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Octopus Deploy

Octopus Deploy

Overview

What is Octopus Deploy?

Australian company Octopus Deploy offers their eponymous automated deployment and release management software that integrates with the user's preferred CI server and adds deployment & ops automation capabilities. Octopus Deploy enables developers, release managers, and operations folks to bring all…

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Reliable Deployment Tool: Several users have praised Octopus Deploy for its reliability in minimizing issues during production releases. …
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Octopus Deploy overview

9 out of 10
July 04, 2021
Octopus Deploy is used for Devops team to deliver applications to different environments across the company and for customers. Octopus …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

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Pricing

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Cloud

Free 30 day trial

Cloud
unlimited targets/users/projects

Server

Free 30 day trial

On Premise
unlimited targets/users/projects

Enterprise

Starting at $18 per month

On Premise

Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://octopus.com/pricing/overview

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Starting price (does not include set up fee)

  • $12 per month
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Product Details

What is Octopus Deploy?

The Octopus Deploy platform enables developers, release managers, and operations teams to bring automation into a single place.

By reusing configuration variables, environment definition, API keys, connection strings, permissions, service principals, and automation logic, teams work together from a single platform. Octopus Deploy helps to break down silos and improve collaboration so teams can ship and operate⁠ software with greater confidence.

Octopus Deploy Screenshots

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Octopus Deploy Video

Introducing Octopus Deploy

Octopus Deploy Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported CountriesGlobal
Supported LanguagesEnglish

Frequently Asked Questions

Australian company Octopus Deploy offers their eponymous automated deployment and release management software that integrates with the user's preferred CI server and adds deployment & ops automation capabilities. Octopus Deploy enables developers, release managers, and operations folks to bring all automation into a single place. The vendor states that by reusing configuration variables, environment definition, API keys, connection strings, permissions, service principals, and automation logic, teams work together from Octopus Deploy.

Octopus Deploy starts at $12.

Jenkins, TeamCity, and Azure DevOps Services are common alternatives for Octopus Deploy.

Reviewers rate Performance and Ease of integration and Contract Terms and Pricing Model highest, with a score of 8.5.

The most common users of Octopus Deploy are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).

Octopus Deploy Customer Size Distribution

Consumers15%
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)20%
Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees)40%
Enterprises (more than 500 employees)25%
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(45)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Users have made several recommendations for Octopus Deploy based on their experiences.

One common recommendation is to take the time to learn the product and create clear deployment plans for each software. By familiarizing themselves with Octopus Deploy and carefully planning their deployments, users have been able to simplify and accelerate the deployment process for their applications.

Another recommendation is the effectiveness of Octopus Deploy in deploying binaries and files. Users have found this feature to be reliable and efficient in their deployment workflows, making it an attractive option for companies looking to automate their build process and improve their deployment workflows.

Additionally, users recommend using Octopus plugins with continuous integration servers like Jenkins or Teamcity to streamline the deployment process. By integrating Octopus Deploy with these tools, users have been able to further optimize their deployment workflows and enhance the overall efficiency of their software development processes.

