What is Plastic SCM?

Plastic SCM is a full stack version control system that aims to make software configuration easy. It focuses on enabling dev teams get work done by facilitating branching, diffing and merging. The vendor says that for those purposes it provides cross-platform apps and GUIs with:

Branch explorer
Diffing and merging tools (both syntactic and semantic)
On-premises and cloud repo management
Code review
mergebots (last mile DevOps merging automation)

According to the vendor, it is used:

across industries
in enterprise companies with world wide distributed teams
in companies with vendors and contractors embedded in their workflows and tight security requirements and complex deployment setup
among video game studios, big and small, that use Unity, Unreal, Ogre or any of the available popular engines

It can handle big files (over 2 GB), it has lock features to avoid concurrent work on files. It also caters for artists and designers – or anyone working in a centralized why for that matter – by providing them a separate, fully featured app called Gluon: a point and click GUI that abstracts them for the complexity of version control while allowing them to work with devs easily. The vendor says they provide on prem (Team Edition) and Cloud (Cloud Edition) installations and everything in between, with hassle-free implementation and prices in range of 60% less than their main competitors.

Categories & Use Cases

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Jacob James Salzberg View profile

Co-Founder at Abacus (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it as a tool inside Unity. It's great to keep things organized as an alternative to github/gitlab/bitbucket. Moreover, for huge projects with lots of assets, scripts in the range of dozens, code trees ranging 5k+, it's a very reliable and already integrated tool in our workflow.

Pros

Version Control
Organizing Workflow
Transparency

Cons

Interface
Documentation
Learning curve
Unity integration

Most Important Features

Gluon
Cloud Server
Branching
Security
Unity single click usage

Return on Investment

Easy to use
Cheap
Better than git for us
Artists love it

Alternatives Considered

GitHub, Bitbucket and Sourcetree

Other Software Used

Slack, Miro, Sourcetree

Gulam Gaus Warsi View profile

Marketing Specialist in Marketing at Leadbook (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My team uses Plastic SCM for version control, to collaborate our SaaS project within other team members working on the same software. We use it to store our unity projects on cloud. So Plastic SCM helps us to control every branch. Besides the features, it has a nice and friendly GUI.

Pros

Version Control
File Locking
Branch Resolution

Cons

Complex
Could be easier on integrations
Lot of menus

Most Important Features

Version Control
Easy Merging
UI

Return on Investment

Saves time
Processes get less complicated

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are developing a big, distributed product for an aviation giant. So the business is complex and so is the technical implementation. A team of 25 people are working on it. So a distributed collaboration is required for systematic development. Plastic SCM is providing us the same environment which is most suitable for our development requirement. It supports the version control for our project and the branching and merging solution for the continuous and simultaneous development. In this way team is able to leverage the best efficiency.

Pros

Branching
Merging
binary freeze or locking
decentralized behavior
Efficient for large projects as well, really fast and quick
Versioning and controlling the repositories

Cons

No administrative tool, so a lot of manual work need to be done
Quite often the workspace for Plastic SCM disappears and its weird
Its not easy to use initially as it requires a knowledge and some efforts
Its not preferable for the small projects as to set up and use takes a lot of efforts

Most Important Features

Best for distributed systems
It goes very well with the giant repos
Functionality to lock/freeze files/binaries to avoid the merging conflicts and issues
branching and merging
graphical visualization of repos to get better understanding and insights of branching

Return on Investment

Its not good for smaller projects
Its a bit complex to understand at initial stages so requires some effort to learn tool
but if project is big and a lot of people are contributing simultaneously then in that case it multiplies the power of team