of box integrations are limited but they do have a well documented REST API.
Improved developer experience with some teams moving to Trunk-based Development.
Increased deployment frequency due to smaller code releases.
Validation of the technical and business value of work is achieved more quickly through smaller pieces of work and through experimenting with a small group of users before a feature gets to 100% of customers.