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Jonathon Colman (he/him)

Optimizely Rollouts - Ship faster with less risk with free feature flags

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Top Product
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Manage your features remotely and roll them out gradually to targeted audiences, without re-deploying your code. Connect Rollouts with Jira and invite your product and engineering teams to work together.

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Jon Noronha
Maker
Thanks for hunting Optimizely Rollouts, @jcolman! Optimizely started as a website A/B testing tool. Since then, we’ve been on a mission to enable every business to build a culture of experimentation. We believe that rolling out features is an essential step on the journey to building a culture of experimentation in product development. Today, top product companies don’t launch new features to everyone at once. These companies use feature flags in order to control who gets access to their features. With Optimizely Rollouts, you can manage your features and roll them out to targeted customer segments. It’s built with development cycles and teams in mind with unlimited feature flags and collaborators. I’m excited to help you ship more features, more safely! If you have any questions or feedback, please let us know directly: rollouts@optimizely.com. Stop launching. Start rolling out today and sign up: https://www.optimizely.com/rollo...
Saul Sutcher
@jcolman @optimizely @thatsjonsense Hi Jon congrats on the roll out. Can you talk more about how this is any different from simply hiding the code using a standard optimizely test?
Jon Noronha
Maker
@jcolman @optimizely @saulsutcher Thanks Saul. The biggest difference is that these feature flags run on the backend in server-side (or mobile app) code, whereas you might be more familiar with using Optimizely to make frontend changes. Check out https://docs.developers.optimize... for more info.
Saul Sutcher
@jcolman @optimizely @thatsjonsense What's the implication of that difference? Load times? I suppose for Mobile Apps there would be a different impact than web.
Jon Noronha
Maker
@jcolman @optimizely @saulsutcher yea, there's a big difference in latency/performance. It also lets you change deeper functionality that's not just visual or layout stuff. For example, rolling out a new version of an algorithm or pricing change. This blog post has more info on the tradeoffs: https://blog.optimizely.com/2017...
Jonathon Colman (he/him)
Top Product
Hunter
I've always been a fan of Optimizely's products, and their new Rollouts demo looks like an awesome way for development teams to release faster and smarter. Well done!
Matt Meffan

This is such a safe way to trial something everybody else charges me for. Optimizely is a super-premium tool

Pros:

Full control

Cons:

I'll come back to this after some use

Haoyang Feng
How does it compare to LaunchDarkly?
Jon Noronha
Maker
Thanks for the question @haoyangnz. We offer similar functionality in terms of being able to feature flag in many languages and roll out gradually. The biggest difference is that Optimizely Rollouts is free and offers unlimited flags and seats, compared to LD's starting price of $300/mo for 5 users. The reason our product is free is that our main focus is on experimentation and measuring the impact of feature rollouts, and we have paid plans where you can upgrade for this. LD is more purely focused on selling feature flagging as a service.
Haoyang Feng
@thatsjonsense Thanks for the answer. Can I ask 2 follow-on questions: 1. Is there any downside for switching from LD to Optimizely for feature flagging? For example, does Optimizely also support pushing of flag changes or does it poll? 2. How much is the pricing for experimentation on Optimizely? The pricing is not publicly available. I'm asking because we're currently using LD and I'm wondering about whether we should switch.
Jon Noronha
Maker
@haoyangnz sorry I missed your follow-up! Sure, good questions: 1. Optimizely supports both pushing (via a webhook) and polling for flag changes. LD's SSE approach may be a few seconds faster to propagate the flag changes. LD has a few more features around managing feature flags, the tradeoff is that you're either paying a lot more or dealing with limited seats. 2. The pricing for experimentation is based on how much traffic you're using plus a fixed platform fee. I recommend contacting our sales team for a quote, or if you're not ready for that conversation you can try out Rollouts for free and see how that meets your needs.
Nicholas Saayman
@thatsjonsense this is quite an amazing offer to have such a powerful capability available for free at global scale. Do you intending keeping this product free indefinitely - how long will Rollouts exist, and exist in free form? I have question on the intended scope of toggles that you anticipate or even recommend that teams manage in Optimizely Rollouts. https://martinfowler.com/article... mentions 4 toggle types (release, permission, ops, experiment). My impression is that your new product is targeted around managing release & experiment toggles. Thoughts around this will be greatly appreciated.