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 9.5 out of 10
N/A
Copado is a Salesforce-native DevOps platform that helps teams deliver software faster, with less risk and more confidence.
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)
DevOps is much more user friendly than Git itself. There is a more GUI-centric interface, tighter integration with the Azure / Entra architecture. For those of use in the Microsoft-sphere, it really is excellent for code-centric project management. I rate this as an 8 because it does not seem quite as well suited for fully functional / non-code project aspects in implementation. Nor does it have customer / end-user portal / front end for easy reporting and insight.
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 did mention it has good visibility in terms of linking, but sometimes items do get lost, so if there was a better way to manage that, that would be great.
The wiki is not the prettiest thing to look at, so it could have refinements there.
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.
very good user interface. It has reduced tons of manual efforts for the developers. Very easy to validate the release work. Easy to club multiple stories into one deployment. We can integrate Copado with our JIRA and all the PR’s are visible under the user story on JIRA board. But this can be overwhelming for beginners
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.
There are tools such as ANT migration tool or using sfdx but Copado makes the deployments super simple. If a user is not that technically strong still he can use Copado and deploy the changes in a few clicks. Copado provides a complete package of maintaining the development and repositories in a common platform. There are pipelines that you can set that changes will move from which org to the final org in a very organized manner. We can perform static code analysis at the time of deployment of the changes and we have to clear those if we need to deploy the changes. Creating pull requests is super easy and can be managed by Copado itself. Overall a superb managed package for deployment in Salesforce.
We have saved a ton of time not calculating metrics by hand.
We no longer spend time writing out cards during planning, it goes straight to the board.
We no longer track separate documents to track overall department goals. We were able to create customized icons at the department level that lets us track each team's progress against our dept goals.
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
