Multinational company Perforce, headquartered in Alameda, California offers a version control and peer code review solution. Perforce version control is built around Helix Core with add-on products for code review (Helix Swarm) for free, and add Git support products (Helix4Git and Helix TeamHub). The original Perforce SCM solution was expanded via the Surround SCM, a software configuration management application which was developed by Seapine Software and now owned by Perforce since that…
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Sourcetree
Score 7.5 out of 10
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Sourcetree, by Atlassian, is a free version control client for Mac and Windows that works with Git and Mercurial repositories. It's distributed version control allows developers to visualize code, review changesets, stash, cherry-pick between branches or commit with a single click.
While Perforce Helix is the best version control software out there, it can also be used to track your documentation, training videos and materials, and requirements. If you have strict compliance requirements, it can be used to ensure that those requirements are satisfied. Perforce Helix is incredibly flexible and can meet the needs of individual users as well as companies with thousands of users.
Sourcetree is a great tool for any Git user. Whether you're well versed using Git commands in the terminal or a newbie, this tool wonderfully supplements your workflow. A quick glance at the UI and you know where your project stands. I find it most helpful when I need to determine what changed in a particular file in past commits. Having a visual graph of branches helps me to understand the big picture. Even though I'm comfortable operating Git most often in the command line, I always have Sourcetree open to check my work and see where my colleagues are.
The branching mechanisms in Perforce allow for an enormous codebase to be duplicated into release versions weekly with little impact upon things such as the speed of queries against the version control.
Action triggers permit such things as automated builds of software versions, dynamic messaging when issues are identified either within or prior to a build process, and much more.
Locking provides the ability to prevent modifications of stable, tested versions in order to ensure validity when they are released.
There's lots of information about the repo, commits, authors, branches etc. For example you can explore the metadata of a single commit such as when it happened, it's ID, it's parent ID, the author, and any labels.
You can explore the history of the repo as a branch graph - This can be helpful to see what branches were live and what other work was going on at that time. You can explore each branch, commits etc. And the visualisation makes it easier to understand how 'busy' a repo was at a certain time period and see how branches were merged.
There's lots of functions and features which can make complex git actions more streamlined and GUI based. This is great for anyone looking to perform complex git actions or really dive into 'under the hood' management of repos. The merge conflict actions in particular can be helpful.
Perforce tends to feel backwards in how it approaches certain tasks, like branching and integrating - even once you figure out how it wants you to perform these tasks, you will likely forget when it comes around to the next time you need to do them again.
Perforce has a higher price tag, comparatively.
Perforce make some tasks very easy, and yet other tasks very difficult - it doesn't always seem to have found its target user's proficiency.
Adding tooltips when hovering UI elements would make Sourcetree even more intuitive for beginners
During installation, Sourcetree suggests creating or signing into Bitbucket account. This step can be skipped and is not a requirement but it's not intuitive whether these accounts are required to use Sourcetree.
We are fully committed to our use of Perforce. It works well within our organization and our desire to share our code base with our customers. Their support staff are responsive, inquisitive, and eager to improve their software. I feel like we have a direct line to their design/feature team as they often solicit our feedback.
With Perforce Helix, you can use it via the command line, via P4V, or any of the other APIs included with the product. It is extremely easy for new users to get up and running. Users of Perforce Helix only have to pull in the files of interest to them. Also, Perforce is very easy to script and integrate into your CI/CD pipeline. Streams allows you to have pinpoint control of your workflow, and P4Search is the absolute best--I wish Perforce (the company) would talk more about this. It is absolutely fabulous!
Sourcetree has lots of information about the repo, it's history, metadata, and has lots of features, tools and actions. However absolutely none of this is helpful to the average developer and actually slows down the developer lifecycle and can be overwhelming. In my opinion, Sourcetree should only be used by those wanting to do complex git tasks or auditing. For everyone else, this tool will slow you down and make things needlessly complex.
In our large environment, Perforce is rarely "down". We have regular maintenance windows and from time to time Perforce can feel a little slow, but its always available. Tech support has always worked with our engineers and IT department to make sure that any real performance or stability issues are addressed quickly.
I had two representatives from Perforce contact me after downloading it but never responded when I had questions. I also had a difficult time finding good training material for getting started. There is a lot of available support material when running into issues, though, because of how many large companies use it.
This rating is related to setting up an environment from an existing Perforce repository. Initial setup of Perforce as the repository for the company was done by a separate team long prior to my inception.
Git is great, I love Git. But it's not great for dealing with binary assets, even when using Git LFS. Locking is not as simple as on perforce. Git presents some problems on using for non-tech people it can get overwhelming and tech people have to come by and help.
I tried GitHub Desktop for a couple of days, but it is just not visual enough for me. It has no graph display for branches. Too much clicking is required to get info that the Sourcetree UI shows by default. Sourcetree gives you that "Big Picture" dashboard. GitHub Desktop seems unfinished to me due to its lack of this overview screen.
