Choosing featuresd

There are several projects and services designed for feature flag management. It is also common and easy to build feature flagging in-house in an ad-hoc fashion.

This page compares featuresd to some alternatives to help you understand when you might want to use it, or another offering.

Strengths of featuresd

  • Easy to deploy
  • Flexible data model
  • Small, simple and focused

Weaknesses of featuresd

  • You have to deploy it
  • Requires integration on the server-side as well as the frontend
  • Small project without enterprise backing

Managed offerings

  • Significant lockin because feature flags end up being pervasive
  • May require additional deployment for speed anyway (e.g. LaunchDarkly's "relay proxy")
  • Well-supported, lots of features
  • Tend to have team management and ACL

Open-source offerings

  • Overlap with managed offerings, to get the best of both worlds
  • Seem to have significant deployment complexity
  • Unleash and Flagsmith are well-supported and have lots of features including ACL

Build it yourself

  • It's easy to stick some booleans in a database
  • You may end up building dependencies between services