Octopus Deploy - a great deployment automation tool with an awesome free plan and extensive integrations
February 25, 2019

Octopus Deploy - a great deployment automation tool with an awesome free plan and extensive integrations

Tim Hardy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Octopus Deploy

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 automated deployment process will save your company a ton of money on testing and bugs. When you don't automate your deployments, you can't be certain that what you are moving between environments is the exact same code with the same or appropriate configuration. What you tested might not be what got deployed.
  • We've saved a lot of money using Octopus over the mostly manual process we were using before. We've removed a lot of the errors that come from manual, human intervention.
  • Octopus has also allowed us to accomplish more with fewer people. It is easy to bring new people up to speed on the deployment process, and we can be confident of success after very little training.
TeamCity is focused more on the build process. It's deployment capabilities are weak compared to Octopus. Bamboo is a proper competitor, but it is far more costly for our needs. The free version of Octopus has proven incredibly competent and sufficient for our needs, and Bamboo didn't have anything comparable price-wise when we had to make our decision.
I've never thought I needed Octopus to be any faster than it is. The slow parts are the parts that are always slow across these frameworks - acquiring the build package, deploying the build package, etc. File IO across machines is the only thing that slows Octopus down. The UX is plenty fast for our needs.
Integration is probably one of the strongest reasons to go with Octopus Deploy for your deployment automation. It integrates with TeamCity, Bamboo, Jenkins, AppVeyor, Bitbucket, Slack. It'll probably handle anything you need it to integrate with. The three we use the most are TeamCity, Bitbucket, and Slack. We haven't needed anything not already provided.
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.