Microsoft's Azure Artifacts is a software package management solution.
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JFrog Artifactory
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
JFrog Artifactory is a software repository management solution for enterprises available on-premise or from the cloud, presented as a single solution for housing and managing all the artifacts, binaries, packages, files, containers, and components for use throughout the software supply chain. JFrog Artifactory serves as a central hub for DevOps, integrating with tools and processes to improve automation, increase integrity, and incorporate best practices along the way.
$150
per month
SmartDeploy
Score 9.6 out of 10
N/A
SmartDeploy, now from PDQ.com (acquired January 2022), provides a software deployment solution supporting computer imaging, app deployment, driver management, and Windows migration.
Share codes and packages across the whole organization. We have developers most of the time work from home or overseas like in India. We can test and deploy the package when they deploy the new changes into the Azure Artifacts. Azure Artifact can promote our package to the correct system like DEV, UAT, or Production. It also provides retention policies to automatically clean up expired packages.
It works at scale and a large number of accessible pipelines for searching, repository updates and indexing will become easier. JFrog provides end-to-end solutions for all DevOps needs. With this, Jfrog Artifactory specifically implements the management of highly available repositories, with a smooth interface and integration with all the main CI tools on the market.
Well suited scenarios : One of the situations SmartDeploy helped immensly was in application deployment and management for our projects , making it and instant favorite for the deployment process. Also in one situation where we had a high flying app development which did'nt had much time to develop, deployment thorugh smart deploy made it quick and less involvement. Easier to understand major functionalities and onboard new projects. Less appropriate scenarios: We faced issues while utilising by DevOps team for monitoring every system for issue resolving in linux update on every employees system. This created alot of delay in every employees work front as systems were not working as expected
Remote monitoring is useful but has some lagging and functionalities are not upfront to use , making it complicated for new users to be aware just by using the application
Windows migration was quite difficult in terms of updates of softwares to be migrated to new system
Integration with client systems can be tough as major usage of other softwares is done in most of client systems causing us difficulties to integrate with smart deploy on the same platform
The main problem that seems intractable is getting the checksum of the artifact. Managing container artifacts is a game changer for us during project execution, as the container artifact type exposes all base image and Docker file steps. This makes debugging or analysis easier. Jfrog Artifactory provides promotion feature and can automated from one environment repo to another environment repo before the deployment occurs.
Support tickets take days to respond. The most basic of questions that should be knocked out in a few hours don't get answers for days. Tickets are also closed without resolution.
SmartDeploy customer support has been very good. Although we do not always get a super-fast response (though always within the time stated). The tech support folks at SmartDeploy always go the extra mile to see that our immediate issues are taken care of in as timely a manner as possible. They have always been attentive to our needs and frustrations.
Azure Artifact is based on GitHub which is the best artifact at all times. Helm is open source and we may have security concerns. Crucible is a good tool but does not of a lot of support. I prefer that Azure Artifact is a solid product and with a good gene from the GitHub codebase.
JFrog Artifactory has a much more friendly GUI, making package exploration less of a chore to do. Other than that, their features are pretty much comparable to each other. Both support multiple types of packages; both have API that can integrate well with CI/CD pipelines.
SmartDeploy has a fantastic deployment process management with detailed and configurable aspects. Even though it has detailed configuration it still somehow makes it easy to understand and implement compared to other services which need special learning and courses to understand them completelya and use them efficiently. This is one quality highly appreciated and stacks up against any other services I have used for deployment
So many times it happens at the time of dependency resolution some of the servers are down e.g NPM, Maven central, PiPy in that cause our builds starts failing. By proxying these repositories with JFrog this is never happened again.
It reduced the additional cost of container image registry and management effort.
Support of integration with Build, Monitoring, and CI tools resulted in smooth automation and management.
Very fast as an image deployment solution for new PCs. We do not have to create a completely new image when new hardware comes out. This is an amazing time-saver on its own.
With offline deployment and some workarounds, this is allowing us to migrate many Windows 7 units, rather than having to upgrade each one or load from scratch or replace it with new hardware.
