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Perforce Helix Core

Perforce Helix Core

Overview

What is Perforce Helix Core?

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…

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Users have adopted various revision control packages like Perforce, Git, and SVN to develop and store data independently. Perforce serves …
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Great Once It Is Set up

10 out of 10
March 14, 2020
Incentivized
Each lab site has its own set of developers that operates independently but we are moving towards more collaboration and sharing software …
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Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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What is Perforce Helix Core?

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).…

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

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

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Product Details

What is Perforce Helix Core?

Perforce Helix Core is a version control system for teams who need to accelerate innovation at scale. It is used to store and track changes to digital assets, from source code to binary to IPs, and connects teams.

Perforce Helix Core Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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 company's acquisition of Seapine in October 2016. Perforce integrated the software with its Helix ALM product. Surround SCM integrates with Perforce's Helix ALM to help manage code, along with requirements, tests, and issues.

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.6.

The most common users of Perforce Helix Core are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Reviews and Ratings

(32)

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 adopted various revision control packages like Perforce, Git, and SVN to develop and store data independently. Perforce serves as the backbone of version control for builds, ensuring everyone has the latest content and code. It is easy to get started with Perforce, allowing users to pull the files they want. However, it can be challenging to perform more complex tasks like branching and integrating. Nevertheless, Perforce supports a rich GUI for most tasks and a command-line interface for automated or advanced tasks, making it suitable for users with varying technical proficiency.

Perforce is accessible globally and externally to product licensees, supporting all major features like branching, shelving, and p4web. The visual client of Perforce is user-friendly, presenting the directory structure conveniently and consistently across platforms. Its merge optimization feature is highly useful for day-to-day operations, providing efficient code merging capabilities. This makes Perforce ideal for agile development, big data services, and marketing materials across thousands of automotive dealerships.

Moreover, Perforce is scalable and suitable for small to enterprise-level projects. It integrates well within a .Net environment and is leveraged by several departments to track changes in software, documentation, and assets, providing quick access to change history and approvals. In industries like healthcare, Perforce Helix Core serves as the source control management system of choice for corporate products, internal applications, custom code, and configurations. Beyond version control purposes, Perforce is also used for collaboration and sharing software between independent developer groups within and across different lab sites. In addition to its version control capabilities, Perforce ensures the integrity of code bases by providing backup and revision control features.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-14 of 14)
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Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Intelligent integration between branches.
  • Simple CLI for scripting.
  • Easy to use web portal for code reviews.
  • Options for integrating changes between classic depots and graph depots (Helix4Git).
  • Provide REST APIs for fetching or manipulating data in Helix Core (e.g. Jobs, changelist queries, etc.).
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Perforce is fast.
  • It is easy to use.
  • It is easy to administer.
  • There is nothing that can beat it when it comes to flexibility.
  • Support is top-notch.
  • Perforce (the company) needs to market itself better.
  • While their Support is the best there is, account management could be better.
  • They could be better about notifying users of new features.
September 30, 2019

