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)
Copado
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Copado is a Native Full DevOps Solution for Salesforce from the company of the same name in Chicago, designed to support fast, error-free releases. Its value stream maps enable users to visualize a team’s delivery process, identify bottlenecks, and gather metrics and insights on time and quality. Users can automatically merge and manage Salesforce XML with dynamically created release plans and 12 types of deployment steps, including full profiles. In March 2021, Copado acquired New…
N/A
Pricing
Azure DevOps Services
Copado
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.
When we have a large organization and number of changes and deployments are more than we should go for Copado. As we know it is a paid managed package and the cost is high so for dealing with fewer deployments it is not preferable to buy. Copado is well suited for users who don't have much technical understanding. So those users can see the User interface select the changes that need to be deployed by selecting the metadata. From Git operation to deployment all is handled by Copado itself. Copado has reduced the efforts for creating the package.xml and direct deployments can be done within a few clicks. Another Major aspect is that it can be directly synced with Jira or Azzure board from where the user stories will be synced and actions can be performed accordingly. For small organization, Copado can be expensive and to set up and maintain we need a technical person to do so.
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.
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.
Flosum is a downgrade for sure and I do not recommend it. Gearset is an upgrade and my preferred solution. Gearset has simplified the deployment path and makes it very easy to move between Salesforce instances. If there are any difficulties with Gearset they also have the best customer support for any deployment tool I've tried. Overall I'd say Gearset is #1, Copado #2 and Flosum a distant #3.
It has reduced the efforts to create package.xml manually and deploy the changes
Another positive impact is that we can track the commits to which org they have reached in an organized way and we don't need to maintain them separately
For setting Copado it take a lot of time and training is required for the complete setup which is time-consuming
