Best DevOps Deployment Tools Shortlist
Here’s the shortlist of the best tools I’ll cover in this article.
- 5. Atlassian OpenDevOps — Best integrated DevOps mission-control center for agile and toolchain tracking
DevOps deployment tools play a central role in the continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline, especially the latter. Moreover, the complexity of software development and the velocity of its release demands deployment tools that can meet the challenge of modern times.
So, in addition to those listed in the selection criteria, several factors weighed more in my estimation than others in choosing the 10 best DevOps deployment tools. Among these include the ability to automate processes quickly, the scope of integrations offered, and the capacity to provide flexibility across cloud environments, platforms, and programming languages.
Below is my list of the 10 best DevOps deployment tools in 2022.
How I Selected the Best DevOps Deployment Tools
Perhaps you're wondering how I selected the best DevOps deployment tools for this list? To build this top 10 list, I evaluated and compared various DevOps deployment tools with positive user ratings.
After determining my long list of top choices, I further whittled down my list by using the selection criteria below to see how each platform stacked up against the next one. I also drew on my years of QA experience to pinpoint the features that add a lot of value.
If you have general questions about how DevOps deployment tools or how to pick the best DevOps deployment tools for your organization, take a look at our frequently asked questions section below. Or, you can skip directly to my detailed software summaries if that's what you need the most.
Selection Criteria
Here’s a short summary of the main selection and evaluation criteria I used to develop my list of the best DevOps deployment tools for this article:
User Interface (UI):
The user interface is the first thing customers notice about an application, so it is pivotal in creating an affinity and bond with customers. It encompasses user navigation elements, like menu items, and responsive design.
Usability:
Usability refers to ease of use, the ability of customers to utilize the application to accomplish its stated goals, functions, and tasks with minimal friction.
Customer and Technical Support:
DevOps is a highly technical and relatively advanced field. Therefore, the tools and applications operating in this ecosystem must endeavor to back their products with adequate support.
This should be in the form of comprehensive documentation, and 24/7 support via phone, chat, and email.
Software Integrations:
The complexity of modern software development means that no tool is an island. As a result, DevOps deployment tools should have robust APIs and integration endpoints to allow users incorporate other applications that provide ancillary and complementary services.
Pricing:
The pricing of a DevOps deployment tool should be cost-effective, reflecting, and hopefully, exceeding the monetary value paid by customers.
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Overviews of the 10 Best DevOps Deployment Tools
Here’s a brief description of each devops deployment tools to showcase each tool’s best use case, some noteworthy features, and screenshots to give a snapshot of the user interface.
Dynatrace
Best AI-powered observability tool for cloud infrastructure and app monitoring
With the growing trend toward cloud computing, Dynatrace has become an important part of the DevOps toolkit, providing valuable insight into cloud infrastructure and container activity.
Why I Picked Dynatrace: Dynatrace goes beyond mere intelligent observability and infrastructure monitoring. Dynatrace also offers insight into the black box of AI explainability, bolstering the ethics governance into the effects and consequences of algorithms.
With its AIOps, Dynatrace has signaled that it’s gone big on artificial intelligence and automation by adopting machine learning models. In addition, it seamlessly pairs cloud automation with business analytics alongside log management and automatic discovery capabilities.
Dynatrace’s Standout Features & Integrations
Features include infrastructure monitoring, application lifecycle management, AI-powered automation, application security, and distributed tracing.
Integrations include all the major cloud computing and Kubernetes platforms. So, DevOps can use Dynatrace to monitor AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Compute, ServiceNow, OpenShift, and VMware Tanzu monitoring.
Dynatrace has also forged out-of-the-box integrations with test automation frameworks like JMeter, LoadRunner, and Neotys.
Dynatrace Pricing
Dynatrace costs vary by package and start at $15-74/host/month.
Pros
- Analytics with seamless integration.
- Provides good visibility through good executive-level dashboards.
- The most popular observability platform.
Cons
- Some users complain of receiving false alarms.
- Steep learning curve because of so much functionality.
- The user interface needs to be more intuitive.
Microsoft Azure DevOps Services
Best Scrum-ready and Agile deployment leader
Azure DevOps provides DevOps teams, especially those using Microsoft tech stack, with an integrated suite of modern dev services. It provides a comprehensive ecosystem of services that is easy to implement. Yet, you aren’t beholden to it because Azure DevOps allows you to select which elements you wish to integrate into existing workflows.
Why I Picked Azure DevOps: Azure DevOps is scrum ready and facilitates collaboration, allowing teams to create and deploy applications while working on projects seamlessly.
Azure DevOps provides both cloud-based and on-premise usage. Its ecosystem provides users with various tools like Azure Boards, Azure Pipeline, and Azure Test Plans. These keep you connected from idea to release.
In addition to CD/CI capabilities, Azure DevOps provides traceability through its comprehensive tracking ability, keeping everyone abreast of activities in their project.
Azure DevOps Standout Features & Integrations
Features include code management capabilities, tracking and project management across teams, control and manage source code repository, integrated + exploratory app testing.
Integrations include Jenkins, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and Terraform. It can also be used with developer tools such as Maven, Eclipse, and IntelliJ.
Azure DevOps Pricing
Azure DevOps offers free trials for its products. Contact Azure DevOps sales for pricing quotes.
Pros
- Provides tremendous flexibility when managing projects
- Great for organizations who follow the Agile methodology
- Enhanced team collaboration tools
- Easy to setup and deploy
Cons
- Its interface can be cluttered
- Significant learning curve
Travis CI
Best parallel build processing capabilities
Travis CI is a continuous integration tool that enables you to build code faster and deploy applications with confidence. As the first CI service tool, it helps teams to avoid “integration hell” by prioritizing integration instead of putting it off till the end.
With assistance from its installed database, Tracis CI provides pre-installed database services that makes it easy for them to quickly set up and start testing their code in minutes.
Why I Picked Travis CI: Travis CI allows teams to sync and check automated builds for errors. Travis CI brought a new approach to cloud computing and building code. It also provides support for various programming languages, platforms, and built configurations such as PHP, Java, and Node.js. It also provides users with the advantage of both a powerful API and a command line tool.
Tracis CI combines automated code reviews with sanity checks. These ensure that builds pass all the organizations internal checks before they are integrated to ensure it meets quality standards.
Travis CI is also integrated with other DevOps ecosystems. You can sign up using your GitLab or Bitbucket account, essentially allowing you to connect to these repositories.
Travis CI Standout Features & Integrations
Features include automated code reviews, debugging and parallel testing, test and change management, quick setup, version controlled configuration, and auto scalability.
Integrations include public and private repositories on GitHub. Other integrations include MySQL, Amazon S3, Heroku, Red Hat OpenShift, Assembla, Docker, and OpsGenie, so on.
Travis CI Pricing
Travis CI starts at $64/month and goes up from there. All plans offer a free trial.
Pros
- Inexpensive with good documentation
- Triggers automatic builds upon pull request initiation.
- Very quick and easy setup
Cons
- Offers less customizable options
Capistrano
Best for building IT automation deployment scripts
Capistrano is a free, open-source utility that makes software deployment easy with its ability to create multiple CI/CD pipeline environments, including staging and production. Moreover, it allows you to create tasks that are applied to roles on host machines.
Why I Picked Capistrano: Capistrano performs IT automation, like backing up multiple releases seamlessly. But one of its most vital use cases is making it feasible to automate the deployment of web-based applications to distributed environments.
Although it is written in Ruby, you can use it to deploy other programming languages. Frameworks and languages easily used for scripting deployments with Capistrano include Java, Rails, and PHP. In practice, Capistrano functions as a remote server automation tool. It allows you to execute commands in parallel, via SSH, on multiple remote systems.
Without needing to use copy-and-paste gimmicks, Capistrano allows you to use parameterized deployments for multiple staging with single deployment definitions.
Capistrano Standout Features & Integrations
Features include task runner deployment/delivery, automate and script arbitrary workflows, and multiple staging.
Integrations can be built using their open source code.
Capistrano Pricing
Capistrano is free to use.
Pros
- Easy automation of common DevOps tasks
- Enabling you to use gateways machines to support tunneling to perform operations behind VPNs and firewalls
- The ability to automate the deployment of web applications to distributed environments
Cons
- Difficult to use if authenticated by one user and running commands as another
- Difficult to use if your deployment requires sudo or interactive prompts
- Expects POSIX shell like Bash or Sh., can try tchs, csh, etc. but may not work
Atlassian OpenDevOps
Best integrated DevOps mission-control center for agile and toolchain tracking
Atlassian Open DevOps is fueled by Jira Software, and its integration with Atlassian products brings symmetry to the agile methodology adoption. As a result, it liberates you and your team to focus on shipping as Atlassian Open DevOps simplifies.
Why I Picked Atlassian Open DevOps: Open DevOps has the philosophy of providing something for every DevOps team member, with tools for developers, operations, and team leaders. In addition to Jira Software, Open DevOps facilitates project management and software development with tools like BitBucket, Confluence, and Opsgenie.
Because these are integrated into a single project, Open DevOps becomes the mission control center of your software toolchain. As a result, it allows you to leverage and customize it to fit your peculiar needs.
Jira software is at the center of the Open DevOps universe, facilitating tracking across your entire software development lifecycle. This allows every team member to appreciate and understand the technical and business impact each step of the way. Moreover, these tools can be used out of the box. You can use Bitbucket Server or the free Bitbucket Cloud migration app to utilize its cloud-based services.
Open DevOps’ default repository tool is Bitbucket, although you can use other version control tools like GitHub or GitLab. Moreover, you are provided the pipeline visibility with Bitbucket Pipelines, with its deployment tabs automatically populated with your data.
Atlassian Open DevOps Standout Features & Integrations
Features include issue tracking and agile planning, source code management, CI/CD deployments, and integrated use with easy extendability.
Integrations include (in addition to its native DevOps tools like Bitbucket Pipelines) Jenkins, CircleCI, Codefresh, Datadog, Dynatrace, and others.
Atlassian Open DevOps Pricing
Free to use for up to 10 users. Paid plans start from $7.75/user/month and come with a 7-day free trial.
Pros
- Easy to integrate with other DevOps applications
- A considerable number of plugins are available
- User-friendly and intuitive to utilize
- Offers a great number of features and functionality
- Free and easily extendable
Cons
- Unless you have a technical background, it isn’t very familiar unless you understand databases or code
DevOps by ServiceNow
Best DevOps platform for change management
ServiceNow DevOps is designed to facilitate change management operations through automating the planning, developing, testing, deployment tasks. Moreover, ServiceNow DevOps provides teams with native SNOW capabilities.
Why I Picked ServiceNow DevOps: ServiceNow DevOps is equipped with useful features, such as the incident module for tracking events. This means it offers organizations in-built, exceptional knowledge management and helpdesk features. It collects data across the spectrum of DevOps activities and subsequently makes it easy to deploy applications quickly while reducing the risk of compromising quality.
ServiceNow DevOps facilitates service management activities that deliver IT services. DevOps data model allows you to move, map, and transform data while migrating from source to target destination.
ServiceNow DevOps provides visibility across a DevOps toolchain from a single dashboard while reducing your operations' costs, complexity, and risk through automation.
ServiceNow DevOps Standout Features & Integrations
Features include change and incident management, using automatic ticketing, event-driven automation, and ideal for the IT infrastructure library (ITIL).
Integrations are made possible via their IntegrationHub, an API-enabled system to integrate products quickly . Jira Software, Azure Boards, Azure Repos, Bitbucket Server/Enterprise, Azure Pipelines, GitHub, Jenkins, and GitHub Enterprise, are some of the platforms and tools that integrate with ServiceNow DevOps.
Pricing
Contact ServiceNow DevOps’ sales department for a price quote.
Pros
- Offers a lot of customizable change management solutions
- Proves advantageous for several use cases such as help desk and knowledge management
Cons
- Some users complain it takes more than the normal time to complete transactions
- It is expensive, so many organizations can’t afford it
Redgate
Best for protecting critical data during deployment by monitoring database problems
Redgate is a software tool that helps DevOps automate database deployments. It ensures frequent deployments are handled with effective database compliance.
Why I Picked Redgate: Redgate provides organizations with end-to-end database development tools that drastically reduce release cycles from months to days. It equips management and IT leadership with the insight to standardize DevOps best practices.
