Statsig vs LaunchDarkly vs PostHog vs Optimizely vs GrowthBook: 2026 Pricing and Buying Guide

Five products keep showing up on every "experimentation tool" shortlist in 2026: Statsig, LaunchDarkly, PostHog, Optimizely, and GrowthBook. They are not the same kind of product wearing different logos. One prices in flat monthly tiers, one prices in raw per-event usage, one prices by service connection and AI-agent runs, one refuses to publish a single number, and one is free forever if a team is willing to self-host. Comparing them on features alone misses the part that actually decides the bill.

This guide pulls the live pricing structure from each vendor's own pricing page as of today, explains what the free tier of each one genuinely covers versus what it only appears to cover, and ends with a single recommendation rather than five options with no ranking. For the feature-flag line item specifically, ToolPick's PostHog usage-based pricing model and LaunchDarkly alternatives roundup go deeper into the numbers referenced below.

Quick Decision

The fastest way to sort these five: Statsig and GrowthBook publish clear, self-serve numbers a team can act on today. PostHog publishes clear per-unit rates but no bundled plan, so the bill is only knowable after real usage data exists. LaunchDarkly publishes numbers that are genuinely difficult to reconcile with each other across its own pricing page. Optimizely publishes nothing at all. That difference in pricing transparency is itself a buying signal, not just a footnote - it roughly tracks which platforms are built for self-serve engineering teams and which are built for a sales-assisted enterprise motion.

How Each Platform Actually Prices Itself in 2026

Statsig: flat Pro pricing with a metered ceiling

Statsig's pricing page runs a three-tier structure. The free Developer tier needs no credit card and includes 2 million events a month, unlimited feature-flag and config checks, 50,000 session replays a month, and a full year of analytics retention - a real allowance, not a 14-day trial. The paid Pro tier is a flat $150 a month that includes 5 million events, then meters additional usage at $0.05 per 1,000 events past that line, along with 100,000 session replays and unlimited analytics retention. Enterprise moves to custom event-or-experiment-based contracts, with warehouse-native deployment, data-warehouse imports, SSO and role-based access control, priority support, and HIPAA eligibility under a signed BAA for regulated-industry buyers.

What is billed under the hood: exposure events fired when an experiment is checked, or when a flag with Metric Lifts enabled is checked, log events sent from the SDK or imported from third-party tools, metrics ingested from a connected data warehouse, and custom metrics built on existing events. Plain feature-flag checks without Metric Lifts turned on do not generate a billable exposure event. Disabled feature flags and experiment checks that resolve to no allocation do not generate charges, which matters for teams that leave dormant flags in code rather than cleaning them up immediately.

LaunchDarkly: governance-first, and pricing units to match

LaunchDarkly's Full Platform pricing now spans four plan families - Developer, Foundation, Enterprise, and Guardian - and, notably for 2026, the page lets a buyer price by CodeControl (the classic flag-management product), AgentControl (a newer AI-agent-runs product), or the combined Full Platform. The free Developer tier includes unlimited seats, 10 million logs and traces, 5,000 AI runs a month, 5,000 session replays and error events, and 14-day data retention.

The Foundation plan is where the numbers get harder to pin down. LaunchDarkly's own pricing-page plan card lists annual-billed rates of roughly $10 per service connection a month and $8.33 per 1,000 client-side MAU a month, plus $5 per 1,000 AI runs past the free 5,000-run allowance - the service-connection rate matches the separate comparison table on the same page, but that table lists $10 per 1,000 MAU rather than the plan card's $8.33, a discrepancy also flagged, with a different figure, by GrowthBook's own LaunchDarkly pricing breakdown as of mid-2026. That gap is most likely an annual-versus-list-price framing difference rather than an error, but it means a buyer cannot safely quote a single Foundation number without confirming the billing term directly with LaunchDarkly first. Enterprise and Guardian remain fully custom, layering in SAML/SCIM support, advanced targeting, release-automation workflows, and approval gates on Enterprise, plus release monitoring, guardrail metrics, and automatic pause-and-rollback on flag rollouts on Guardian - a safety mechanism none of the other four platforms in this comparison advertise in quite the same form.

PostHog: no plans at all, just five metered products

PostHog's pricing page does not sell "Starter," "Growth," and "Enterprise" the way the other four do. Product analytics, session replay, feature flags and experiments, and surveys are each billed independently on their own free monthly allowance and their own declining per-unit rate ladder, with experiments billed together with feature flags rather than as a separate line item. The free allowances: 1 million events for product analytics, 5,000 session replay recordings (2,500 for mobile), 1 million feature-flag and experiment requests, and 1,500 survey responses - every month, with unlimited seats at every tier, since PostHog does not charge per seat at all.

Past those free lines, product analytics starts at $0.00005 per event and declines to $0.000009 per event past 250 million; session replay starts at $0.005 per recording and declines to $0.0015 past 500,000; feature-flag and experiment requests start at $0.0001 and decline to $0.00001 past 50 million. ToolPick's own PostHog cost model runs these rates through three real team-size scenarios and lands at roughly $50 a month for a 1-seat early-beta project, climbing to roughly $901 a month for a 5-seat startup around 20,000 monthly active users. Two fixed-price Boost ($250/month) and Scale ($750/month) add-on packages exist specifically for teams that want a predictable number instead of the pay-as-you-go ladder.

