Azure DevOps Server Reviews & Insights

Score8.3 out of 10

294 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Azure DevOps Server are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Efficient Task Management: Users have found Azure Boards fast and easy to use once a good structure is established, enabling quick creation or modification of task types. This reduces administrative overhead and facilitates the creation of numerous smaller tasks.

Simplified Setup Process: Reviewers appreciate Azure Repos for its simplicity in setup compared to other solutions, with most options readily available including user management. The out-of-the-box features streamline the onboarding process.

Powerful CI/CD Pipelines: The Pipelines tool within Azure stands out for its robust capabilities, allowing users to swiftly create pipelines, automate workflows, and easily track their progress effectively throughout the development cycle.

Azure DevOps Server Reviews

20 Reviews

Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees)

best for code, but still missing tools for CAD designers.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 2, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Azure DevOps Server makes integration between different areas with the agile process, in my case I use Kanban to guide a hardware design team and Azure lets me create several features for each part of our PCB design process, and I can manage how each person on the team is going on, review cases are much easier. I can link all tasks from the first requirement to the reports from the qualification tests. Each project has an epic structure that lets us navigate over all projects and create multiple teams in the same workspace. I can bring a lot of metrics showing who is delaying, effort by project, and much more info that helps my board to understand if the critical tasks are being managed as requested.

Pros

multiple team management
one server for all types of team connected
version control is easy
scripts to automate simple tasks

Cons

integration with CADs for hardware design
improve the link management for child/related/parent work items
template for several common work flow

Likelihood to Recommend

For an agile team, DevOps is great. Using scrum, Kanban fits perfectly into the project structure. The web interface lets anyone, anywhere, interact with work items.

The version control is great if you code, but if you design with CADs, it still lacks some link features that could help non-code documents.

Ricardo Noronha

Hardware Design in Engineering at Autotrac (Telecommunications, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

View profile

Azure DevOps is a game change

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

June 30, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Azure DevOps to manage the end-to-end lifecycle of our code. We use Boards to capture our backlog and manage the work through delivery, Pipelines for our code repository, and Pipelines for CI/CD.

Pros

Azure Boards is fast to use once you have a good structure in place. You can create or modify each task type quickly. The consequence of that is that is it reduces your admin overhead so its a no-brainer to create lots of smaller tasks.
Azure Repos is simple to set up compared to other on prem solutions that we have used. Most options come out of the box including user management.
The Pipelines tool is very powerful, and you can quickly create your CI/CD pipelines. Simple to see the state of each pipeline at a glance.

Cons

Azure Boards can be daunting to set up. There are a lot of different features and if you don't know what you are doing it's easy to overcomplicate things.
If you have lots of similar Pipelines to create there is no way to template them, each one has to be created and managed separately. So if your target K8s cluster changes, you have to manually edit each Pipeline.

Likelihood to Recommend

Azure DevOps is good to use if you are all-in on the Microsoft Azure stack. It's fully integrated across Azure so it is a point-and-click for most of what you will need to achieve. If you are new to Azure make sure you get some outside experience to help you otherwise it is very easy to overcomplicate things and go down the wrong track, or for you to manually create things that come out of the box.

Verified User

C-Level Executive in Information Technology (Information Technology & Services company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Engineering Based Toolset for Extreme Collaboration

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

June 8, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

One product to cover the most common engineering activities in tech irrespective of the domain. Whether the team is in medical tech, fintech, aerospace tech, or a business process outsourcing firm, this platform has all the common tools needed in an Agile workspace with extreme collaborations across DevOps, Product, and Engineering. This gives the best centralized toolset, especially if your organization is already a Microsoft-based firm.

Pros

Version control
Requirements definition
Secrets library management
Continuous integration and deployment

Cons

Wiki Markdown customization
Better Syntax Highlighter in Repository
Improvements in Requirements Definition Customization

Likelihood to Recommend

In my capacity as an architect, the platform gives me the ability to define the architecture within a wiki. I can include details including flow, UML, and ER diagrams in the User Story of Features being defined by the Product Owner, and my engineering team can link the repository pull requests to the story being developed. My Product Owners can now view the business definitions, software architecture, code written, and QA tests performed all on one central platform.

