Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System) is an agile development product that is an extension of the Microsoft Visual Studio architecture. Azure DevOps includes software development, collaboration, and reporting capabilities.
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
Codeanywhere
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Codeanywhere is a Cloud IDE with the features of a Desktop IDE. Codeanywhere enables users to set up a workflow in any way desired. The features needed for coding tasks are built into Codeanywhere, including support for debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, code refactoring, and embedded Git. Languages included are popular programming ones such as C, C#, C++, CSS, HTTP, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, SQL.
$6
per month 1 container
Pricing
Azure DevOps Services
Codeanywhere
Editions & Modules
Azure Artifacts
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
Basic Plan
$6
per user per month (first 5 users free)
Azure Pipelines - Self-Hosted
$15
per extra parallel job (1 free parallel job with unlimited minutes)
Azure Pipelines - Microsoft Hosted
$40
per parallel job (1,800 minutes free with 1 free parallel job)
ADO is well suited for the visibility of day-to-day tasks and responsibilities as well as things such as Features, user stories, etc. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any scenario where it might not be well suited, as you can customize ADO to your liking to a degree.
If you're looking for a VS Code-like online environment with containers to spin up a dev environment or execute code and scripts it is a good fit. The environments are very customizable, and, all said and done, the price is fair. If you're looking for a remote code editor that allows you to connect via SFTP/SSH and edit the remote files, it isn't quite as seamless as it used to be. I still haven't found any all-cloud alternative, but it could be better.
Flexible Requirements Hierarchy Management: AZDO makes it easy to track items such as features or epics as a flat list, or as a hierarchy in which you can track the parent-child relationship.
Fast Data Entry: AZDO was designed to facilitate quick data entry to capture work items quickly, while still enabling detailed capture of acceptance criteria and item properties.
Excel Integration: AZDO stands out for its integration with MS Excel, which enables quick updates for bulk items.
Since some updates a couple of years ago, using Codeanywhere as a remote code editor rather than a container-based development environment has been more cumbersome and difficult.
The modular nature of connections and containers seems like a good idea, but they don't always work properly.
It's difficult sometimes to share a connection or container together with a collaborator.
I don't think our organization will stray from using VSTS/TFS as we are now looking to upgrade to the 2012 version. Since our business is software development and we want to meet the requirements of CMMI to deliver consistent and high quality software, this SDLC management tool is here to stay. In addition, our company uses a lot of Microsoft products, such as Office 365, Asp.net, etc, and since VSTS/TFS has proved itself invaluable to our own processes and is within the Microsoft family of products, we will continue to use VSTS/TFS for a long, long time.
Azure DevOps is a powerful, complex cloud application. As such there are a number of things it does great and something where there is room for improvement. One of those areas would be in usability. In my opinion it relies too much on search. There is no easy way to view all projects or to group them in a logical way. You need to search for everything.
When we've had issues, both Microsoft support and the user community have been very responsive. DevOps has an active developer community and frankly, you can find most of your questions already asked and answered there. Microsoft also does a better job than most software vendors I've worked with creating detailed and frequently updated documentation.
Microsoft Planner is used by project managers and IT service managers across our organization for task tracking and running their team meetings. Azure DevOps works better than Planner for software development teams but might possibly be too complex for non-software teams or more business-focused projects. We also use ServiceNow for IT service management and this tool provides better analysis and tracking of IT incidents, as Azure DevOps is more suited to development and project work for dev teams.
I've used CodeTasty, which is much more of a straight remote code editor, but their dev team is entirely unresponsive, and I became uncomfortable storing credentials with them, so I pulled everything from them and went back to Codeanywhere. VS code is similar but not fully online. While I know that they've released a fully online version, I haven't had the time or wherewith-all to make it work in the capacity I need. Codeanywhere is still the best solution I've found.