Optimizely: no public pricing, period

Optimizely is the outlier of the five: there is no free tier, no starting price, and no published tier structure of any kind on its pricing page. The page frames every plan as individually packaged around a buyer's stated needs, positions the experimentation product as "Agentic Experimentation" with A/B, multi-page, feature, and server-side testing, a proprietary statistics engine, real-time personalization and audience targeting, warehouse-native analytics, and third-party integrations - but every path from that page leads to a demo request, not a number. That is a deliberate positioning choice toward larger marketing and growth organizations with a dedicated CRO or experimentation team and a sales-assisted buying process, not toward a solo developer comparing five tabs before lunch.

GrowthBook: the only real $0-forever option

GrowthBook's pricing page is the only one of the five that ships a genuinely free, permanently unlimited self-hosted open-source tier: unlimited users, unlimited feature flags, and unlimited experiments, with the tradeoff that the team runs its own warehouse (bring-your-own or a managed option) and its own infrastructure. The cloud-hosted Starter tier mirrors those unlimited-flag and unlimited-experiment claims but caps at 3 users - fine for a founding team, tight past that.

Cloud Pro is a flat $40 per seat per month for up to 50 users, and is where the statistically rigorous features actually live: a visual editor, multi-arm bandits, safe rollouts, advanced permissioning, a power calculator, sequential testing, CUPED variance reduction, and sticky bucketing. Enterprise (both cloud and self-hosted) adds ramp schedules, approval workflows, advanced access control, SSO and SCIM provisioning, exportable audit logs, and a 99.99% uptime SLA on the cloud version, all under custom pricing. Cloud usage adds modest overage charges once free allowances are exceeded - $10 per million CDN requests past 1 million a month, $1 per GB of CDN bandwidth past 5GB, and $0.03 per 1,000 events on the managed warehouse option past 2 million free.

Comparing the Free Tiers Side by Side

A pattern worth naming out loud: three of the five (Statsig, PostHog, GrowthBook) have free tiers that are actually usable in production for a real early-stage product, not a crippled trial. LaunchDarkly's free tier is real but shaped around a solo developer or a very small team testing the platform, not around running a company's flag infrastructure. Optimizely simply is not evaluable without a sales call.

The three platforms below are the only ones with a single number that maps cleanly onto "roughly a 5-person team, one month" - LaunchDarkly and Optimizely are excluded from this chart on purpose because neither publishes one comparable figure, not because the number would be zero.

Who Should Pick What

• Pick Statsig if the team wants a single self-serve platform for feature flags, experiments, and lightweight analytics, values a flat and predictable Pro price over a fully usage-based one, and does not yet need HIPAA-grade compliance or warehouse-native deployment - those live behind the custom Enterprise tier.
• Pick GrowthBook if budget discipline matters more than managed convenience, engineering already owns a data warehouse, and the team is comfortable running its own infrastructure in exchange for a genuine $0 floor - or if the team just wants the cheapest possible per-seat number for a small crew ($40/seat on Cloud Pro).
• Pick LaunchDarkly if the org needs release-safety governance most platforms here do not offer in the same form - SAML/SCIM, approval workflows, and Guardian's automatic pause-and-rollback on risky rollouts - and has budget and patience for a live quote rather than a self-serve checkout.
• Pick PostHog if the team already wants (or has) product analytics, session replay, and surveys in the same tool as feature flags and experiments, and is comfortable with a bill that moves with product usage instead of staying flat - see the full PostHog cost model before assuming the free tier alone covers a live product.
• Pick Optimizely only if there is already a dedicated growth or CRO team and budget line for enterprise experimentation software, since a decision cannot be self-served here the way it can with the other four - every evaluation starts with a demo request.

Red Flags Before You Sign

• A vendor's own pricing page contradicts itself between the headline plan card and the fine-print comparison table (documented above for LaunchDarkly) - always confirm the exact billing term in writing before a contract is signed, not after the first invoice.
• The team plans to lean heavily on session replay. Across every platform here that prices replay separately, per-recording rates run far higher than per-event analytics rates, and unsampled replay is the single fastest way to blow past a free tier or spike a usage-based bill.
• Nobody on the team owns the billing-limit or usage-alerting configuration on a usage-based platform like PostHog or Statsig's metered overage. Usage-based pricing rewards teams that watch their own dashboards and punishes teams that treat the bill as a black box until the invoice arrives.
• "Unlimited" claims that turn out to be feature-gated - GrowthBook's free tier claims unlimited experiments but reserves sequential testing and CUPED for Pro, and Statsig's Enterprise-only HIPAA eligibility means a regulated-industry team cannot actually self-serve compliance no matter which lower tier looks cheap on paper.

Bottom Line

None of these five is the objectively cheapest or most complete tool - they are built for different buyers, and the pricing model each one chose is a fairly reliable signal of who that buyer is. Statsig and GrowthBook are built to be evaluated and bought without a sales call. PostHog is built to be one consolidated, usage-metered bill instead of four separate subscriptions. LaunchDarkly is built for governance-heavy release engineering, with pricing complexity to match. Optimizely is built to be sold, not self-served.

Related ToolPick Decisions

• PostHog Pricing 2026: What Usage-Based Pay-As-You-Go Actually Costs - The full per-event, per-recording, and per-request cost model referenced throughout this guide.
• PostHog Review 2026 - Feature and workflow fit for PostHog's combined analytics, replay, and flags platform.
• LaunchDarkly Alternatives in 2026: Statsig, PostHog, GrowthBook, and ConfigCat - A deeper look at switching away from LaunchDarkly specifically, including ConfigCat as a fifth option not covered here.
• Best Feature Flag Tools in 2026 - The feature-flag-specific shortlist for teams that do not need a full experimentation stack.