Overall, these recommendations highlight Octopus Deploy's potential to simplify deployments, deploy files effectively, and integrate seamlessly with other tools to streamline the deployment process.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-24 of 24)
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Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use the simplest Octopus use-case. We have multiple projects (websites, windows services, web apis) that we deploy to test and live servers using the octopus calamari client listener.<br><br>Everything just works as expected, and it makes deployments vanishingly simple. Also, the ease with which I can make a deployment, or re-deploy an old check-in means that rolling back is easy, which in turn makes all deployments much less stressful!<br><br>I cannot speak for the more advanced aspects of Octopus, but I cannot imaging working with a client on windows software and making live or test deployments without octopus. I would recommend it to any new client I meet.
  • Dashboard visibility makes it v easy to see the state of our test and live servers and projects.
  • Single key-press deployments mean that non-technical staff are able to promote from test to live after testing is succesful.
  • Integration with Azure makes our pipelines fully automated from code check-in to live deployment
  • Arranging the dashboard could be better - filtering to HIDE selected projects would be nice (currently we can filter to SHOW, but I want to show by default,, and hide the ones I don't want)
Once set up it enables non-technical users to fully deploy a complex site, meaning the test/integration team can control any deployments to live without having to go back to the development team.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have used Octopus Deploy for many years now for our CI/CD (Continuous Integration/ Continuous Deployment) of roughly twenty projects. After a steep first learning curve and the initial investment of time and effort in the deployment projects, Octopus Deploy has saved us an uncountable number of hours in the past eight years. In all my career, I have seldom encountered such a versatile, powerful, and well-engineered software product. Support is also very responsive.
  • A wonderful time saver
  • Enabling self-service to non-technical product managers
  • Reliable weekly deployments of almost twenty of our (on-line) projects
  • I honestly can't think of something that they could do better
Octopus Deploy fits in any scenario you could think of. There is literally nothing it can't do in terms of the intricacy of deployment logic.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Octopus Deploy is used within our organization to provide continuous deployment to the development environment with manual gates for production deployment. Octopus Deploy is able to handle any environment or application, from very old legacy applications deployed to Windows Scheduled Tasks all the way to cloud-native function and service applications.
  • Octopus Deploy is versatile, if you can dream it you can do it!
  • Octopus Deploy is very user-friendly; from the deployment plan to error reporting, I've always felt in control.
  • Octopus Deploy has a generous free plan so you can easily try before you buy.
  • Acquiring an instance to run on can take a long time, especially a Linux instance
  • Containers are recommended but extremely slow
Octopus Deploy is a fantastic product. It shines particularly well in deployments, as the name would indicate. Our use case is for deployment and post-deployment automated usability testing, and the process steps provide a very clear mechanism to configure the runs. We have been able to deploy to machines of all kinds and operating systems, to jobs, and FaaS, all without too much effort or team stress. If you're just starting out with a deployment service or you're a veteran, Octopus Deploy is well worth investigating.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Octopus Deploy to deploy software across the whole estate and to ensure version control is adhered. Octopus has been great in allowing us to expand across the world and has become an important tool in our product cycle. It's a shame that their change in pricing structure for their cloud service is now pricing us out of continuing to use the service long term.
