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LaunchDarkly vs Harness Feature Management & Experimentation (formerly Split)
Both layer experimentation on flag telemetry; the real choice is standalone LaunchDarkly versus Split bundled inside Harness's delivery platform.
Side by side
| LaunchDarkly | Harness Feature Management & Experimentation (formerly Split) | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vendor | LaunchDarkly | Harness | ||||||
| Pricing model | Subscription | Quote only | ||||||
| Free tier | Yes | — | ||||||
| Deployment | Cloud | Cloud | ||||||
| Open source | No | No | ||||||
| Best for | Engineering teams that want feature-flag-driven releases with built-in experiment analysis on the same flags. | Teams already using or evaluating Harness for delivery pipelines who want flagging and experimentation in the same platform. | ||||||
| Pricing | Free Developer plan with 100K experimentation MAU/month; paid Foundation plan bills per service connection and per 1K client-side MAU; Enterprise is custom.
Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget. | Bundled only in Harness's Enterprise plan; no standalone public pricing. Checked on the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026: no prices are published. Expect to be quoted. | ||||||
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Verdict
LaunchDarkly and Harness Feature Management & Experimentation (formerly Split) both start from the same premise: feature flags gate code paths for progressive rollouts and kill switches, and experimentation analyzes the same flag-driven traffic rather than querying a data warehouse. Both read events from their own SDKs, not your warehouse tables, so there's no data-modeling step before testing, but experiment metrics live inside the flagging tool rather than alongside your other analytics.
The practical difference today is less about capability and more about packaging and company direction. LaunchDarkly remains an independent, focused feature-management and experimentation product with a published pricing page and a genuinely usable free tier. Split was acquired by Harness and is now sold as a module — Feature Management & Experimentation (FME) — bundled specifically into Harness's Enterprise plan alongside CI/CD and cloud cost management, with no standalone public pricing.
Choose LaunchDarkly if
- You want feature flags and experimentation as a standalone, focused product, not bundled into a broader delivery suite.
- You need to start small and prove value on a free Developer plan (100K experimentation MAU/month) before committing budget.
- You want a choice between frequentist and Bayesian analysis on the same flagged experiment, plus a Guardian add-on for automatic rollback on regressions.
Choose Harness FME (Split) if
- You already use, or are evaluating, Harness for CI/CD and want feature management and experimentation in the same platform rather than a separate vendor.
- Bundled pricing across delivery, flagging and experimentation is preferable to managing multiple vendor contracts.
- Built-in impact monitoring against flag rollouts — catching regressions as a flag rolls out — is a priority alongside experimentation itself.
What they share
Both measure experiment impact from SDK-based flag-exposure telemetry rather than warehouse data, both support statistical significance testing on flagged cohorts, and both integrate with common delivery and alerting tools (Slack, Datadog). Neither is warehouse-native — if you need that, look at GrowthBook or Statsig instead.
The honest caveat
Split's pricing is no longer independently comparable — it's only available bundled into Harness's Enterprise tier, so you can't evaluate cost without also pricing the rest of Harness's platform. LaunchDarkly's free tier is genuinely usable for evaluation, but its paid Foundation plan bills per service connection plus per-1,000 client-side MAU, which can scale faster than expected at high traffic; model your actual MAU before committing.
Last reviewed September 22, 2026