Feature Management And Experimentation Solutions

Forrester published one Wave under this name, crowned one Leader in it, and then retired the category eight months later. The unified platform won the only scorecard, and the scorecard was then canceled.

The Q3 2024 Wave is the sole edition, and no future edition will exist.

The scorecard with one Leader and one edition: The Forrester Wave: Feature Management And Experimentation Solutions, Q3 2024

The Q3 2024 Wave, published August 6, 2024, was the first evaluation Forrester ever dedicated to this market, a 25-criterion scorecard for what the report defines as software that "simplifies software release and enables full-stack product experimentation" through embedded libraries, APIs, data, and a user-managed control plane.

Amplitude was named the Leader, the only one, with the highest possible scores in eleven criteria including advanced experimentation, A/B testing, audience segmentation and targeting, data security and privacy, user interface, analytics, and governance.

Forrester's citations are worth reading at full length, because they describe the market's last attempt at being one thing. "Amplitude's unified platform delivers on multiple fronts." "An exceptionally good fit for customers that are collaborative and product-focused." A customer reference: "Amplitude's integrated platform sets it apart from the competition for sure."

The unifier won. The unification argument was the winning argument, eight months before the analyst concluded the market did not exist.

The podium that contained the divorce

The two publicly confirmed Strong Performers each carried one half of the category, and the podium itself contained the divorce.

LaunchDarkly is the developer half. Forrester credited its deep developer roots and strong feature management and progressive rollout, and a reference customer put the product's essence in one sentence: "Switching a feature flag in the dashboard and seeing changes in our product is near instant. Competitors do not have that type of performance."

Kameleoon is the experimenter half. It took the top possible score in the innovation criterion on the strength of its AI Copilot, and it was the only purpose-built experimentation vendor in this Wave to also earn recognition in The Forrester Wave: Experience Optimization Solutions, Q4 2024.

The developer's tool won one half of the rung. The marketer's tool won the other half. The unifier sat on top. That arrangement was never going to hold, because the two halves answer to different buyers with different budgets.

The unified platform won, and then lost its market

Amplitude's win was explicitly a win for integration: analytics, feature management, experimentation, and data management in one platform, answering what the report called "the urgent need for integrated solutions" from the convergence of product and engineering teams.

The trouble is what happened next. Forrester did not dispute the unified platform. Forrester disputed the market it was unified for.

In the retirement notice, the analyst's language is clinical: the two use cases are "evolving rapidly but separately." The convergence the 2024 report treated as urgent turned out to be two markets passing through the same hallway in opposite directions. The platform that unified them kept the trophy. The category it unified stopped existing.

The retirement notice, eight months later

On April 11, 2025, principal analyst Christopher Condo announced that Forrester would retire the Wave. The reasoning, in two sentences: "feature flags are the domain of developers and experimentation is the domain of product and marketing." And: "these use cases are being served by separate technology markets."

Forrester did not retire the market. It retired the pretense that it was one market.

The split maps cleanly onto the 2024 podium. LaunchDarkly's half goes to the developers and their DevOps platforms. Kameleoon's half goes to the product and marketing teams and their experience optimization suites. The scorecard that ranked both halves together was the pretense, and eight months was all the experiment lasted.

Where the two halves went

The flag market went to the DevOps scorecard. The Forrester Wave: DevOps Platforms, Q2 2025 published in June 2025, two months after the retirement notice, and feature management now lives inside that evaluation's platform criteria rather than in a scorecard of its own.

The experiment market went to the experience scorecard. The Forrester Wave: Experience Optimization Solutions, Q4 2024 had already published before the retirement, and Kameleoon's dual recognition is the bridge between the old category and the new one.

For a buyer, the inheritance is clean. If your problem is shipping safely, you now shop in the DevOps Platforms Wave. If your problem is testing what you shipped, you shop in the Experience Optimization Wave. The category that promised both in one purchase no longer has analyst coverage, which is the analyst's way of saying what the buyers already decided.

What to ask now that the scorecard is gone

Which half of the retired category are you actually buying? The flag half and the experiment half answer to different people and different budgets. Name the persona before you name the vendor.

Where does your vendor sit in the successor scorecards? Kameleoon's presence in both the old Wave and the experience optimization Wave is the model of what to look for. A vendor that appears in neither successor has quietly left the covered market.

What happens to the unified investment you already made? The convergence the 2024 report called urgent is not where analyst coverage points anymore. Ask your vendor for its roadmap into the two separated markets, and expect the answer to be two roadmaps.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.

This pairs closely with Integration Platform As A Service, where forrester dropped one letter from this category's name and rewired the criteria around it: the market that used to connect systems is now scored on whether it can also govern the AI agents deciding what to do next.