Matthew Budram

Software Architect in Engineering at TFOB (Information Technology & Services, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Good Agile Management Tool

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

May 13, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The biggest and best use of Azure DevOps Server (formerly Team Foundation Server) is the gathering and management of user stories for development, coupled with the other elements of information sharing and the metrics it can provide. The ability to track bugs, and the fixes to those bugs, and generally track the evolution of your agile development group is a major plus. While primarily focused on the development organization, Azure DevOps Server (formerly Team Foundation Server) is used by the lines of business by product owners and their associates.

Pros

User story management
Integrations with other products
Reporting

Cons

It does not necessarily play very well with non-Microsoft stacks
Upgrades have been cumbersome; however, with the cloud offering, that is mostly off the table as a major issue
Some of the search functionality is unclear and difficult to use
Could have more pre-built templates; it offers so much it can be challenging at times

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are a large organization that needs structure, Azure DevOps Server (formerly Team Foundation Server) is a great place to go. It does really benefit from others that have experience with the tool--that is a major plus. Azure DevOps Server (formerly Team Foundation Server) is particularly well suited for organizations that are looking to become more agile in the way they do business, especially in the way they code.

Jeffrey Staw

Chief Innovation Officer (CINO) in Information Technology at Open Technology Solutions, LLC (Financial Services, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

View profile

All-in-one solution with stability

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

April 22, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Azure DevOps [(formerly Team Foundation Server)] in our IT department to help us with Agile software development. It helps us to track code changes with various work items like Tasks and Bugs. It also helps to test, build and deploy those changes to multiple environments. It easily integrates with Visual Studio to create a seamless experience.

Pros

All-in-one product (don't need a bunch of separate connected products)
Integrates easily with other Microsoft products
Can use git or its own version control with less steep learning curve
More stable than Atlassian products

Cons

No clear-cut way to track items in a release, especially if they are not code change related
Agile boards still lag behind Jira in terms of functionality
Bamboo and Confluence have nice features over DevOps Build and Sharepoint

Likelihood to Recommend

More stable than Atlassian products but not quite as feature rich. I've supported both TFS (now Azure DevOps) and Atlassian products in the past. Nice to have an all-in-one stable suite but you may not have quite as many bells and whistles. I would choose less features over having to restart servers.

Christopher Sawyer

Programmer Analyst in Information Technology at TCDRS (Investment Management, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Still TFS to Me

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 14, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our dev team uses [Azure DevOps Server] to receive requests for our site from all departments in the company. I have used it as a marketing user. It is being used across the entire organization. It helps to address the business problem of prioritizing the work that we need to be done on our website.

Pros

Orginazation
Notifications
Complex nesting of projects

Cons

So many options, getting the team on the same page
Formatting
Tricky for new users

Likelihood to Recommend

We still call it TFS. It is very useful for our marketing team and working with our developers. Every time we have a page, a bug, a user story, or an epic project, we can put the details into [Azure DevOps Server] and work back and forth with our dev team in there to complete the work.

Jordan Comstock

Digital Marketing Specialist in Marketing at Signs.com (Business Supplies and Equipment, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Happy User of Azure DevOps Server

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

December 3, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I am currently using Azure DevOps Server with a client on a scrum project to build a business application. In the company, Azure DevOps Server is mostly used by our specific project but does have other users and different projects. It helps manage the scrum process and provides organization and clarity to a project with many moving parts and members.

Pros

Organization of tasks per team member
Statistics provider for data related to capacity and output
Good UX/UI experience for clarity

Cons

Copy/Paste functionality could be improved
Ability to see all team members more clear visually
Sort feature on columns could be better

Likelihood to Recommend

Azure DevOps Server is a great tool for keeping large projects organized. It is well suited for building large, business applications that require a lot of organization and history of the project that is accessible.
It would be less appropriate for small projects that do not need maintained history or have a very small group of people working on them.

Kellie Crawford

Office Manager at Tecnics (Information Technology and Services, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

ADS/TFS Offers Integration and Automation

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

November 23, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Source control for application code, for the most part. For database code, it integrates well with Red Gate software. Besides scripting out database schema, Red Gate will even script out static data so it can be source controlled as well within TFS/ADS. My previous employer used TFS/ADS to automate builds and as a ticketing system.

Pros

It allows you to view the history of any piece of code. Shows the differences. If you are a good 'code archaeologist' you can figure out why things were changed and when.
It provides a repository of your code so you can reconstruct it in case of a catastrophe. With code history, you can restore the code as it was before some change that didn't work, was made.
The tickets it creates can be linked to the changes in the code. This adds an important element showing causation. This code change resolves or is associated with this ticket which includes the purpose of the change.

