Digital.ai Release vs. Octopus Deploy

XL release fits very well when you need cross-team coordination in a release process where you want to coordinate an alpha or beta program with marketing as part of a major release process.

Incentivized

• The ability to manage different stages and define a workflow is very useful for ops troubleshooting as well as deployment. You can see which version each environment has for each project, and promote or redeploy versions.
• You can view deployment logs and dig deep into problems or long deployment steps.
• Finding old releases can be a pain, and there isn't a good way to compare releases.
• It does not really lend itself well to viewing what the content of a release is further than the version number. Ideally, you would be able to tie a deployment to the builds from the build server as well as specific commits from source control.

Incentivized

• Cross-team release workflow control using email, texts, scripts allow our release management to be truly a 360 process.
• XL Release allowing our Jenkins toolchain to control the beginning of release trains which is very powerful.
• XL release allows us to expose the business process flow for anyone to read direct at the source which runs the process instead of a separate vision.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Pagination of data - across tool.
• User Roles Management API can be improved.
• Case insensitive ID's are treated differently making user face login and access issues.
• Dependency on Universal template/custom plugins creation should be reduced.
• Code versioning of templates is very difficult.
• Better error handling.
• Futures Timeout Issues.

Incentivized

• Support for non-Microsoft applications needs to be improved to bring it on par with other comparable automation tools.
• It doesn't yet provide integration options with other IT management tools like JIRA and HP Support to implement continuous delivery and true DevOps processes.
• Support for AWS/Azure has been included very recently and it's not still very mature and feature rich and is expected to improve further in upcoming releases.

Incentivized

Would be a 10 except for the retirement of the free Community Edition.

Incentivized

The tool is easy to use, easy to navigate and learn. Manages releases with proper approvals in a systematic manner. Though it needs minor improvements in terms of pagination (data loading), access management, but, overall the tool helps in increasing productivity and less time for production deployments.

Incentivized

Some functionality feels slightly hidden in the menu system. For example: script modules are in the same menu as packages, where I feel that are not related entities. One is code for the deployment, the other is the thing that you are deploying...

Incentivized

Octopus Deploy is a software that runs very effectively, is easy to use, does not require such a high learning curve, provides the necessary tools to carry out the functions it offers, making it a very flexible software, it also allows that can be configured according to the needs of the user and provides integrations with other very advantageous tools since they are carried out in a very favorable way.

Incentivized

Support is not good at all. To this day, I have to mail my queries and their support site does not log in for me (me alone). But, upon contacting many times, no one helps with a proper response. Though good thing is, I get a proper response over mail too. But, being informative about the tool and not on the issues faced by users outside of the process to get support should also be addressed equally. Which is currently missing in support.

Incentivized

Octopus Deploy support has always been there for us, even when using the free tier, we get responsive hands-on help. We haven't needed to use that level of support since the documentation is clearly written, and help is readily available within the interface itself. Using Octopus Deploy is a truly joyful experience.

Incentivized

Deployment and release management can be done in various ways. But, XL Release or Digita.ai, helps in simplifying the process with predefined plugins, pre-developed security features, etc that help manage and process deployment cycles quicker and in a processed way.

Incentivized

Octopus Deploy was the obvious choice at the time, its strong .net support, robustness, ease of use, and integration into an existing process was a big plus. Also, Octopus Deploy was kind enough to give my organization a not for profit community licence. In addition, the product comes from a local Brisbane based company and it is always good to support local businesses when you can.

Incentivized

• Positive - Faster deployments.
• Positive - Better tracking on progress of each release.
• Negative - Data once goes beyond a limit, pagination and data load take a toll on users.
• Positive - Dashboard can be customizable.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized