LaunchDarkly vs GrowthBook
This is the pairing most teams end up in when the reason for leaving is cost or licensing rather than a missing feature. GrowthBook does the same two jobs, flags and experiments, under an MIT core you can self-host for free, and charges $40 per seat where LaunchDarkly charges nothing per seat and meters your infrastructure instead. The axis that decides it is where your experiment data lives, because GrowthBook computes statistics inside your own warehouse and LaunchDarkly computes them inside its own platform.
Pick GrowthBook if you already have a data warehouse, want an MIT-licensed core you could self-host if pricing ever changes, and your flag audience is a focused engineering and product team. Stay on LaunchDarkly if you have no warehouse, need dashboard access for dozens of people at zero seat cost, or depend on governance features that GrowthBook keeps behind its Enterprise licence.
Side by side
LaunchDarkly vs GrowthBook at a glance
| LaunchDarkly | GrowthBook | |
|---|---|---|
| Billing unit | Service connections and client-side MAU | Seats |
| Free plan | ✓ 5 connections, 1k MAU, 100k experiment MAU | ✓ 3 users, 1 project, unlimited flags |
| Entry paid tier | Foundation: $10/connection, $8.33/1k MAU | Pro: $40/seat/mo, up to 50 users |
| Cost of traffic growth | ✗ scales with MAU and instances | ✓ flat; unlimited traffic self-hosted |
| Cost of wide access | ✓ seats are free and unlimited | ✗ every viewer is $40/mo on Pro |
| Self-host | ✗ not available | ✓ free, 1 project, unlimited traffic |
| Licence | Proprietary | MIT core; some dirs commercial Enterprise |
| Experiment data lives | In the vendor platform | In your warehouse (bring your own) |
| Needs a warehouse | ✓ no | ✗ yes, for the experimentation half |
| Project limit | Plan-dependent | 1 free, 3 on Pro, more on Enterprise |
| Overage | $5 per 1k AI runs past 5k | CDN: $10/M requests, $1/GB |
| Best for | Wide access, no warehouse, deep governance | Warehouse-owning teams watching cost |
Sources: LaunchDarkly pricing · GrowthBook pricing · GrowthBook repository. Compiled August 2026.
Where GrowthBook wins
The licence is an actual exit
Most of the GrowthBook repository is MIT, with several directories under a separate commercial Enterprise licence. MIT is the permissive licence corporate legal teams wave through, which is precisely what AGPL-3.0 competitors cannot offer. The practical value is not ideological: it means that if the pricing model changes in two years, self-hosting is a real option you can exercise, rather than a bargaining chip you do not hold. LaunchDarkly customers watched the billing model change from per-seat to usage in this category and had exactly two options, renegotiate or migrate.
Your statistics are auditable
GrowthBook is warehouse-native. It connects to the warehouse you already run and computes experiment results there, against your own event tables. When a stakeholder disputes a result, you can open the query. When compliance asks where user-level data went, the answer is that it never left. Vendor-hosted experimentation platforms cannot make either claim, and you also stop paying to store a second copy of data you already have.
Traffic is free, and that is the whole point
Self-hosted GrowthBook has unlimited traffic and no MAU meter. Against LaunchDarkly's $8.33 per 1,000 client-side monthly active users, a consumer app with a million monthly users is looking at a meaningful five-figure annual line that simply does not exist on the other side. Cloud Pro at $40 a seat behaves the same way: predictable, and unaffected by how well your product does.
Where LaunchDarkly still wins
The seat model inverts as soon as the audience widens. GrowthBook Pro charges $40 per seat per month, so giving 30 people across product, QA and support the ability to see and toggle flags costs $1,200 a month. On LaunchDarkly it costs nothing, because seats are free and unlimited on every tier including Enterprise. Feature flags are one of the few tools where wide read access is genuinely useful, and this is the scenario where the incumbent's new model is not a downgrade at all.
The warehouse requirement is also a real barrier and worth being blunt about. If your company has no Snowflake, BigQuery or ClickHouse and no clean event stream, GrowthBook's central advantage is unavailable to you. You would be adopting a warehouse-native experimentation platform with no warehouse, which leaves a decent flagging tool and a lot of unused surface area. LaunchDarkly's Developer plan, by contrast, includes 100,000 experimentation MAU a month at no charge and needs nothing from you but the SDK.
Finally, depth of governance. Approval workflows, fine-grained roles and audit trails that have already survived enterprise procurement are LaunchDarkly's strongest ground, and GrowthBook keeps its equivalents behind the commercial Enterprise licence, which means a sales conversation and a non-public price.
Migrating LaunchDarkly to GrowthBook
The path most teams take:
1. Inventory first. Flag keys, default values and simple boolean rollouts port with little friction. Complex targeting built on LaunchDarkly context kinds needs rewriting against GrowthBook's attribute model, and the mapping is rarely one to one.
2. Point experiments at the warehouse. This is the real work and it happens before any flag moves: define your metrics against your own event tables, then verify that a metric you already trust from LaunchDarkly reproduces within the noise band. If it does not reproduce, the problem is your event data, and it is far cheaper to learn that now.
3. Run both for one cycle. Evaluate both SDKs behind one internal wrapper and log disagreements. Keep LaunchDarkly on the free Developer tier during the wind-down if you can drop under 5 service connections.
4. What does not move. Historical experiment results computed inside LaunchDarkly stay there, as do audit logs and approval history. Export anything compliance needs before the account closes.
Common questions
FAQ: LaunchDarkly vs GrowthBook
Is GrowthBook really open source?
Mostly, and the qualifier is worth understanding. The GrowthBook repository states that most of the codebase is under the permissive MIT licence, while several directories are governed by a separate commercial GrowthBook Enterprise License. In practice this means you can self-host the full flagging and experimentation platform for free, inspect it, fork it and run it without a vendor relationship, but specific enterprise features such as advanced access control, SSO and SCIM sit under the commercial terms. That is a materially more permissive position than Unleash's AGPL-3.0 core, which many corporate legal policies prohibit for network services.
Do I need a data warehouse to use GrowthBook?
You need one to get the value out of the experimentation half of the product, though not to use the feature flags. GrowthBook is warehouse-native: it connects to your Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, ClickHouse or Postgres and computes experiment statistics against data you already own, rather than asking you to pipe events into the vendor. The upside is that the numbers are auditable and you are not paying to store your data twice. The downside is real: if you have no warehouse and no analytics events, you get a competent flagging tool and none of the analysis that justifies choosing it.
How much does GrowthBook cost compared to LaunchDarkly?
GrowthBook Cloud is free for up to 3 users on one project, and Pro is $40 per seat per month for up to 50 users and 3 projects. Self-hosting the open-source edition is free with unlimited traffic and one project, with CDN overage at $10 per additional million requests. LaunchDarkly charges nothing per seat and instead bills $10 per service connection and $8.33 per 1,000 client-side monthly active users. So GrowthBook is cheaper for high-traffic products with focused teams, and LaunchDarkly is cheaper when many people need dashboard access and the deployment is modest.