Azure DevOps Services vs. Mattermost

ADO is well suited for the visibility of day-to-day tasks and responsibilities as well as things such as Features, user stories, etc. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any scenario where it might not be well suited, as you can customize ADO to your liking to a degree.

Mattermost is definitely appropriate for a growing company with team members spread out across the u.s. and Canada. It’s given me the ability to have access to anyone with the information I need or the ability to develop friendships, working relationships with people I otherwise wouldn’t have access to

Incentivized

• Flexible Requirements Hierarchy Management: AZDO makes it easy to track items such as features or epics as a flat list, or as a hierarchy in which you can track the parent-child relationship.
• Fast Data Entry: AZDO was designed to facilitate quick data entry to capture work items quickly, while still enabling detailed capture of acceptance criteria and item properties.
• Excel Integration: AZDO stands out for its integration with MS Excel, which enables quick updates for bulk items.

Incentivized

• Easy intergration to our main CRM (Monday.com)
• I'm not techy myself but I have seen a lot of our previous integrations in Slack transferred over to Mattermost so that's fun
• The desktop and phone app (android) works well enough. I haven't tried it on the Apple ecosystem yet.

Incentivized

• Need to make the changes so that it doesn't occupy most of the CPU utilization and memory
• Execution of Bulky SQl Queries leads to either the SQl being out of exception or the VS being unresponsive
• Integration with Microsoft products is easy, but with non-Microsoft products it is more difficult, and you have to make a lot of configuration changes to integrate
• With every upgrade of the Visual Studio, like from VS 2010 to VS 2013 , we need to upgrade our hardware/machine, as the VS hardware requirement also increases
• If code is getting compiled in one visual studio, like in VS 2010, that the same code could possibly give an error when compiled in VS 2013, due to certain changes in keyword, data format, etc., with the VS upgrade

Incentivized

• Basic features like custom status, collapsed reply threads are JUST rolling out - kind of slow for a workplace chat app.
• I don't really get the idea of Playbooks and Boards - there are better, dedicated tools for stuff like this and it's not so easy to turn off.

Incentivized

I don't think our organization will stray from using VSTS/TFS as we are now looking to upgrade to the 2012 version. Since our business is software development and we want to meet the requirements of CMMI to deliver consistent and high quality software, this SDLC management tool is here to stay. In addition, our company uses a lot of Microsoft products, such as Office 365, Asp.net, etc, and since VSTS/TFS has proved itself invaluable to our own processes and is within the Microsoft family of products, we will continue to use VSTS/TFS for a long, long time.

Incentivized

Mattermost works perfectly within our company as a way to communicate seamlessly. I have had no issues with the product and continue to use it often while on and off site. The mobile app allows me to continue to communicate with my team even when I don't have my laptop with me.

Incentivized

Azure DevOps is a powerful, complex cloud application. As such there are a number of things it does great and something where there is room for improvement. One of those areas would be in usability. In my opinion it relies too much on search. There is no easy way to view all projects or to group them in a logical way. You need to search for everything.

Incentivized

It's an extremely easy to use software, and I would recommend it to every company that is growing. I think they could improve their notification system, as it gets a little spammy sometimes and important notifications get lost. Also needs to improve the number of private chats that you are allowed to create.

Incentivized

When we've had issues, both Microsoft support and the user community have been very responsive. DevOps has an active developer community and frankly, you can find most of your questions already asked and answered there. Microsoft also does a better job than most software vendors I've worked with creating detailed and frequently updated documentation.

Incentivized

We have not had to contact support for Mattermost ever. All that we have needed has been available in the documentation or website. One of our DevOps team members set it up in a couple of hours. The whole team was using Mattermost that same day. No support needed.

Incentivized

Was not part of the process.

Incentivized

This went as expected. No surprises or major hurdles.

Incentivized

Jira is fantastic for project management and customer facing portal. It is not good for pure development (no integration with Git, pipeline management, automated testing features). If DevOps were to integrate and adopt the project features of Jira as well as the customer facing interfaces, I feel it would be a complete project management system.

Incentivized

Unlike Slack and Discord, Mattermost is self-hosted and focused on security. I used Discord before for community management and much simpler and less secure operations. Slack is great, but the fact that is cloud based takes out a lot of its independence.

Incentivized

• Increased dev team efficiency through more streamlined development processes and task automation.
• Improved quality of software deployments due to better source control, automated testing, and release management options available in DevOps.
• Better collaboration between the dev team, business analysts, and agile project managers.

Incentivized

• The platform is adaptive to storage data center outages in case our cloud storage provider goes away, Mattermost still works with our local database. However, files couldn't be shared. We can switch storage to local temporarily; that's a benefit. Later it all syncs up to main storage.
• When our team switched to Mattermost from paid solutions, we had much savings and access to unlimited past messages and storage quota (we use our cloud storage provider)
• We have better visibility of our tools and other products running adjacent to Mattermost due to integration capability. We use it for notifications/ updates sent from other products.

Incentivized