Connections from HCL Technologies (formerly from IBM, acquired by HCL in 2018) is a collaboration tool and employee digital workspace with key features like social analytics, blogs, document management, and a social network.
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Jetbrains Space
Score 9.0 out of 10
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JetBrains Space is a unified platform for the entire software development pipeline and team collaboration. A solution to host git repositories, review code, automate CI/CD, store and publish packages, manage issues and documents, and communicate in chats. Space removes the silos that are often inherent to organizations, helps individuals and teams be more productive, and makes software development and collaboration more enjoyable. Space integrates the complete toolchain for the…
$0
per active user/month
Pricing
HCL Connections
Jetbrains Space
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Free
$0
per active user/month
Organization EAP PLAN
$0
per active user/month
Team
$8
per active user/month
Enterprise
$99
per active user/month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
HCL Connections
Jetbrains Space
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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JetBrains Space is available in four subscription plans, ranging from Free to Enterprise. The Free plan supports an unlimited number of users. Each plan is distinguished by its pricing, plan-based resources, product features, and support options. More information is available on the product pricing page.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
HCL Connections
Jetbrains Space
Features
HCL Connections
Jetbrains Space
Project Management
Comparison of Project Management features of Product A and Product B
HCL Connections
-
Ratings
Jetbrains Space
8.0
Ratings
4% above category average
Task Management
00 Ratings
8.00 Ratings
Search
00 Ratings
8.00 Ratings
Communication
Comparison of Communication features of Product A and Product B
HCL Connections
-
Ratings
Jetbrains Space
8.0
Ratings
1% above category average
Notifications
00 Ratings
8.00 Ratings
File Sharing & Management
Comparison of File Sharing & Management features of Product A and Product B
IBM Connections is possibly most suited for larger organizations where bigger teams are able to have more people to share with. Also, it may be less appropriate when there is so much security that it would hinder the anytime, anywhere access capabilities and prevent users from being able to enjoy sharing content with each other.
Jetbrains Space is extremely well suited to web projects, as well as application development. The management tools and CI are great for web. I think it is less good for game development. Needs more access to viewing assets, and improved git-lfs support to really work for games.
Search in connections is incredibly poor. It's commonly joked that once data goes into Connections, you never find it again, unless you have a direct link. This alone kills usability for Connections.
Embedded content in wiki pages in connections is poorly implemented. While the content displays, you can't interact with it, or edit it reasonably, and it's really slow to load.
The "social" features in Connections are pretty lame, and no self-respecting user spends any time trying to build their profile. It's just disappointing.
Connections has continued to more than meet our needs from a collaboration point of view and we are currently working on integration with our IBM Websphere portal platform to provide an integrated collaboration solution. This scenario will provide our users the best both products have to offer in a single interface.
Connections combines all the most useful abilities from various social networks. This makes it useful of course, but it also reduces user adoption time initially by allowing users to get comfortable with basic features. Once they are comfortable, it's easy for users to start exploring. They find new people in the organization to contact, new sources of information, etc. Before you know it, about half of the users are contributing back in some form -- and all with little or no training needed by IT.
Once Connections was installed, patched, etc. it was ALWAYS up. We only had to bring it down for OS updates to the servers. That seems to be typical of anything that runs on WebSphere; it's bulletproof and could probably run for months and years if the underlying OS didn't require constant patching.
IBM Connections web UI, mobile app (data sync to / from the device), and file transfer speeds were almost always very fast. It was rare for a slow-down of any kind, even when doing searches.
IBM Support has ALWAYS been quick to respond, regardless of the product. Even first level techs seldom provide "canned" responses and they really try to help. If they can't help, they don't wallow around but engage the right person immediately. It's very rare that the first level tech needs to escalate, and even more rare when they do escalate and the next person engaged cannot solve it. We have been more than satisfied with IBM support's quick and professional responses to our issues.
Try to understand you will never find a product which suites all your end user for 100%. IBM Connections is the best of all breeds but if you go look on each functionality on its own there are better example out there. But as IBM COnnections delivers it all in just one platform makes it the best example about integration of different functionality into one platform.
IBM Connections offers a complete package of tools that can be useful but it doesn't integrate well with other services. Competitors like Yammer offer slightly fewer features but are cheaper and much easier to maintain. If we were making a decision today we probably would choose a combination of Yammer, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and other Microsoft or Google Tools.
With the other software I've tried, they solve many issues, Jetbrains Space solves them all by being a complete all-round solution for every level, from management, to support, to the developers. The other tools have some of these things, but I never felt comfortable using the whole system as a complete source of project tools, often ending up using tools from multiple vendors.
Scaling UP is never an issue with IBM's core technologies like WebSphere, DB2, etc. as long as you have or can find the technical resources to implement it. Where IBM seems to fail is scaling DOWN for smaller organizations. Connections 5.0 on-premises would have required us to create 7 servers -- yes, they would be virtualized, but still that's 7 OS licenses, 40 virtual CPU cores, 80GB RAM, and a few TB of hard disk space. All to replace Quick which runs on 1 server with 1 OS license, 4 cores, 8GB RAM and 600GB of disk. Granted, there are major differences in capabilities between the two, but how do you get a CFO understand why features like a mobile app, file sync, and social sharing require 10x the back-end resources?
