Beyond Compare from Scooter Software headquartered in Madison is a utility for comparing different version of documents and seeing the differences. It also allows changes to be merged and synchronized.
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Bitbucket Server (discontinued)
Score 4.0 out of 10
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Bitbucket Server (formerly Stash) from Atlassian was a self-hosted source code management solution. The product is no longer available for sale, and support for existing licenses ended in 2024.
Beyond Compare is extremely good at the task of comparisons, whether that is text file comparisons or folder comparisons. It does a great job of easily highlighting the differences for users, and giving them the option of merging (in the case of text files) or synchronizing (in the case of folders.) In either case, no one on my team has ever had any reason to reach for another different tool.
Bitbucket Server would be good to use if you are not extremely reliant on the availability of your code at any given moment. If you have other systems relying on the up status of Bitbucket Server that can cause problems if unable to reach it -- you might consider going with a different product
For date formatting discrepancies the software does not automatically mark the dates as equivalent; for instance ‘2019/10/15’ vs. ‘15-OCT-2019’. This would be considered a difference.
The columns/report must be ordered similarly. If extra data is available in one file, it should be removed or extra rows will be marked as differences.
For spreadsheet comparison, the user must save the file on the proper tab and then “recompare” within the tool. There is no way to switch between sheets in the software.
Again, given the intuitive nature of this program, there is barely any learning curve needed. It is simple, reliable, accurate, and just one of those tools you always have with you and rarely think about until you don't have it. Then it is a case of OMG what was I thinking? This program is just very easy to use, and that makes it more valuable to me than some of my other software tools that cost significantly more.
The usability of its interface is pretty straight forward when it comes to creating projects and repositories, but when you have to dive into finer grained portions of the UI things can get tricky. If you are used to using tools like GitHub or Gitlab -- Bitbucket is just different enough to be a bother.
I have never needed support for this product other than learning how to use a new feature I was not familiar with. User forums and user groups that have used this product for their own purposes have always sufficed for anything that I needed help using with the product. Some of the features could be a little better outlined, but overall very easy to use.
Never really needed any support as the application is very easy to set up and maintain. Any questions we had were well documented in their online documentation, and community forum.
We've tried many: Code Compare, Meld, UltraCompare, and WinMerge. None of them have the depth of features and speed to handle the work we throw at Beyond Compare. The multi-tabbed interface allows us to sync multiple servers at the same time. It understands multiple file types, metadata, and encodings. It's the best tool for the job.
Stash was selected before I was at the company, but we're looking at these alternatives and actively considering switching. Stash seems to have all the necessary features we need to make it work, but it doesn't have any bells and whistles or extra special features that we can use to create more advanced integrations with other products like Jenkins or Amazon Web Services.
Stash has certainly improved the productivity of the team. We no longer have to use Shared Drive on network which is prone to hacks and errors to manage our code.
During the process of releases, the release engineering team can pull the latest and approved code from Stash and need not be dependent upon the availability of the developers during their non availability. It improves productivity and fastens the ETA for requests.
We have stayed on course for project deadlines since introduction of Stash and helps us achieve the goals of timely completion of projects.