  • Multiple deployments
  • Version control
  • Pricing structure
  • UI is clunky when you have multiple sites in your infrastructure
  • If deploying to single points in 1 area there's no way to represent this is the case and just shows as if everything was deployed to
I think for any business having to manage custom software at multiple endpoints there's not really anything better. It's just the new pricing model is pretty extreme and will price out any small to medium enterprises from their service. I love the product even with all the UI issues but yeah currently having trouble recommending it because the cost to service is now out of control.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Before we used Octopus Deploy, we used to deploy our websites to our servers manually. This was a time consuming, error prone process. Many late evenings were spent in the office purely for website deployments. <br><br>We moved our deployment process into Octopus Deploy, automated and standardized every step, and have scaled the same process out to more websites as we've worked on more projects. We're even able to schedule the deployments so they can happen after hours without someone needing to work late.
  • Reliable
  • Intuitive interface
  • Works with lots of technologies
  • Config as code is still new, some missing features
  • Mobile view of the dashboard isn't great in places
  • A way to bulk clean up old package versions would be nice
Octopus Deploy has been able to do everything we've set out to make it do. Most of the time there are either built-in or community made step templates, but we've also authored a handful of our own. I have used it for deploying to Windows servers, Linux servers, and Docker containers in Azure. We've predominantly deployed applications written in dotnet and JavaScript.
Stefano Altieri | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We've been using Octopus to deploy our products to multiple environments customers and countries.
  • Integrating with Team City
  • Managing multiple environments
  • Custom scripts and variable management
  • Disk space management can be tricky to use and it's not set up by default
Octopus starts being useful the first time you ever deploy but quickly becomes vital as soon as you start versioning or going to production. It's sure some work to set up but definitely worth it. The only time when we don't use it of for disposable PoCs.
Jason Brown | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Octopus Deploy is helping to solve bottlenecks in getting code changes out to our Cloud Environments, as well as helping us automate our DevOps Tooling around database housekeeping, environment automation and general DevOps. The granular permissions model lets us empower developers without handing them the keys to the entire cloud castle, and the detailed auditing gives us the agility we need with confidence we can trace problems back to their source.<br><br>We're also planning for a small number of quirky use cases where the polling tentacle forms a useful bridge between PaaS out in the cloud and disparate services running behind NATs and Firewalls.
  • Separating out environments, letting us create immutable artifacts which we promote from dev to staging to prod
  • Bypassing tricky firewall configs by deploying polling tentacles inside the firewall
  • Automating quirky or custom devops scenarios with relative ease
  • A build of Tentacle for the M1 Mac (so I can test against my local machine)
  • A full Python API wrapper
It's a brilliant deployment engine on the infrastructure side of a build pipeline. You _can_ shift it further left, but it is better used once your CI server has generated artifacts
September 09, 2022