Redgate enables teams to accelerate development delivery times and business requirements of projects while increasing code quality.
Redgate also shines as a database performance monitoring and availability tool. Not only does it provide the ability to scale operations across servers, but it ensures problems are pinpointed before they impact end-users.
Redgate Standout Features & Integrations
Features include standardize team-based development, database monitoring, version control and change management, and SQL provisioning.
Integrations include AWS’s EC2 and RDS. It also has integrations with ServiceNow, Jira Software, Bamboo, Jenkins, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and many others. Redgate’s Fly offers integrations with Maven, Docker, Cake, Chef, JUnit, and IntelliJ IDEA.
Redgate Pricing
Redgate has an array of products in its stable that range from $1200+ per license.
Pros
- A lot of customization options
- Intuitive UI and flexible SDK
- Fast and lightweight
Cons
- Products lack free trial and free version
Octopus Deploy
Best in facilitating fast, repeatable, and multi-tenancy deployment
Octopus Deploy is a deployment automation tool that makes multi-tenant deployment easier, especially for enterprises and teams with large software artifacts. It focuses on making repeatable deployments more reliable by reducing their complexity.
Why I Picked Octopus Deploy: Octopus Deploy enables release managers and DevOps teams to have greater control and management over their releases. One of the main ways it achieves this is by allowing DevOps teams to use one deployment process across multiple environments.
Octopus Deploy also simplifies deployment operations through automation, allowing teams to execute runbooks from a single place.
As a result of these features, Octopus Deploy is renowned for standardizing the software delivery process and making repeatable deployments simple and easy to execute. Although deployment is the last phase in the CI/CD, Octopus helps ship code faster by accelerating this process.
Octopus Deploy Standout Features & Integrations
Features include multi-tenancy, automating complex software deployments, GitHub actions deployment, scalability, and API-first philosophy.
Integrations include favorite CI servers and deployment tools such as the following: Jenkins, Azure DevOps Server, Kubernetes, Docker, Apache Tomcat, NGINX, TeamCity, CirceCI, Bamboo, GitHub Actions, and others.
Octopus Deploy Pricing
Octopus Deploy has two pricing and deployment modes: Cloud (deployment-as-a-service) and Server (Octopus on your infrastructure). Pricing starts at $10/target/month. Octopus Deploy provides users with a 30-day trial with its Community and Professional versions.
Pros
- Excellent dashboard visibility
- Affordable pricing
- Provides clarity with deployment management
Cons
- Dashboard customization could be better around hiding/filtering data
Jenkins
Best open-source DevOps automation server
Jenkins is one of the most ubiquitous tools in the DevOps ecosystem. As an open-source automation server, Jenkins is supported by a robust community that provides solutions like plugins that allow users to automate different aspects of DevOps activities and the software delivery pipeline.
Why I Picked Jenkins: One of the most attractive features of Jenkins is its massive collection of 1800+ plugins that support various aspects of the software lifecycle with little effort on your part, from building, testing, deploying, and automating projects.
Jenkins' core use case is continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), so some of its activities include static code analysis, automated testing, distributed builds and packaging, documentation, deployment, and more.
Jenkins is written in Java, but Jenkins servers give you the liberty to set up CI/CD environments for multiple programming languages and different OS platforms. It is also mature and battle-tested.
Jenkins started as an automation server to test the validity of Java code before committing them to the repository and breaking builds. As a result, it can work in a “pull” or “push” mode, checking for repository changes when triggered by commit events.
Jenkins Standout Features & Integrations
Features include plugins, easy configuration, source code and build management, systems analytics and monitoring, build pipelines, and flexible and distributed architecture.
Integrations including Jira, GitHub, Microsoft Azure, Build Failure Analyzer, and Copy Artifact Plugin.
Jenkins Pricing
Jenkins is free to use and open source.
Pros
- Easy to set up with great flexibility
- Provides seamless integration
- Great community that provides DevOps support and solutions
Cons
- Jenkins doesn’t permit server-to-server federation, which has a huge potential to create performance issues in large-scale environments
- Teams using Jenkins are susceptible to Jenkins sprawl, creating lots of Jenkins servers difficult to manage
Copado
Best low-Code CI/CD built for Salesforce
Copado is a low-code platform focused on helping sales teams deliver CI/CD pipeline deployments. Developed by Salesforce, Copado is designed to make deployments on its secure platform easier to execute for DevOps.
