Octopus Deploy: a solution to all of your software deployment problems.
January 02, 2019
Octopus Deploy: a solution to all of your software deployment problems.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Octopus Deploy
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.
- We now deploy a lot more frequently.
- The number of mistakes while deploying has gone down significantly.
- Because it is now much easier to deploy, we have multiple environments for testing and QA: Testing, Staging, and Production.
- Deploying to new servers is simple and painless.
- Customers are happier to provide Octopus Deployment access than they are to give Remote Desktop access.
There aren't really any competitors in the land of ASP.NET. Deployment is too ad-hoc. Other tools exist that have massive downsides, like Web Deploy. Most aren't even supported anymore. You could argue that containers (Docker) are a competitor, but containers cannot be used for everything and solve a somewhat different problem. Octopus Deploy is even able to help with containers. To us, Octopus Deploy was really the only really polished solution.