Useful Automation tool

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it for creating automating release deployments. It has very intuitive User Interface which makes it easy for less technical user like business personnel use. It has a number of plugins to support most of the devops tools to integrate with. What I personally love about Octopus Deploy is its proactive support. We post our queries, issues or requirement via email and they almost respond within hour.
  • UI
  • Release deployment
  • Dashboard for reporting
Octopus Deploy is specifically suited if you have a very specific requirement for your release pipeline, it gives the option to create a runbook too where you can have steps that need to run after deployment step is run successfully. It also provides tenants option, if you want to deploy same application with different vendor with minor changes.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
CI/CD Pipeline is an essential component for DevOps practice and the overall Software Delivery Life Cycle. We use Octopus Deploy in the Continuous Deployment part in our CI/CD pipeline. It helps us deploy code changes quickly and reliably.
  • Fetch artifacts.
  • Deploy to AWS environment.
  • Deploy to Docker Container Clusters.
  • Deploy to static website infrastructure like S3 and CloudFront.
  • Octopus should have an easy to use IaC.
Ocotpus Deploy is good where the CI server doesn't have a deploy functionality.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We primarily use Octopus Deploy to manage and push [the] deployment of our .Net (legacy) and .Net (core) applications. We also use it to automate tasks beyond code deployment. We have additionally begun integration with Kubernetes.
  • .Net Code deployment
  • Distributed Powershell scripting
  • Config management
  • Better Linux/*Nix support
- Octopus Deploy has been a real time-saver for deploying of .Net (legacy) and .Net (core) applications. We have integrated ("Fed") it with Jenkins and TFS, allowing seamless SDLC from developer repo to production deployment.
- We have also used it to avoid "touching" servers for routine Powershell-automated tasks.
Norman Quates | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Octopus Deploy is used in our Information Technology department to automate the deployment of more than 60 applications, both internal and public-facing. Octopus Deploy allows us to be more consistent with how applications are deployed to four different lifecycle environments (Dev, QA, Stage, and Production). It allows us to have an easy fallback strategy if an application makes it to one of the environments and has an issue. It allows us to securely store sensitive information for these deploys (passwords, connection strings, keys, etc.) as opposed to saving these values in source code or environment variables. It allows us to easily and securely maintain the multitude of SSL certificates on the servers where we deploy. It saves the organization time and money by making this step of the dev-ops process more efficient and consistent. The deploys that were done with Octopus Deploy minimize and virtually eliminate downtime and its effect on our users.
  • Virtually zero downtime deployments
  • Flexible deploy processes combined with multiple "variable" strategies
  • Intuitive interface
  • Multitenancy is difficult to set up and maintain variables that change between tenants and environments.
  • The dashboard is slightly confusing when groups of projects contain projects with different lifecycles.
  • Deployment target status gives warnings for drives close to out of space for hard drives that are tiny and designed for special system use. It would be helpful if we could have some kind of override available.
Well suited for organizations with multiple dev-ops personnel and multiple projects to deploy.
Chert Pellett | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
At a previous company, someone outside of the company recommended Octopus Deploy (and Team City), and I recommended that to my manager. However, they decided to go with TFS, in spite of the huge cost, partially because they had credits with Microsoft that they could use to configure it. The Microsoft person didn't help much. We ended up with a horrible mess that was all broken in terms of the configuration - they could turn off someone's access, but the person could turn it back on, people could do things they shouldn't be able to do, permissions were hard to figure out, configuration to get it to build and deploy was painful, overall it was a disaster. Fast Forward, I started at my current company, and they used Team City and Octopus Deploy already (on Prem install of both). This worked out fantastic. We deployed eight machines at once. It was easy to get the deployments configured, super simple to set up the variables needed, and very, very easy to see what was deployed where. It took me very little time to spin up a new environment. This is currently being used in the cloud version - [for] which we have a paid license for. Speaking of which, awesome license system! 100% functionality up to 10 deployment targets, then a reasonable price per each.
  • Per Environment Configuration, 5 Stars. Unlike ADO, you can set a var to a specific environment while still having another one apply to everything else.
  • Rapid deployment compared to ADO.
  • Easy to set up a new tentacle. The tentacles (deployment targets) can be upgraded with one click.
  • Easy access control, easier with the stand-alone version (single step), but not bad with the cloud. Just add a member (invite), wait for them to accept, and then add them to the team you want. Create whatever teams with whatever permissions you need.
