Perforce P4 Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services Reviews & Insights

Score7.5 out of 10

35 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

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.

Reviews

2 Reviews

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

Enterprise-level SVN software

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

June 3, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Perforce, for many years, was the primary version control tool in our organization. In the product department, we recently have switched to different software, but we still use Perforce for custom projects. Perforce is integrated within a .Net environment (ASP.Net and ASP MVC projects). Perforce is very scalable; it can be used from small projects to enterprise level projects. It has a learning curve, but after spending some time, it allows for fast and easy use.

Pros

Perforce Visual tool (P4V) is very extensive and pretty well organized. Perforce has a built in history tool.
Very good history view: you can see when your code was last changed, committed, and by whom.
You can add a lot of columns and history view, and sort a file by any of the columns.

Cons

I was having a hard time learning it. Even if you are an experienced developer, there is some learning curve.
Can be slow when working with large data sets at once.
When working on multiple workspaces on the same machine, Perforce can make it difficult not to mess up the code.

Likelihood to Recommend

The files view and history view are very clear. You can configure the information you want to see by adding new columns (from very large set of options). It makes work on versioning very pleasant. I use it to see my last changes, then compare with the current version, or I can see who has overwritten my version and ask that developer for details of his/her changes. This history view also gives an easy way to compare two chosen versions and revert to the version you need in just seconds.

Filip Witkowski

Web Developer in Research & Development at TMP Worldwide (Marketing and Advertising, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile

Perforce - Scalable Enterprise Version Control

Rating: 4 out of 10

Incentivized

September 2, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As the primary tool for version control across our organization, Perforce provides an enterprise level solution for the management of our various products and software branches, among other things. Perforce branching, action triggers, locking, and other features make it ideal for the type of work historically done by CDK Global (formerly ADP Dealer Services). It supports the production of highly scalable big data services, agile development of websites and other marketing materials spanning thousands of automotive dealerships, and much more.

Pros

The branching mechanisms in Perforce allow for an enormous codebase to be duplicated into release versions weekly with little impact upon things such as the speed of queries against the version control.
Action triggers permit such things as automated builds of software versions, dynamic messaging when issues are identified either within or prior to a build process, and much more.
Locking provides the ability to prevent modifications of stable, tested versions in order to ensure validity when they are released.

Cons

As new tools like Git enter the market, enterprise solutions like Perforce are often seen as rigid and overly complex.
Occasionally, the branching system in Perforce seems to fail to retain proper branching history, making it difficult to track the original source of changes if they were initiated across multiple branching operations.
When a change made has inadvertently caused side effects, it can be necessary to back out code changes. This process is difficult to do when the changes needing back-out are spread across multiple changelists for the same set of files. It can be even more difficult if any of those changelists contain files that should not be backed out, though this latter point partly indicates a flaw in the developer's process.

Likelihood to Recommend

For large-scale codebases with fixed and regular releases that do not follow a continuous delivery paradigm, Perforce is certainly well suited. In projects that are small and distinctly separated from other discrete (though potentially dependent) units, the benefits of the Perforce tool may not be as clear of a victor over other systems.

Verified User

Team Lead in Professional Services (Marketing and Advertising company, 5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

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Perforce - Scalable Enterprise Version Control

Rating: 4 out of 10

Incentivized

September 2, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

The branching mechanisms in Perforce allow for an enormous codebase to be duplicated into release versions weekly with little impact upon things such as the speed of queries against the version control.
Action triggers permit such things as automated builds of software versions, dynamic messaging when issues are identified either within or prior to a build process, and much more.
Locking provides the ability to prevent modifications of stable, tested versions in order to ensure validity when they are released.

Cons

As new tools like Git enter the market, enterprise solutions like Perforce are often seen as rigid and overly complex.
Occasionally, the branching system in Perforce seems to fail to retain proper branching history, making it difficult to track the original source of changes if they were initiated across multiple branching operations.
When a change made has inadvertently caused side effects, it can be necessary to back out code changes. This process is difficult to do when the changes needing back-out are spread across multiple changelists for the same set of files. It can be even more difficult if any of those changelists contain files that should not be backed out, though this latter point partly indicates a flaw in the developer's process.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Team Lead in Professional Services (Marketing and Advertising company, 5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience