We reviewed Microsoft Azure DevOps vs TFS according to our users’ review in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison results: Microsoft Azure DevOps is a more advanced solution than TFS. Regardless of the higher cost, it offers stronger capabilities, evolving features, and better support.
"The solution integrates well with other Azure services and third-party tools."
"Azure is an advantage when working with other Microsoft solutions."
"There are a lot of helpful features available for tracking dependencies."
"Azure DevOps is complete and meets all of your expectations. You can develop your own plugins to customize it however you want, so it's highly flexible. We develop personalized plugins or use ones that other programmers create for the Azure Marketplace."
"The automated bill feature is most valuable. As with most software developers, I can build code on my machine, but if one of my coworkers can't build the same code on theirs, there are always issues in trying to track it down. The automated bill process makes it a lot easier to track down where the issues are and find out what bugs aren't being included for whatever reason."
"The most valuable features are continuous integration and deployment, and simplicity."
"It is a really easy way to define all of the features that you need to deliver. You can link those features to epics and break them down into user stories. You can also assign the user stories into sprints for doing your product improvement planning."
"It is a well-integrated product in terms of the development lifecycle."
"The solution is very much stable."
"We use TFS for forecast management."
"It has great functionality: work items, backlogs, source code, build releases, and it's easy to use."
"TFS’s test management capability without the expensive licensing has large gaps. Users will be unable to access performance testing and coded UI testing capabilities."
"The most valuable feature is the backlog."
"It's is a very stable solution."
"What I like the most is that you can set permissions on just one folder."
"I feel that the test plan and test tools are more manageable in TFS."
"They could provide clearer guidance on deployment practices for the product."
"It is not that intuitive. Sometimes, it is hard to find some of the functions. I would like to have an old-fashioned menu structure to be able to easily find things. Its environment setup is not very good. They should improve the way it is set up for different screens and make it easier to find functionalities and maintain team members."
"Incorporating security tools directly into DevOps is crucial, as many existing DevOps solutions lack robust security features."
"The functions have too much dependency right now, so it makes it really, really hard to upgrade and make a change in the code."
"I can't think of any specific things at the moment, but I've run into things that I didn't like. I came across something that I wanted to be changed in DevOps, but I can't remember what it was. It was a particular feature I was looking for that I couldn't find."
"I would like to see better interoperability with the agile scaling frameworks."
"The price could be lowered. It would be nice if it was cheaper."
"The active directory password system needs some improvement because many times the password for the active directory expires before the set time."
"Not all of the functionality, which is exposed by the command line interface (tf.exe) is available in the Visual Studio GUI."
"Merging branches is definitely one of the more challenging aspects for people new to TFS."
"They have room for improvement in merging the source code changes for multiple developers across files. It is very good at highlighting the changes that the source code automatically does not know how to handle, but it's not very good at reporting the ones that it did automatically. There are times when we have source code that gets merged, and we lose the changes that we expected to happen. It can get a little confusing at times. They can just do a little bit better on the merging of changes for multiple developers."
"I would like to see TFS improve its web interface as there are some limitations with IDs and the integration behind it and with open-source tools like VS Code."
"Access and permissions are confusing when attempting to include basic manual testing functionalities."
"The test management interface is not very handy."
"The dashboard and the customization of dashboards is an area they have to work on."
"The dashboard needs more enhancements."
Microsoft Azure DevOps is ranked 2nd in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 127 reviews while TFS is ranked 3rd in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 93 reviews. Microsoft Azure DevOps is rated 8.2, while TFS is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Microsoft Azure DevOps writes "Allows us to deploy code to production without releasing certain features immediately and agile project management capabilities offer resource-leveling". On the other hand, the top reviewer of TFS writes "It is helpful for scheduled releases and enforcing rules, but it should be better at merging changes for multiple developers and retaining the historical information". Microsoft Azure DevOps is most compared with GitLab, Jira, Rally Software, ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management and OpenText ALM / Quality Center, whereas TFS is most compared with Jira, Rally Software, Visual Studio Test Professional, OpenText ALM / Quality Center and TestRail. See our Microsoft Azure DevOps vs. TFS report.
See our list of best Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites vendors.
We monitor all Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
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 friendly user interface. I think TFS does have a few valuable features, though, such as its project management, which happens to not only include user stories, but task management as well. It would be good if TFS offered better integration for third-party tools like Jira. For my needs specifically, for example, I need to do a lot of manual tasks, and integration with SharePoint is not easy. Other than that, I consider the product to be pretty solid, stable, and also scalable, and haven’t experienced too many issues with it.
In contrast to TFS, Azure DevOps provides a seamless user experience that is not only consistent across Azure DevOps service, but is consistent across Azure DevOps server too. It also has great navigation and the user interface is responsive, helping employees focus better on their work. Azure also allows users to connect GitHub Enterprise with Azure Boards, with no disruption to other workflows.
While both Azure DevOps and TFS require SQL Server, Azure DevOps server can be hosted on virtual machines running on Azure. In turn, these support Azure SQL Databases give users superior backup and scaling options - and do so all without increased administrative costs that are usually tacked on to running such complex services. I also like that Azure DevOps has advanced search capabilities. For example, certain features allow information from different components of the product to be accessible from whichever parts users are working on. You can also expand the search box from the product header, which I find useful and a great addition to help improve navigation.
Conclusion:
Azure DevOps is a better match for me than TFS because it has several new features and more additional benefits than TFS can offer for my needs.
Hi @Netanya Carmi,
Both are good and in fact, TFS is now rebranded as Azure DevOps server.
Now the point is about your requirement, if your requirement is to work closely with Cloud Services Cloud Application and you are Ok to manage your code and CI/CD plans over the cloud platform then go for Azure DevOps whereas if you can't move the data to cloud use Azure DevOps Server.
But for such tools my first choice is Gitlab.
Rest you can call me at 9717996125 or drop me at kulbhushan.mayer@thinknyx.com to discuss further.
Both, it depends on what you want to do with it and what is your technical environment.