  • Support - An example: We are in a meeting discussing License costs at 10 Am Central time US. I'm pretty sure of the terms, but they want me to confirm with Octopus. I sent the e-mail [at] about 10:05, I got a response DURING the meeting, about 10 minutes later, with everything we needed. Any time I had an issue, I got a quick response, and they told me what I was doing wrong or how to fix it. Super, super responsive, and they also take your suggestions and improve the product.
  • Runbooks - Clean and easy to do. I have to try to make them work as well in ADO, and well, yeah, I'll take Octopus Deploy any day. Their runbooks have saved us TONS of time, avoided errors, and opened up what I do to everyone else without using my time.
  • At one point, they didn't have runbooks, I suggested it (and I guess others did too), and now they do.
  • I would like to be able to edit a process and then run it without having to do a new build/release. This is something that I've suggested to them, and they are considering implementing. It can be hard to develop the scripts if you have to do a ton of iterations to get them right - At least, if [your] build time is long AND your process is one that you can't deploy the same release over the same release (like one of ours). We are using Octopus Deploy for about eight projects right now.
  • I believe they are working on their ISO 27001 certification and don't have it yet. This is something that CSG mandates to keep things secure.
If you have an application that deploys to a website, this works quite well. (Just don't have more than one tentacle running on the same machine and deploying websites there - there isn't any sensible reason to do that anyway - but we had it set up that way for a while since changing that it worked perfectly. If you need to deploy a Windows application to a bunch of machines, this is awesome, you can add a machine in a few minutes, and it is done. You can easily see all the machines that it is deploying to; they run in parallel, so that is great. One where it might be bad [is] when I worked at Robot Entertainment, we needed to deploy to 25,000 machines at once. Based on the pricing model, this would be bad, plus I'm not sure how well it would handle easily figuring out what was deploying and where. In our case, I took a program that was started for that and rewrote it to deploy to all the machines at once - so we rolled our own. However, it was a very specific use case that isn't likely you would need unless you were developing a League of Legends type app.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Octopus Deploy in IT to facilitate our CI/CD environment and structure. Octopus Deploy is used to define the environment and tenant-specific variables which are used for substitution in our config files as part of our deployment process. It allows us to, upon build completion, push new builds to all of our respective environments and not have to be concerned with environment variables or any manual deployment-related tasks. It's really an awesome piece of software that I'm not sure I've ever experienced a problem with, to be honest.
  • Variable definition and substitution.
  • Configurable deployment processes.
  • Automated deployments.
  • Deployment logging.
  • Sometimes it can become overwhelmed by parallel deployments.
Well suited to development environments utilizing multiple branches with multiple releases. Teams can target specific release branches, which can be configured to trigger builds and Octopus deploys. Allows QAs to promote successful builds to higher environments and has permissions to limit who has the ability to promote.
Siddharth Shettigar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Octopus Deploy has been immensely helpful in helping reduce the 'Mean Lead Time for changes' and increase deployment frequency in our cloud environment. We use it to seamlessly push out new releases in our hybrid public-private cloud infrastructure. The runbooks are super helpful for orchestrating recurring maintenance tasks. Training new team members is a breeze as the UI is mostly intuitive.
  • Granular control over tenants for deployments using tags.
  • UI makes it easy to train and onboard new team members.
  • API documentation is great.
  • We have not run into any limitations yet. Perhaps our use case is very simple.
[Octupus Deploy] is well suited to seamlessly manage a large number of tenants across multiple cloud environments from one interface. It is great for multi-step deployment orchestration. Additionally, great documentation and informative webinars hosted by the team help provide further information on how to leverage this awesome tool. Perhaps it is overkill if you are hosting in a one-cloud environment or have a small number of tenants.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Octopus Deploy is used for Devops team to deliver applications to different environments across the company and for customers. Octopus Deploy allows us to have an organization by projects and environments and having tenants configurations. Managing variables across all the projects and separate by environments is a nice of feature. Availability to create our own step templates for any need that we have for deployments.
  • Create you own step templates
  • API that supports any operation
  • Good support and community
  • Variables management
  • Audit management
  • API key permissions not attached to user
Octopus is good for companies with multiple environments and projects. Allowing you to have a good segregation on users, environments and releases.

