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)
Kantata PS Cloud
Score 7.3 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Kantata Cloud (formerly Mavenlink + Kimble) provides project management and collaboration software for small to mid-sized professional services companies. Features include resource management, project dependencies, time and expense tracking, file sharing, versatile user permissions, private messaging, planning and reporting.
N/A
Pricing
Azure DevOps Services
Kantata PS Cloud
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.
It is appropriate and even exceeds expectations 90% of the time. It makes project tracking very easy and visually accessible for most cases. The only occasion where Mavenlink came slightly short was for a special project that required more interaction options among project members. I am certain there are ways to work around that issue, but we did not find them.
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.
With Mavenlink when starting to assign tasks to people, set deadlines and milestones, and add files to our projects we can look at it all from a variety of perspectives, including a task tracker view and a Gantt chart view
Through Mavenlink each project also includes an activity stream where we can view all project details as they come up, as well as an activity feed for all the projects it is linked to.
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.
Although the company I currently work for does not use the product I have recommended that we do switch to Mavenlink. We will be opening some new sites internationally this year and I can see that Mavenlink would be a great product for us to use
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.
I think Mavenlink is the most robust and best project management tool out there for an organization like ours. However, some of our staff feel like it isn't as user-friendly as it could be. From a Director point of view or a Project Manager point of view, Mavenlink is exceptional. From the point of view of a task-doer, it could be more visually appealing. Also, the mobile version isn't great.
Very good integration with Google apps. Some complexity is called however in the synchronization between Google Tasks and Maven links tasks. This can sometimes lead to duplicate records in Google Tasks. It has been dissolvable that becomes cumbersome if not properly curated.
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.
Mavenlink support is fantastic! Any issues that arise are always handled quickly and efficiently. Granted, we haven't had many issues to report. Typically, my team tends to only reach out to support if they need assistance remembering how to do something or asking about an improvement. We had Mavenlink build an integration when we first started using the software, and the support team worked hard to listen and improve the integration.
We prepared questions in advance, and our trainer was an expert in what Mavenlink was and wasn't able to do. We were able to have multiple people trained at once.
The training was very well-organized. We were able to send questions in advance so the instructor knew what to cover, and the brought up related topics to maximize the usefulness of what they were teaching us.
Dedicate as much internal time to the implementation effort as possible, even if you're using a 3rd party or Mavenlink services. Your team knows your processes the best
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.
We have since switched over to JIRA and let me tell you, it was probably the best decision we have made as a company. We chose Mavenlink based on promises from the sales team about future roadmap work that really never happened. We thought Mavenlink would easily integrate with our billing software but we couldn't have been more wrong. We ended up never utilizing Mavenlink invoices as they don't even allow you to fully customize your invoices that go out to clients!
Manvenlink is perfect for showing expenses and income over time and across people.
Manvenlink is adaptable for the integration and automation of the processes of each of our projects in order to optimize resources and improve operational performance.
Mavenlink allows us to determine if our projects are profitable or not, as well as save significant time by automating components such as recurring tasks and having templates, among other things.
Manvenlink is advantageous for our operations due to its simple portfolio management of our projects: manage several projects at once and receive a complete perspective of the development of each one at a glance.
Manvenlink kindly provides us with robust discussion threads, access restrictions, and built-in document management, allowing us to contextualize communications.
