TrustRadius Insights for Perforce Helix Core are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
Users have adopted various revision control packages like Perforce, Git, and SVN to develop and store data independently. Perforce serves as the backbone of version control for builds, ensuring everyone has the latest content and code. It is easy to get started with Perforce, allowing users to pull the files they want. However, it can be challenging to perform more complex tasks like branching and integrating. Nevertheless, Perforce supports a rich GUI for most tasks and a command-line interface for automated or advanced tasks, making it suitable for users with varying technical proficiency.
Perforce is accessible globally and externally to product licensees, supporting all major features like branching, shelving, and p4web. The visual client of Perforce is user-friendly, presenting the directory structure conveniently and consistently across platforms. Its merge optimization feature is highly useful for day-to-day operations, providing efficient code merging capabilities. This makes Perforce ideal for agile development, big data services, and marketing materials across thousands of automotive dealerships.
Moreover, Perforce is scalable and suitable for small to enterprise-level projects. It integrates well within a .Net environment and is leveraged by several departments to track changes in software, documentation, and assets, providing quick access to change history and approvals. In industries like healthcare, Perforce Helix Core serves as the source control management system of choice for corporate products, internal applications, custom code, and configurations. Beyond version control purposes, Perforce is also used for collaboration and sharing software between independent developer groups within and across different lab sites. In addition to its version control capabilities, Perforce ensures the integrity of code bases by providing backup and revision control features.
I use Perforce Helix Core to upload and download files across our team. A place where anyone on our team can access the files and at the same time know who is working on which file so they don't work on the same file and overwrite it by accidently saving over the file.
Pros
A place to add your organizations files across all departments
syncing files on your computer
download and uploading files is fairly easy
Cons
an updated UI that is more modern
automate the process of updating files in real time so you don't have to manually refresh to see updated files
could simplify the literature in the preferences to make it more understandable of what the preferences are doing
Likelihood to Recommend
Its the standard for hosting an organizations files, but there is a lot of room for improvement for more throughtful design practices to help simplify the process of uploading and downloading files or checking in or checking out files. I feel there could be ways to help notify the user so instead of thinking of how Perforce Helix Core is working, Perforce Helix Core is showing intuitive visuals so that anyone can understand what's its doing without having to ask other people for help on how to use it.
In my opinion, Perforce Helix Core is the most confusing and inefficient code management repo software that I have ever used. I often get stuck in unrecoverable mode in the desktop app, so I just create a new workspace to start from scratch. In my experience, it's contra-intuitive and hard to find details on the Internet how to resolve issues. I don't recommend using Perforce Helix Core. I think you would be much happier with any Git flavor.
We use Perforce Helix Core across the entire organization. We leverage it for source control on all of our corporate products, all internal applications, and to store custom code and configuration which we or our partners create I association with product implementations at hospital and Healthcare sites around the world. We have created automated systems to allow implementation configuration items changed by clinical users to be versions behind the scenes without their requiring any technical knowledge on how to use Helix clients.
Pros
Intelligent integration between branches.
Simple CLI for scripting.
Easy to use web portal for code reviews.
Cons
Options for integrating changes between classic depots and graph depots (Helix4Git).
Provide REST APIs for fetching or manipulating data in Helix Core (e.g. Jobs, changelist queries, etc.).
Likelihood to Recommend
We have found it to be well-suited in all cases except those where Developers are highly predisposed to only using Git. For this case we are starting to experiment with Helix4Git and hope that this will make management easier and at some point he hope for clean integration paths between Git and Classic depots so that development teams can collaborate on code even while differing on the source control paradigm they prefer to use.
Perforce is the main code version control tool that we utilize at our company. It is incredibly useful to keep track of our code history and branches. The visual client is very easy to use and presents the directory structure in a convenient way. It is easy to install on any system and the user interface is consistent across platforms. Perforce has great merge optimization that is extremely useful in day to day operations.
Pros
Merge algorithm is smart and utilizing the visual interface to do merges makes them easier to digest.
Easy to set up on multiple platforms and architectures and is well supported on all of them.
Visual interface has many tools and customization options that help to optimize and personalize workflow.
Cons
Updating Perforce is somewhat challenging, especially on Linux Systems.
Sometimes settings disappear.
In order to customize the font settings, you must restart the visual client.
Perforce could display its progress in a clearer way.
Likelihood to Recommend
Perforce is a perfect choice for large or small corporations who need a code version control tool. It is highly capable of handling the tasks that a version control tool should with the added benefit of having an easy-to-use visual client with the option of the command-line interface. It is very useful when doing a lot of merges and branching as it has a good workflow for resolving any conflicts. It is also good if you prefer using visual interfaces since it is built by the same people and is optimized to execute common commands and workflows.