It is hard to manage in scenarios that need to be generated programatically from scratch because Octopus requires an agent installed and registered in Octopus server before deployments.

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Octopus Deploy as a deployment orchestration solution that allows us to easily and succinctly deploy critical corporate and scientific software in a reliable, repeatable, and automated way. it is being used by the software development team of [the] information technology services department to deliver software for the entire organization. It solves the problem of automated and reliable deployment orchestration for the organization and is an integral part of our process.
  • Simple and well thought out product
  • Feature rich
  • Excellent support and documentation
  • Reliable
  • Robust
  • In the past has been somewhat .net focused but that has been changing in recent times
  • Would be great if community licenses for NFP organizations were perpetual - but in saying that I appreciate that Octopus does provide my organization with a community [license]. Not all organisations do
  • I can’t think of any other
Octopus Deploy is a well though [the] solution to the deployment orchestration problem. It is a reliable and robust solution that is relatively simple to understand. [Its] UI is friendly and easy to use, The support and documentation [are] excellent and the product seems to fit into any organization’s process very well and with less effort than other products in this space. I actually find it a pleasure to work with [every day] and I am glad to have it as an integral part of our process.
Jeffrey Staw | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Octopus Deploy is being used by our DevOps group to automate the deployment of code. It's used for all automated deployments, which account for almost all of the total deployments, in the web development group. We do not currently employ Octopus Deploy to manage and deploy non-web-developed applications, however, it is used to manage items like certs and password resets.
  • Automation of deployments
  • Managing pipeline activities
  • Requiring a consistency of process
  • Improved reporting
  • Additional out of the box integrations that work really really well.
  • Onboarding and ramp-up may benefit from some AI, so it does not take so much experience to be an "expert."
Octopus Deploy is a tool that we rely on to make our DevOps shop and Development team run smoothly on a daily basis. When looking to streamline the deployment process and pipeline, and when looking to add process, Octopus Deploy is a tool to help make that happen in a structured way.
Anthony Aziz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We aim to have a light-weight and flexible deploy pipeline since we are a small startup. Octopus gives us a good deployment tool that isn't overly complicated. We use it to manage our deployment for all of our products. These include ASP.Net deployed to AWS EC2 hosts, Angular webapp deployed to EC2 hosts, published installers for desktop apps, and scripts to deploy new versions of ECS hosts. (Our builds are handled by Team City which integrates with Octopus nicely)
  • Integrates well with various platforms
  • Allows customization of deployment process, manual deploys, and redeploys
  • Allows flexible deployment process definition and scripting
  • UI is very fluffy and padded. It looks pretty but it could benefit from a more compact, information-focused design
  • Deployment process options are not always laid out in an intuitive manner. Choosing which steps to exclude, which environments or targets to deploy to, etc., is not immediately clear
  • Lack of useful reports and metrics for tracking active deployments and historical data
  • The ability to manage different stages and define a workflow is very useful for ops troubleshooting as well as deployment. You can see which version each environment has for each project, and promote or redeploy versions.
  • You can view deployment logs and dig deep into problems or long deployment steps.
  • Finding old releases can be a pain, and there isn't a good way to compare releases.
  • It does not really lend itself well to viewing what the content of a release is further than the version number. Ideally, you would be able to tie a deployment to the builds from the build server as well as specific commits from source control.
Hanna Bedoya | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Software that is ideal to carry out the implementation of software or applications in development, so our company has decided to implement it as part of the software that can facilitate the work of developers in their department, since it has a very simple and easy to use, plus guarantees that everything that is implemented is what is really shown, this way you save time, avoid mistakes and work is much more effective.
  • Easy to use because it has a very simple and understandable interface.
  • It offers different languages ​​as well as several operating systems.
  • Allows it to be implemented on own or third-party servers.
  • Your support team is extremely attentive.
  • Provides a very user-friendly documentation as it is easy to understand.
  • The implementations can be carried out in an automated way thanks to the fact that it allows you to configure if you want to do it immediately or in the future.
  • Its price can be high according to where you want to implement the applications.
  • Your configuration may take some time so it is necessary to have a good knowledge in this field otherwise it will take more time than expected.
  • Their integrations although they are very advantageous can be somewhat complicated.
