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)
Pendo Feedback
Score 6.9 out of 10
N/A
Pendo Feedback (formerly Receptive, acquired 2019) is a SaaS product management platform that allows users to collect product feedback and feature requests from customers as well as internal teams, and collaborate on the product roadmap.
N/A
Pricing
Azure DevOps Services
Pendo Feedback
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.
Receptive is very effective for multiple internal teams/department of a single product who need to scale their product feedback management effectively. We've been leveraging it for one of our products and it was so successful, that we implemented it with a second product. The main issue we ran into situationally with that was managing 2+ modules (products) in Receptive; it was a bit more difficult to present Receptive to two different customer bases/users (we couldn't change the appearance) and slightly confusing to do within the app (lots of filtering needed). I have heard that support of multiple modules is something that Receptive will likely be working on in the near future, so that's good news.
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.
We had UserVoice prior to Receptive but it was just too clunky and extensive for our needs. It was less about automation and still very manual work to process feedback. It also didn't provide collaboration levels that we needed for our internal teams to work together. ProdPad was a very clean tool but also didn't enable us to automate the process like Receptive does.