Why I Picked Copado: Copado is built for system administrators, architects, and developers to implement and quickly release software changes at half the risk. Copado provides an end-to-end development lifecycle that makes your software more resilient by integrating AI-driven test automation into deployed code.
Because Copado is natively built on Salesforce, developers quickly scan code and move from working on a sandbox to deploying Salesforce metadata and seamlessly syncing with their Salesforce organization.
Copado is focused on bringing value stream management to its Salesforce customer so that a team can visualize the delivery process through value stream maps, its unified DevOps platform, flexible architecture, and improved agile adoption.
Copado Standout Features & Integrations
Features include monitoring, managing CI/CD pipelines, low-code automation, value stream management, easy integration between your product into other Salesforce application lifecycle management (ALM) tools, and track changes capabilities in your Salesforce environment.
Integrations include the ability to sync items like user stories with Jira and Azure boards in agile two-way integrations to simplify feature planning and facilitate better Agile sprints. These include built-in integrations such as Git and Vlocity. Its add-on integrations include Jenkins, Bitbucket, OwnBackup, and Welkin Suite.
Copado Pricing
Copado starts at $1000/month. They offer a free Essential version.
Pros
- Accelerates since data is contained in a single location
- Presents DevOps practices to non-technical users
- Ideal for executing deployments with smaller teams
Cons
- Requires a significant learning curve to execute
The 10 Best DevOps Deployment Tools Summary
| Tool | Free Option | Price | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dynatrace Best AI-powered observability tool for cloud infrastructure and app monitoring | 15 days free trial | From $11/month | Visit Website |
| 2 |  Microsoft Azure DevOps Services Best Scrum-ready and Agile deployment leader | Not available | Visit Website | |
| 3 |  Travis CI Best parallel build processing capabilities | Offer a free trial | From $64/month | Visit Website |
| 4 |  Capistrano Best for building IT automation deployment scripts | Not available | Free To Use | Visit Website |
| 5 |  Atlassian OpenDevOps Best integrated DevOps mission-control center for agile and toolchain tracking | 7-day free trial | From $7.75/user/month | Visit Website |
| 6 |  DevOps by ServiceNow Best DevOps platform for change management | Not available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
| 7 |  Redgate Best for protecting critical data during deployment by monitoring database problems | Not available | From $1200+ per license | Visit Website |
| 8 |  Octopus Deploy Best in facilitating fast, repeatable, and multi-tenancy deployment | 30 days free trial | From $50 per month | Visit Website |
| 9 |  Jenkins Best open-source DevOps automation server | Not available | Visit Website | |
| 10 |  Copado Best low-Code CI/CD built for Salesforce | Not available | $1,000/month | Visit Website |
Other Options
Here are a few more options:
- Codefresh
Best GitOps-friendly tool for CI/CD pipeline and workflow automation
- Incredibuild
Best for C++ code compilation and distributed processing
- Datadog
Server monitoring and observability for cloud-scale applications
- Ozone
Modern delivery orchestrator for Docker containers
- Blue Canvas
DevOps solution for Salesforce software development
- IBM UrbanCode Deploy
Automated, enterprise-grade application release solution
- GoCD
A continuous delivery server for modeling complex workflows
- Shippable
No-code DevOps tool for continuous delivery
- Juju
Big Data application modeling solution
- AWS CodeDeploy
Automate and scale code deployments on various Amazon compute instances
You can also check out our other software review lists, like the 10 Best DevOps Platforms.
People Also Ask
Here are a few commonly asked questions about DevOps deployment and DevOps deployment tools. I’ll quickly cover the basics for anyone feeling a little lost
What is DevOps deployment?
Are There Any Free DevOps Deployment Tools?
What are the Key Features of a DevOps Deployment Tool?
Get Started with the Best DevOps Deployment Tools
DevOps deployment tools are an indispensable part of the software delivery lifecycle. Whatever tool you end up using, I hope you found some helpful information in this list of DevOps deployment tools product reviews. Be sure to stick around and check out our other articles for more thought leadership and product reviews.
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