It allows the work to carry out the implementations manually, much faster because it is carried out in an automated way, which is a great time saver. It gives the development team the option of choosing where they want to carry out the implementations of their applications according to their need or comfort, either in virtual form (in the cloud) or physically. The implementations carried out are always secure, however, if you want to carry out such implementations on your own server, the cost is much higher.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Octopus Deploy is an interesting product that interacts with Chef and other programs to create group of servers in what is termed as 'tenants' which allows you to take specific actions on a particular subset of servers that are grouped by function or role. It can be used to deploy simple configuration changes or single scripts as well as laying down entirely new code. This has helped our company grow at scale without being overwhelmed with the sheer number of servers that we must maintain as we grow.
  • Grouping of servers into tennants allows for easy classification of systems into roles or server types.
  • The application allows for simple or complex configurations to be deployed depending on the need.
  • I really enjoy the ability to run a new build to a single group of servers or have the same installation run on multiple groups depending on the need.
  • Patches or new builds can be ran adhoc or scheduled for a future time allowing for scheduled deployments to be pushed with minimal effort.
  • The initial setup and configuration can be a bit daunting.
  • There is a bit of a learning curve to learning how to use Octopus effectively, but once that learning is done it becomes simple to use.
Being able to use tenants allowing you to take specific actions on a particular subset of servers that are grouped by function or role is a huge plus. It is well suited to deploying simple configuration changes or single scripts as well as laying down entirely new code. It has helped our company grow at scale without being overwhelmed with the sheer number of servers that we must maintain as we grow and allows us to maintain hundreds of servers in 3 different locations with little user interaction.
Tim Hardy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Octopus Deploy to handle deployment of about eight different applications across Development, User Acceptance Testing, and Production environments. Octopus ensures that we have consistent, repeatable results in our deployments through the automation it provides to the deployment process. By using Octopus, we can be confident that the same deployment package that we have been testing in our DEV environment is exactly what gets deployed to our UAT environment, and finally our PROD environment.
  • Octopus integrates nicely with TeamCity, our build server.
  • Octopus uses the same deployment packages across environments and makes it easy to track their progress across those environments.
  • Octopus makes it easy to handle configuration across environments which is usually a particularly difficult task.
  • I would like to see Octopus handle branches as a first class citizen better. It certainly has branch support, but it is not as smooth or as intuitive as I would like it to be. I would like it to be easier to pick the branch of a repo I want to deploy and where I want to deploy it.
  • I think Octopus could do more to help the management of Azure deployments. The ability to swap slots in Azure would be a welcome feature.
  • Some integration points with TeamCity could be improved. It's not easy to spot the version number/name of a build package in Octopus and track it against the version displayed in TeamCity. It's possible, but not at all easy.
Any software shop that deploys multiple applications across multiple environments can benefit from Octopus Deploy. If you already have a custom deployment framework in place, Octopus might not offer anything new for you. It's also noteworthy that the free version of Octopus offers a great deal of functionality. We are still using the free version and are just now possibly needing to move to a paid version.
Sam Rueby (MCSA) | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Octopus Deploy is used by our department to facilitate the deployment of many applications to many servers. Software deployment is difficult and humans make mistakes. Octopus Deploy makes it very easy to deploy applications to one or several servers with the click of a button. It has allowed us to deploy faster, more consistently, with fewer mistakes and less downtime.
  • Many different platforms, languages, and operating systems are supported. You can deploy to your own server or the cloud. You can deploy to Windows, Linux, etc.
  • Many different "step templates" are included, which make it very easy to deploy what you want, how you want. Such as deploying over SSH, FTP, etc.
  • Support is very responsive and personable. You won't just be talking to a robot or a script. They will either solve your problem or understand it enough to solve it in a future release.
  • Their documentation is well thought-out and very helpful. I have found very few missing pieces.
  • The pricing model is a bit strange. You can run Octopus Deploy yourself on your own server, or use their cloud service. Surprisingly, the cloud service can easily be less expensive. With self-hosting, pricing doesn't become less expensive with more deployment targets. Instead, it becomes more expensive.
  • There are a few features they're aware of, that are not released yet, that would be huge improvements to the software. Such as "Spaces", which allows you to group projects/deployment targets/users. Otherwise at the moment, as you add more projects and infrastructure, the deployment portal quickly becomes cluttered.
  • Payment was more difficult than expected. The company is located in Australia. Mailing a check is very slow from the US.
Octopus Deploy is well suited when you have more than a handful or servers or more than a handful of projects. You don't want developers publishing from Visual Studio. Octopus Deploy makes it easy to deploy correctly every time.
