Copado vs. GitLab vs. GoCD

When we have a large organization and number of changes and deployments are more than we should go for Copado. As we know it is a paid managed package and the cost is high so for dealing with fewer deployments it is not preferable to buy. Copado is well suited for users who don't have much technical understanding. So those users can see the User interface select the changes that need to be deployed by selecting the metadata. From Git operation to deployment all is handled by Copado itself. Copado has reduced the efforts for creating the package.xml and direct deployments can be done within a few clicks. Another Major aspect is that it can be directly synced with Jira or Azzure board from where the user stories will be synced and actions can be performed accordingly. For small organization, Copado can be expensive and to set up and maintain we need a technical person to do so.

Incentivized

GitLab is good if you work a lot with code and do complex repository actions. It gives you a very good overview of what were the states of your branches and the files in them at different stages in time. It's also way easier and more efficient to write pipelines for CI\CD. It's easier to read and it's easier to write them. It takes fewer clicks to achieve the same things with GitLab than it does for competitor products.

Incentivized

Previously, our team used Jenkins. However, since it's a shared deployment resource we don't have admin access. We tried GoCD as it's open source and we really like. We set up our deployment pipeline to run whenever codes are merged to master, run the unit test and revert back if it doesn't pass. Once it's deployed to the staging environment, we can simply do 1-click to deploy the appropriate version to production. We use this to deploy to an on-prem server and also AWS. Some deployment pipelines use custom Powershell script for.Net application, some others use Bash script to execute the docker push and cloud formation template to build elastic beanstalk.

Incentivized

• Capturing latest changes accurately in the commit window
• Auto resolving conflicts
• gate checks for apex code coverage.
• Giving insights into the validation errors
• very easy to migrate data & metadata between orgs, just with few clicks

Incentivized

• GitLab excels in managing code versions, allowing easy tracking of changes, branch management, and merging contributions.
• It helps maintain code stability and reliability, saving time and effort in the development or research workflow.
• Powerful code review features, enabling collaboration and feedback among team members.
• Robust project management features, including issue tracking, kanban boards, and milestones.

Incentivized

• Pipeline-as-Code works really well. All our pipelines are defined in yml files, which are checked into SCM.
• The ability to link multiple pipelines together is really cool. Later pipelines can declare a dependency to pick up the build artifacts of earlier ones.
• Agents definition is really great. We can define multiple different kinds of environments to best suit our diverse build systems.

Incentivized

• In deployment, the Query can be lost when editing, which can cause a lot of problems.
• The Query option is cumbersome, but it works!
• The deployment instructions fields could be made into rich text fields which would be awesome.

Incentivized

• CI variables management is sometimes hard to use, for example, with File type variables. The scope of each variable is also hard to guess.
• Access Token: there are too many types (Personal, Project, global..), and it is hard to identify the scope and where it comes from once created.
• Runners: auto-scaled runners are for the moment hard to put in place, and monitoring is not easy.

Incentivized

• UI can be improved
• Location for settings can be re-arranged
• API for setting up pipeline

Incentivized

I really feel the platform has matured quite faster than others, and it is always at the top of its game compared to the different vendors like GitHub, Azure pipelines, CircleCI, Travis, Jenkins. Since it provides, agents, CI/CD, repository hosting, Secrets management, user management, and Single Sign on; among other features

Incentivized

very good user interface. It has reduced tons of manual efforts for the developers. Very easy to validate the release work. Easy to club multiple stories into one deployment. We can integrate Copado with our JIRA and all the PR’s are visible under the user story on JIRA board. But this can be overwhelming for beginners

Incentivized

I find it easy to use, I haven't had to do the integration work, so that's why it is a 9/10, cause I can't speak to how easy that part was or the initial set up, but day to day use is great!

Incentivized

I've never had experienced outages from GItlab itself, but regarding the code I have deployed to Gitlab, the history helps a lot to trace the cause of the issue or performing a rollback to go back to a working version

Incentivized

GItlab reponsiveness is amazing, has never left me IDLE. I've never had issues even with complex projects. I have not experienced any issues when integrating it with agents for example or SSO

Incentivized

At this point, I do not have much experience with Gitlab support as I have never had to engage them. They have documentation that is helpful, not quite as extensive as other documentation, but helpful nonetheless. They also seem to be relatively responsive on social media platforms (twitter) and really thrived when GitHub was acquired by Microsoft

Incentivized

There are tools such as ANT migration tool or using sfdx but Copado makes the deployments super simple. If a user is not that technically strong still he can use Copado and deploy the changes in a few clicks. Copado provides a complete package of maintaining the development and repositories in a common platform. There are pipelines that you can set that changes will move from which org to the final org in a very organized manner. We can perform static code analysis at the time of deployment of the changes and we have to clear those if we need to deploy the changes. Creating pull requests is super easy and can be managed by Copado itself. Overall a superb managed package for deployment in Salesforce.

Incentivized

Gitlab seems more cutting-edge than GitHub; however, its AI tools are not yet as mature as those of CoPilot. It feels like the next-generation product, so as we selected a tool for our startup, we decided to invest in the disruptor in the space. While there are fewer out-of-the-box templates for Gitlab, we have never discovered a lack of feature parity.

Incentivized

GoCD is easier to setup, but harder to customize at runtime. There's no way to trigger a pipeline with custom parameters.

Jenkins is more flexible at runtime. You can define multiple user-provided parameters so when user needs to trigger a build, there's a form for him/her to input the parameters.

Incentivized

I think is very well designed, and like any VCS it works as intended

Incentivized

• It has reduced the efforts to create package.xml manually and deploy the changes
• Another positive impact is that we can track the commits to which org they have reached in an organized way and we don't need to maintain them separately
• For setting Copado it take a lot of time and training is required for the complete setup which is time-consuming

Incentivized

• GitLab cut down our spent on container, package and infrastructure registry
• Best thing is we can now have everything in single platform which cost effective too
• Quality of support is really good and they do have emergency support team as well which is great

Incentivized

• ROI has been good since it's open source
• Settings.xml need to be backed up periodically. It contains all the settings for your pipelines! We accidentally deleted before and we have to restore and re-create several missing pipelines
• More straight forward use of API and allows filtering e.g., pull all pipelines triggered after this date

Incentivized