Great Code Version Control

Kaleb-John Loo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Merge algorithm is smart and utilizing the visual interface to do merges makes them easier to digest.
  • Easy to set up on multiple platforms and architectures and is well supported on all of them.
  • Visual interface has many tools and customization options that help to optimize and personalize workflow.
  • Updating Perforce is somewhat challenging, especially on Linux Systems.
  • Sometimes settings disappear.
  • In order to customize the font settings, you must restart the visual client.
  • Perforce could display its progress in a clearer way.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • The Perforce visual client makes it easy to track changelists and file history
  • Very stable with high performance
  • Diff tool makes identifying code changes a snap
  • Works nicely with Visual Studio via plugin
  • Performing integrations is somewhat confusing for new users
  • Managing multiple workspaces can get difficult
  • Backing out changes can be problematic if split across multiple changelists
Matt King | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • It's been incredibly reliable. I can't think of a single bug I've run into in five years.
  • Helpful integration APIs that allow me to use it with other apps.
  • Its Diff tools are easy to work with and helpful.
  • The UI can be hard to navigate for people new to the product.
  • It could do with some simplification in areas such as connecting to servers, etc.
  • UI seems dated.
Filip Witkowski | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Perforce Visual tool (P4V) is very extensive and pretty well organized. Perforce has a built in history tool.
  • Very good history view: you can see when your code was last changed, committed, and by whom.
  • You can add a lot of columns and history view, and sort a file by any of the columns.
  • I was having a hard time learning it. Even if you are an experienced developer, there is some learning curve.
  • Can be slow when working with large data sets at once.
  • When working on multiple workspaces on the same machine, Perforce can make it difficult not to mess up the code.
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
  • As new tools like Git enter the market, enterprise solutions like Perforce are often seen as rigid and overly complex.
  • Occasionally, the branching system in Perforce seems to fail to retain proper branching history, making it difficult to track the original source of changes if they were initiated across multiple branching operations.
  • When a change made has inadvertently caused side effects, it can be necessary to back out code changes. This process is difficult to do when the changes needing back-out are spread across multiple changelists for the same set of files. It can be even more difficult if any of those changelists contain files that should not be backed out, though this latter point partly indicates a flaw in the developer's process.
Josh Markiewicz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Perforce handles code exceptionally fast and provides a deep toolset. The ability to quickly see differences via the revision history, revision graph, and time lapse view are invaluable for tracing differences over time and across branches/integrations.
  • Perforce does a decent job of maintaining our security policies across different areas of code. We can block access to various branches and directory structures using the various administration tools available. This ensures the right people have the right access at the right time. We can also temporarily disable check in access and lock down a source tree when necessary.
  • The P4 client, P4V, is a clean and intuitive tool. There are multiple ways of viewing the depot with powerful search commands and easy access to the more advanced P4 concepts all from within the GUI. Shelving, merging, integrating, and syncing are all easy to do.
  • P4V, in the interest of stability, seems to have taken a few steps back in its ability to perform asynchronous operations. Once upon a time I was able to sync and perform resolves on code at the same time and now it seems to wait for all operations and does everything much more serially.
  • P4VS, the integration with Microsoft Visual Studio, is still fairly new to the product suite. We have very complicated VS projects and it can take some time for P4VS to sync its status with the P4 server. Additionally, there are still a few rough edges in its features, such as the limited history dialog and some crash/instability issues when an automated checkout of file about to be edited doesn't get a response from the server quickly. It is still good to see that they wrote their own tool rather than stick with the antiquated SCC APIs offered by Microsoft.
  • If I was being nit picky, I would say it would be nice for P4 to consider integrating more "content" versioning tools for various binary formats. There is plenty "non text" content to be version controlled, and to be able to diff versions right inside P4 would be invaluable.
  • Working across multiple workspaces on the same machine can sometimes be difficult when various P4 products are used at the same time (say P4VS, P4V, P4EXP). It would be nice if workspace switching, the P4 env variables, and the various P4.ini settings were easier to reconcile and visualize from within the various client tools.
  • Some really advanced/complicated client specs (using ... and * for example) can slow down integrating and other P4V operations.
  • While I haven't experienced this directly, it is my understanding that syncing large data across large distances can be slow and that the various proxy tools could use improvement. I do know that various switches/options have been exposed to make various tasks require less data transfer to the client to improve this.
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Great command line support.
  • Great compare text files tool.
  • Have to check out code before modifying, preventing from accidentally modification.
  • UI tool is not intuitive.
  • Hard to manage multiple branches.
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Perforce has a feature rich GUI making it somewhat easy to find files, and historical changes, as well as utility features to better visualize changes over time.
  • The concept of change lists, client specs, and branches is unique to a large extent, and adds value in high customization for each user.
  • Perforce is well supported, and has plenty of information on use both officially, and through other user experience as documented on the web.
  • 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.
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