Eric Huggins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As the DevOps Manager for a Microsoft Gold Partner I configure Continuous Integration Pipelines using Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and Octopus Deploy. Our Development and Business Intelligence Teams use Octopus Deploy to push custom applications and database changes to Azure IAAS and On-Premises Virtual environments. VSTS manages the CI pipelines while Octopus Deploy manages the granular details of the IIS and SQL Server deployment configurations. Octopus Deploy ensures we have consistent and reliable application deployments across Dev, Test, and Production environments.
  • Octopus Deploy is a deployment management tool and brings to the table detailed configuration options for deployments not generally or readily available from Continuous Integration platforms such as VSTS or TeamCity.
  • Octopus Deploy provides direct access to IIS App Pools, App Pool Permissions, Directory locations and more. Options are clearly displayed in the interface as opposed to searching out arcane switch statements for command line arguments or complex batch statements used with platforms focused on skills other than deployment tooling.
  • Octopus Deploy works extremely well in conjunction with RedGate's ReadyRoll database lifecyle management tool with the same level of configuration capabilities for RedGate's database deployment configuration as for other deployment targets.
  • Octopus Deploy agents are generally easy to configure and record a plethora of information about the deployment process and any errors in the deployment process itself.
  • Octopus Deploy automatically generates encrypted connections between the Octopus Deploy server and Tentacles ensuring communication between Octopus Deploy and target machines is secure by default. I give customers Octopus Deploy documentation as the first step to allaying security concerns and often find no further discussions are required.
  • I prefer VSTS Agent's https "Pull" configuration to Octopus Deploy's "Push". Because VSTS remote agents pull information from Visual Studio Team Services via https, no firewall rules are required when deploying the agents. Octopus Deploy agents typically are configured to be polled from the central Octopus Deploy server and must have firewall rules configured to allow conversations.
  • Octopus Deploy's Pipeline configuration can get a bit complex and is sometimes less than intuitive when configuring deployments across multiple environments. While it is possible to use variables to simplify configurations, examples are not readily available and the process for configuring and using variables is not as easy to understand as I would like.
I would prefer to use a dedicated deployment tool in CI Pipelines whenever possible. I would have rated Octopus Deploy a 10 except for the recent removal of the free Community Edition product. While understandable, the added cost for small individual customer projects may now be too high to continue using Octopus Deploy on every project. If it were not for the retirement of the Community Edition Octopus Deploy would be a part of all deployment processes and pipelines.
Ramendra Sahu | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Octopus Deploy is used as the primary tool for automated deployment for a host of applications built using as diverse applications as Microsoft BizTalk, Node.js, and SOA based applications. The automated deployments using Octopus has resulted in the quicker delivery of applications to Prod environments and eliminates the tasks that used to be done manually and were error-prone. This has helped the team focus on building better software and not worry about pushing the changes to Test or Production.
  • Deployments are not more error-prone because there is no manual intervention. There had been cases in the past where a thing or two miss would cause a lot of heartburn during Prod release and we had to keep the whole herd together until everything was sorted out. With Octopus Deploy we can test the release with the repeat-ability and chances of running into issues has been minimized a lot.
  • Octopus Deploy works really well with the whole stack of Microsoft Products. It was one of the 1st 3rd party tools for Continuous Deployment focused on MS products when it was initially released. Over time, however, it has matured and supports nearly every technology under the sun for implementing automated deployments.
  • More frequent and parallel deployments. This is where Octopus really shines. This ensures that the QA team is constantly engaged and not waiting for the Dev team as releases are promoted to Test environments faster and ultimately helps to move new features/bug fixes to Prod faster thereby delivering tremendous business value and puts us in a good light in front of our consumers.
  • The tool has a very nice GUI and supports scripting in Powershell, C#, Bash, F#. The Octopus user community has developed close to 80 templates that can be used readily. Octopus works as seamlessly on the Cloud as it works on premises. It has first-class support for both AWS and Azure.
  • Support for non-Microsoft applications needs to be improved to bring it on par with other comparable automation tools.
  • It doesn't yet provide integration options with other IT management tools like JIRA and HP Support to implement continuous delivery and true DevOps processes.
  • Support for AWS/Azure has been included very recently and it's not still very mature and feature rich and is expected to improve further in upcoming releases.
Octopus Deploy is one of the best options you've got if you are a Microsoft shop. It works seamlessly and is very easy to use and set up. The low cost of the product makes it an attractive option for organizations implementing Release automation processes. If you are an organization working with open source technologies and not much invested in Microsoft products it makes sense to look at alternatives out there which are great.
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