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TFS vs Zephyr Enterprise comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 16, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

TFS
Ranking in Test Management Tools
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
99
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (9th)
Zephyr Enterprise
Ranking in Test Management Tools
7th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.6
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Test Management Tools category, the mindshare of TFS is 5.6%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zephyr Enterprise is 5.2%, down from 7.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Test Management Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
TFS5.6%
Zephyr Enterprise5.2%
Other89.2%
Test Management Tools
 

Featured Reviews

PF
Angular C Full Stack Developer at Great American Insurance
Simplified task creation enhances seamless development workflow
We use TFS for our Agile board to handle our sprints, epics, stories, and tasks, tracking how work is progressing. It is also a repository for managing code changes TFS integrates seamlessly with Visual Studio and Azure Cloud, facilitating continuous integration and continuous deployment, which…
JM
Director - Quality Engineering at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Integration with tool streamlines test management but needs better exporting options
I use it for test management within Jira This tool boasts an incredibly user-friendly interface that integrates seamlessly with other Jira tools. I particularly appreciate its intuitive features for designing test plans, creating test cases, and executing test cycles. Some areas for improvement,…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"There are many advantages."
"Record and playback is a good feature."
"TFS, like most Microsoft products, is easy to install and use; the initial setup is very easy, and all you need to know is the basic configurations that need to be applied."
"Test Management is immature for an application lifecycle management tool and it might take a couple more releases and pricing/functionality restructuring."
"Basically, the capacity to construct various products is something I find handy."
"The interface is good with TFS."
"This solution is stable and we have not had any crashes to this point."
"Code annotations and code review is the most valuable feature of this product platform."
"It has integration with test automation tools."
"Zephyr Enterprise is a stable solution."
"At this moment, it is fulfilling our requirements."
"It's very simple to use, which is beneficial, and it has 90% of the basic features you need without having to pay a lot of extra money."
"The solution does its job well."
"Now, we are getting consolidated reports in one place, we have all our metrics and repository together, and this is helpful."
"We use the solution for test case management."
"It has a very intuitive user experience."
 

Cons

"Test case management could be improved."
"As an end-user, I expect the solution's performance to be faster while staying as stable as possible."
"I would like to see better integration between TFS and third-party tools such as Jira."
"The usability of TFS is not that great. Integration from an agile perspective could be improved. Jira is far better in this regard."
"The program and portfolio planning facility can be improved."
"The solution's server for deployment needs to be improved."
"Integration from Visual Studio could be improved."
"Not all of the functionality, which is exposed by the command line interface (tf.exe) is available in the Visual Studio GUI."
"We faced some errors while uploading the test cases."
"The solution is not really stable. Sometimes in the past, some pages wouldn't load due to issues."
"Creating better default varieties of reporting would make the product much better and more popular."
"Additionally, they could improve the daily reporting. It does generate reports, but they are screen based reports."
"The only thing I have missed is an easy way to configure showing the latest execution results of all test cases linked in JIRA (story/epic), thus, receiving the state of a feature."
"We would like support for the agile and behavior-driven development (BDD) approaches."
"It's difficult to export the test cases in Zephyr, especially with screenshots or attachments, making sharing test cases not very easy."
"For JIRA, in comparison to other solutions, such as TestRail, Zephyr is good, but it is not as good as DFS."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Use the Microsoft recommended “seat-based” licensing model. This allows a single developer with multiple machines to consume only one client license."
"The overall price of TFS is good."
"We pay for the license yearly."
"On a scale where ten is the highest and one is the cheapest, I rate the solution's licensing cost at one on a scale of one to ten."
"If running TFS on-premise is expensive, maybe you could consider moving to the Cloud and use the Visual Studio Team Services."
"TFS is expensive, and the licensing costs are yearly. I rate the tool's pricing an eight out of ten."
"There is a yearly licensing fee that needs to be paid."
"I was working with the engineering team, and that was not under my umbrella. From what I can remember, its license was yearly. They had the licenses on a per-user basis, and they included MTM."
"It costs a couple of thousand dollars for a little more than 125 users, per month."
"DFS is more expensive than Zephyr. DFS is around $32 per person, whereas Zephyr is $10 per person. There is a major difference in the price, which is the main reason why we are trying to shift to Zephyr."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Construction Company
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
Outsourcing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise26
Large Enterprise64
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

Which is better - TFS or Azure DevOps?
TFS and Azure DevOps are different in many ways. TFS was designed for admins, and only offers incremental improvements. In addition, TFS seems complicated to use and I don’t think it has a very fri...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for TFS?
While I do not know the exact pricing, TFS is likely more expensive than GitLab.
What needs improvement with TFS?
From a testing perspective, while the build and deploy automation capability and pipeline integration are already present to a great extent, these are areas where TFS can improve further.
What needs improvement with Zephyr Enterprise?
Some areas for improvement, include its export capabilities. Exporting test cases, especially those with screenshots or attachments, can be cumbersome, hindering easy sharing and scalability.
What advice do you have for others considering Zephyr Enterprise?
I would recommend it mainly for manual testing and test management. Within Zephyrscale, they also have automated testing, however, I would recommend it only for test management. The overall rating ...
 

Also Known As

Team Foundation Server
SmartBear Zephyr
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Vendex KBB IT Services, Info Support, Fujitsu Consulting, TCSC, Airways New Zealand, HP
Hyundai, Fujitsu, Google, David Jones, Burger King, Ingenico, Websense, Dow Jones, Harris, Saab
Find out what your peers are saying about TFS vs. Zephyr Enterprise and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
905,526 professionals have used our research since 2012.