Digital.ai Release vs. GoCD

Mainly used in release management where all deployments are well managed and processed further based on the approval system. Complete enterprise-level solution with minor difficulties which need to be added to product improvement features. Integration with other CI-CD tools makes it easier to perform tasks in terms of release and deployments.

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

• Cross-team release workflow control using email, texts, scripts allow our release management to be truly a 360 process.
• XL Release allowing our Jenkins toolchain to control the beginning of release trains which is very powerful.
• XL release allows us to expose the business process flow for anyone to read direct at the source which runs the process instead of a separate vision.

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

• Pagination of data - across tool.
• User Roles Management API can be improved.
• Case insensitive ID's are treated differently making user face login and access issues.
• Dependency on Universal template/custom plugins creation should be reduced.
• Code versioning of templates is very difficult.
• Better error handling.
• Futures Timeout Issues.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

The tool is easy to use, easy to navigate and learn. Manages releases with proper approvals in a systematic manner. Though it needs minor improvements in terms of pagination (data loading), access management, but, overall the tool helps in increasing productivity and less time for production deployments.

Incentivized

Support is not good at all. To this day, I have to mail my queries and their support site does not log in for me (me alone). But, upon contacting many times, no one helps with a proper response. Though good thing is, I get a proper response over mail too. But, being informative about the tool and not on the issues faced by users outside of the process to get support should also be addressed equally. Which is currently missing in support.

Incentivized

XL release is simpler to configure and deploy to the organization than other change management platforms I have used. That simplicity has minor drawbacks requiring you to fit into a limited set of control methods but that exercise helped us simplify a needlessly onerous process.

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

• XL release has improved our consistency of release process, removing multiple days worth of manual status checking and coordination.
• XL release has allowed us to increase the number of beta releases we can support due to simplifying our release actions.

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