Composer vs. Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Composer
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
Composer is a free and open source dependency manager for PHP. It allows the user to declare the libraries a project depends on and it will manage (install/update) them. it manages packages on a per-project basis, installing them in a directory (e.g. vendor) inside a project and by default, it does not install anything globally. Thus, it is a dependency manager.N/A
Microsoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)
Score 1.0 out of 10
N/A
Visual SourceSafe is a discontinued source control software offering, from Microsoft.N/A
Pricing
ComposerMicrosoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ComposerMicrosoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
ComposerMicrosoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)
Best Alternatives
ComposerMicrosoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)
Small Businesses
Salt
Salt
Score 6.6 out of 10
Salt
Salt
Score 6.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Salt
Salt
Score 6.6 out of 10
Salt
Salt
Score 6.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Perforce Helix Core
Perforce Helix Core
Score 6.8 out of 10
Perforce Helix Core
Perforce Helix Core
Score 6.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
ComposerMicrosoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(2 ratings)
1.0
(4 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
3.8
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
4.2
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
ComposerMicrosoft Visual SourceSafe (Discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
Open Source
I do highly recommend it whenever you have some PHP projects, especially if you need to have reusable modules that you want to share across teams. With a good branching an tagging strategy, you can go a long way in making your developers' life easier. They will only need to work on the modules that are of interest of them, and not have to touch the whole codebase.
Also, it's quite necessary if you are planning to use community PHP modules, as the vast majority of them is distributed, and versionned via packagist.org, and thus via composer.
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Discontinued Products
I would not recommend Visual SourceSafe to anyone out there as there are so many better, more modern solutions that do what it does and much more. Visual SourceSafe should be retired in most cases.
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Pros
Open Source
  • Controlling dependencies
  • Fast dependency resolver
  • Easy to use dependency injection
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Discontinued Products
  • At this point in its lifecycle there are not many things VSS does well
  • Its main strength would be its ability to be self contained on a local drive
  • It is a basic Code repository
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Cons
Open Source
  • Sometimes a bit slow, but v2 made a lot of improvements on that
  • If everything is modular, setting up a local dev environment is a bit trickier than having everything in the same repo
  • Might be hard to adopt with some frameworks which have not fully embraced it, like Wordpress
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Discontinued Products
  • The system stability could be improved. Often we get file corrupted errors.
  • The User Interface is not modern and not user-friendly.
  • Concurrent check-outs could be added, allowing more people to work on the same file at the same time.
  • Add conflict resolution, files comparison, blame file, features that any modern source control program should have.
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Usability
Open Source
No answers on this topic
Discontinued Products
The current status of Visual SourceSafe is not usable. There are many things that are just so out of the date that it should be retired and not looked at any longer. If you have an existing application that is stored in it, I'd consider migrating it to a modern tool.
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Support Rating
Open Source
No answers on this topic
Discontinued Products
It's a Microsoft product so the customer support is great. The program has been around a long time so there are plenty of places on line to get assistance. Also almost any development shop you go to will have at least one developer who has used this product extensively in their career.
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Alternatives Considered
Open Source
If you're familiar with npm or Yarn, you'll feel right at home with composer. The work in pretty much the same way. You can use a composer.json file in your repo to reference specific version of public community modules, and enterprise internal ones. You can also hook some scripts that you would want to execute, like for testing, building your code ...
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Discontinued Products
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Return on Investment
Open Source
  • Composer only has had positive impacts in our business. It saves a lot of time and resource in order to develop a software.
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Discontinued Products
  • When we started using it, it allowed us to do source code versioning and store the code in a centralized location and not locally.
  • We are using it for very few projects with few developers that still maintain those applications and do not have time to merge the source code to Git.
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