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)
Digital.ai TeamForge
Score 7.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Digital.ai (formerly CollabNet) aims to help enterprises and government organizations deliver high-quality software at speed with TeamForge, its application lifecycle management suite. According to the vendor, Digital.ai offers innovative solutions, provides consulting and Agile training services, supports more than 10,000 customers with 6 million users in 100 countries, and has been recognized for 13 consecutive years as SD Times 100 “Best in Show” winner in the…
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Pricing
Azure DevOps
Digital.ai TeamForge
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)
Being primarily Microsoft Developers and how VSTS integrates with Visual Studio it stood head and shoulders above other options for us at the time of making our initial decision.
Azure DevOps works well when you’ve got larger delivery efforts with multiple teams and a lot of moving parts, and you need one place to plan work, track it properly, and see how everything links together. It’s especially useful when delivery and development are closely tied and you want backlog items, code and releases connected rather than spread across tools. Where it’s less of a fit is for small teams or simple pieces of work, as it can feel like more setup and process than you really need, and non-technical users often struggle with the interface. It also isn’t great if you want instant, easy programme-level views or a very visual planning experience without putting time into configuration.
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
CollabNet TeamForge is more well-suited for technically knowledgeable users such as developers, systems analysts, QA but not for non-technical users due to the technical data used throughout the tool. CollabNet TeamForge is appropriate for most applications development. In any industry especially suited for high demand software delivery environments.
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.
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
I would like to see personalization for managing artifacts, that is, allowing the user to customize pages and save personalized settings and then save them as bookmarks.
I would like an improved subversion browser such as a graphical user interface rather than a basic file explorer.
I would like built in features for CollabNet TeamForge integrated with subversion so that i can associate my private code branches and code changes.
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.
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
No answers on this topic
Usability
Microsoft
It's a great help to get more information about new feature release and stay updated on what the dev team is working on. I like how easy it is to just login and read through the work items. Each work item has basic details: Title, Description, Assigned to, State, Area (what it belongs to), and iteration (when it’s worked on). See image above.They move through different states (New → Discovery → Ready for Prod → etc.).
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Microsoft
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.
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
They always answer the phone when we put a call in, any time. They have consistently sent out contractors when needed and were there every step of the way when we switched over from ClearCase to TeamForge years ago. The support is what you really pay for when you buy into TeamForge.
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
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.
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
CollabNet TeamForge is superior to Mercury mainly because it has a subversion change management tool integrated with the product. CollabNet TeamForge offers more complexity but with more flexibility for managing and tracking projects. I think CollabNet TeamForge is more comprehensive than either Mercury and JIRA. They're all user friendly tools with short learning curves but CollabNet TeamForge is most efficient in my experience. JIRA was recently adopted for particular applications and is currently being evaluated by various technology teams.
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.