Having a solid source control solution is a necessity for any software company. The product development department for my organization uses Perforce for software version control. It solves a core business problem for our department by allowing us to track changes made to the main codebase, as well as branch new versions of said codebase.
Pros
The Perforce visual client makes it easy to track changelists and file history
Very stable with high performance
Diff tool makes identifying code changes a snap
Works nicely with Visual Studio via plugin
Cons
Performing integrations is somewhat confusing for new users
Managing multiple workspaces can get difficult
Backing out changes can be problematic if split across multiple changelists
Likelihood to Recommend
Perforce is great for managing a large scale codebase with a fairly large engineering team. It is fast, powerful, and has solid security features to lockdown specific branches. Perforce is best suited for established software companies with the resources to set up and maintain a Perforce server. Due to the difficult setup, cost, and learning curve, Perforce is not a great fit for small software development team or startups.
Currently, everyone on our Development team uses Perforce, including QA. It's our primary source control app.
Pros
It's been incredibly reliable. I can't think of a single bug I've run into in five years.
Helpful integration APIs that allow me to use it with other apps.
Its Diff tools are easy to work with and helpful.
Cons
The UI can be hard to navigate for people new to the product.
It could do with some simplification in areas such as connecting to servers, etc.
UI seems dated.
Likelihood to Recommend
I haven't run into any scenarios where the app wouldn't be suitable for something, but our small team depends on it and it hasn't let us down yet. I don't have any experience using it for larger teams, so I don't know if it's as useful in that respect or not.
Perforce is the source control management system of choice for our entire organization. We use it to safely version content of all kinds; code, scripts, art, and documentation. It is shared globally across our organization and accessible externally to our product licensees. It has been used for every product we've shipped as well as all our active projects. We make use of all the major features like branching and shelving as well as p4web.
Pros
Perforce handles code exceptionally fast and provides a deep toolset. The ability to quickly see differences via the revision history, revision graph, and time lapse view are invaluable for tracing differences over time and across branches/integrations.
Perforce does a decent job of maintaining our security policies across different areas of code. We can block access to various branches and directory structures using the various administration tools available. This ensures the right people have the right access at the right time. We can also temporarily disable check in access and lock down a source tree when necessary.
The P4 client, P4V, is a clean and intuitive tool. There are multiple ways of viewing the depot with powerful search commands and easy access to the more advanced P4 concepts all from within the GUI. Shelving, merging, integrating, and syncing are all easy to do.
Cons
P4V, in the interest of stability, seems to have taken a few steps back in its ability to perform asynchronous operations. Once upon a time I was able to sync and perform resolves on code at the same time and now it seems to wait for all operations and does everything much more serially.
P4VS, the integration with Microsoft Visual Studio, is still fairly new to the product suite. We have very complicated VS projects and it can take some time for P4VS to sync its status with the P4 server. Additionally, there are still a few rough edges in its features, such as the limited history dialog and some crash/instability issues when an automated checkout of file about to be edited doesn't get a response from the server quickly. It is still good to see that they wrote their own tool rather than stick with the antiquated SCC APIs offered by Microsoft.
If I was being nit picky, I would say it would be nice for P4 to consider integrating more "content" versioning tools for various binary formats. There is plenty "non text" content to be version controlled, and to be able to diff versions right inside P4 would be invaluable.
Working across multiple workspaces on the same machine can sometimes be difficult when various P4 products are used at the same time (say P4VS, P4V, P4EXP). It would be nice if workspace switching, the P4 env variables, and the various P4.ini settings were easier to reconcile and visualize from within the various client tools.
Some really advanced/complicated client specs (using ... and * for example) can slow down integrating and other P4V operations.
While I haven't experienced this directly, it is my understanding that syncing large data across large distances can be slow and that the various proxy tools could use improvement. I do know that various switches/options have been exposed to make various tasks require less data transfer to the client to improve this.
Likelihood to Recommend
While I'm not well versed in some of the new version control paradigms (like Git), I find that Perforce and its entire product suite have stood the test of time and continues to be a sound choice in source control management. It is great at code versioning and I haven't found a scenario where it didn't work well. Check ins, shelving, diffing, revision history, and branching all work exactly as needed when working on a product through all phases of development. Integration with Visual Studio is good and for the most part non intrusive. We have a very large code base that puts Perforce through its paces and it performs admirably.
It's the backbone of our version control for our builds. It's used by everyone in the organization to keep current. It mskes sure everyone has the latest content and code.
Pros
Version control
Conflict mitigation
Proxy server access
Cons
Merging conflicts is sometimes difficult.
New users often have trouble with setup.
UI is sometimes vague.
Likelihood to Recommend
Small organizations may not need something this robust. An organization needs to look at how many users and the approximate number of files they will need to track.
