Azure DevOps vs. JFrog Artifactory vs. Quicklisp

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.

Incentivized

It works at scale and a large number of accessible pipelines for searching, repository updates and indexing will become easier. JFrog provides end-to-end solutions for all DevOps needs. With this, Jfrog Artifactory specifically implements the management of highly available repositories, with a smooth interface and integration with all the main CI tools on the market.

Incentivized

• Utilize Git as a repository to share work between multiple users
• Ability to configure Pipelines to build containers to run virtual deployments and testing scripts.
• Split individual tasks and relate to master documents for quick navigation and ability to see overall picture of project.
• Track status of each task
• Integrate with Git to utilize branches, merging, approvals, history, etc.

Incentivized

• Artifactory Management acting as a repository manager of docker images, application and component dependencies
• Automate pipelines and thereby releasing changes faster
• Supports high availability and scalability with multi site replication

Incentivized

• 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.
• It could improve the search slightly better.

• We can always use support for more different types of packages in Artifactory.
• We also would like to see the Artifactory X-Ray produce continue to mature.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.).

Incentivized

The main problem that seems intractable is getting the checksum of the artifact. Managing container artifacts is a game changer for us during project execution, as the container artifact type exposes all base image and Docker file steps. This makes debugging or analysis easier. Jfrog Artifactory provides promotion feature and can automated from one environment repo to another environment repo before the deployment occurs.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Support tickets take days to respond. The most basic of questions that should be knocked out in a few hours don't get answers for days. Tickets are also closed without resolution.

Was not part of the process.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

JFrog Artifactory has a much more friendly GUI, making package exploration less of a chore to do. Other than that, their features are pretty much comparable to each other. Both support multiple types of packages; both have API that can integrate well with CI/CD pipelines.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• So many times it happens at the time of dependency resolution some of the servers are down e.g NPM, Maven central, PiPy in that cause our builds starts failing. By proxying these repositories with JFrog this is never happened again.
• It reduced the additional cost of container image registry and management effort.
• Support of integration with Build, Monitoring, and CI tools resulted in smooth automation and management.

Incentivized