ALM Comparisons

[Jamie Clayton]

G'day,

I've notice that fortress doesn't include any comparisons against other suppliers like Fogbugz/Kiln, Codesmith Insight and Microsoft Team Foundation Server. Would you elaborate on the differences from a price (licensing), functionality and infrastructure . We currently use Fogbugz and are about to do a complete review of ALM with VS2010's release and the changed licensing model from Microsoft. You guys have a big opportunity to be winners if I could find enough information without having to do all the comparisons myself. I'm sure others are in the same boat.

[lbauer]

Thanks for the request. We’re frequently asked to provide point-by-point product comparisons against other products. While we certainly understand how that would be useful to you – and in fact we do provide a few such charts, such as the Vault vs. Subversion comparison (at http://www.sourcegear.com/vault/vs/subversion/) -- in general we don’t think maintaining many of these charts is very productive.

For one thing, Vault and Fortress have a very aggressive release schedule, and we’re constantly upgrading them – and so is our competition. Any pricing and feature comparison charts we provide would become outdated very quickly, and we don’t think it’s fair to offer a public comparison against our competition unless we’re committed to relentlessly keeping them current. And frankly, that’s time and energy we’d rather spend improving our products.

Also, SourceGear has a somewhat unique position in the industry, partly due to the high profile of our founder, Eric Sink. For example, we like Joel Spolsky, founder of FogBugz, and think very highly of his product. In fact, Vault integrates with FogBugz, as you know. We’re also closely partnered with Microsoft, makers of Team Foundation Server, and just sold them our Teamprise division, which made add-ons for TFS, in November.

This is a small industry, we’re proud to be in it, and we work side-by-side with our competition ever day. The kind of feature comparison charts cranked out by marketing departments in other industries don’t seem to fit the spirit of our industry very well.

However, we are committed to providing you with any information you may need to judge Vault and Fortress fairly against the competition, and we feel very strongly that both products have very real advantages. Contact us at sales@sourcegear.com and tell us a little bit about yourself, and we’d be more than happy to explain exactly how Vault and Fortress could benefit you, as honestly and objectively as we can.