Cons

The way it uses workspaces is non-intuitive. I required help from our resident expert to get TFS set up initially.
Don't forget to refresh again and again. Yes, of course, you want the latest changes - you shouldn't have to remember to keep hitting that button.
Even though it uses a Microsoft SQL Server database to store its data, it uses the database in a non-standard way. Don't try to do the usual MS SQL backups - let TFS handle the backups.

Likelihood to Recommend

Git is very popular right now and can be used instead of TFS for source control, but TFS can integrate with Git. Git has more of a learning curve than TFS, IMO.

Verified User

Consultant in Information Technology (Non-Profit Organization Management company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

Azure DevOps Server -What it offers

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

October 15, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It was used as an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) system that takes care of all aspects of software development from planning, requirements gathering to coding, testing, deployment, and maintenance. Also as a Source Code Control(SCC), Bug Tracking, Project Management, and Team Collaboration platform.
SDLC Management (SDLC – Software Development Life Cycle):

Software Team Collaboration
Source Code Management
Supports Agile, Scrum, CMMI
Bug Tracking
Integrated Test Tools
Automated Builds

Pros

SDLC Management (SDLC – Software Development Life Cycle).
Software Team Collaboration.
Supports Agile, Scrum, CMMI.
Bug Tracking.

Cons

Reporting
Code integration
Project Management integrations

Likelihood to Recommend

Team Foundation Server (TFS), provided by Microsoft, provides you a wide array of collaborative software development tools that integrate with your IDE providing secure version control, extensible integrations, agile tooling among many others. You can set up an on-premise version of TFS or you can sign up for Visual Studio Team Services which is backed by Microsoft Azure if you don’t want the hassle of managing the infrastructure.

F A

Software Quality Assurance Analyst in Quality Assurance at LMKR (Oil & Energy, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

Software Management and Agile Project Management in One Package

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

October 7, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Azure DevOps to manage and store all our corporate source code and deploy our applications to a string of various environments from development to production. In addition, we use Azure DevOps on a daily basis to manage our agile-based projects. Azure DevOps is used to track and follow the progress of customer support tickets as well. Our business analysts use the Agile Project Management feature to log user stories.

Pros

Azure DevOps easily handles our source code and works seamlessly with Visual Studio (our main development environment).
Our business analysts use its features to document and assign user stories for Agile-based projects.
Our deployment team uses Azure DevOps to push code from development to main to user acceptance and finally production.

Cons

For managing Agile projects, web-based navigation is terrible. There's no easy drop-down menu system you have to hunt and peck around to try and find pages to manage your hours.
Our management needs the ability to predict when development may finish a project. Azure DevOps fails here because it doesn't easily provide a feature to let you predict an end date and it doesn't easily provide you with a feature to export the data to Excel so you could plug-in a formula to calculate an end date.
The menu options for code management are sparse. It would be great if they had a feature to let you simply drag and drop folder structures.

Likelihood to Recommend

Azure DevOps works great if you spend most of your day in Visual Studio. If you plan on using VS Code, then skip it because Azure DevOps doesn't really work with VS Code. VS Code works with Git. For project management, Azure Dev Ops is okay, but project managers need to provide their team with links to where things are. Additionally, you might be better off using OneNote to document requirements and simply add links to your user stories where developers and testers can read the stories. The Word-like editor in Azure DevOps is extremely primitive.

Mark Orlando

Senior Developer Analyst in Information Technology at Joint Commission Resources (Hospital & Health Care, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

View profile

Loading Reviews List....

Software Management and Agile Project Management in One Package

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

October 7, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Azure DevOps easily handles our source code and works seamlessly with Visual Studio (our main development environment).
Our business analysts use its features to document and assign user stories for Agile-based projects.
Our deployment team uses Azure DevOps to push code from development to main to user acceptance and finally production.

Cons

For managing Agile projects, web-based navigation is terrible. There's no easy drop-down menu system you have to hunt and peck around to try and find pages to manage your hours.
Our management needs the ability to predict when development may finish a project. Azure DevOps fails here because it doesn't easily provide a feature to let you predict an end date and it doesn't easily provide you with a feature to export the data to Excel so you could plug-in a formula to calculate an end date.
The menu options for code management are sparse. It would be great if they had a feature to let you simply drag and drop folder structures.

Likelihood to Recommend

Mark Orlando

Senior Developer Analyst in Information Technology at Joint Commission Resources (Hospital & Health Care, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

View profile