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why_featbit.md

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I will explain why FeatBit in 4 steps:

  • Original intention
  • The evolution
  • Existing solutions
  • What are we different

Original intention: An infrastructure system for Feature Flags

Feature Flags is a software engineering technique that turns select functionality on and off during runtime without redeploying the code.

Initially, engineering teams use it to speed-up feature releases and reduce delivery risk. Here are some typical use cases:

  • Testing new features in production.
  • Progressive Delivery.
  • Targeted rollouts.
  • Safe and smooth data migration without impact.
  • Trunk-based development
  • Etc.

The evolution : Feature Management & All teams need it

For many data-driven/user-driven teams, product managers use it to improve user experience by:

  • Fine-grained targeting for who sees what experiences when.
  • Measuring the impact of features' rollouts.
  • Running A/B tests to improve feature quality.

With the evolution of this technology, feature flags evolved to feature management, which more teams started to benefit from. For example, feature management:

  • Enable Sales and Customer Success to close more deals with live demos and feature trials at the push of a button.
  • Help Support debug exactly which features and tests a customer has for faster resolution.
  • Give Marketing and Design the ability to fine-tune target audiences, coordinate announcements, and manage special customer programs.
  • Empower finance teams quickly get the billing report of how customers used and paid for the different features and subscriptions.
  • Etc.

Existing solutions

Many companies self-develop their feature flags system. But as the company and product thrived, the self-developed system encountered problems, like performance issues, inconveniences for teamwork, more requirements features for non-engineering teams, and so on. Self-development teams have struggled to put more energy into providing a high-quality feature management system. It needs time and practical experience to meet needs. This means expensive and inefficient!

There are some excellent feature management SaaS products, but they aren't open-source or self-hosted.

There are some open-source solutions, but they are Open Core (not 100%), they lack the esprit of empowering all teams. We also think they aren't very developer friendly. The performance of the product isn't quite as good as we expected.

What are we different

That's why we decided to start to build a 100% open-source (inspired by MinIO) project FeatBit, a scalable and high-performance Feature Management platform to Empower all teams to deliver, control, experiment with, and monetize their software.

We're just beginning and we want to provide more to the world. Now, FeatBit is already an alternative to existing feature management solutions. Try FeatBit!