Octopus Deploy Reviews

Easy to configure and set up all your dev ops pipelines once and then invoke them over and over, to ensure consistent and completely automated deployments.

If you use their cloud offering with many targets it can quickly become quite expensive.

The fact that Octopus is API driven allows us to easily automate everything in the deployment space. It allows us to have repeatable deployment and operations processes across all the phases of the lifecycle. Now with deployment steps as code, we can easily adjust the deployment steps per branch, which matches very well with our DevOps mindset. We are able to deploy many different types of projects with ease.

The biggest challenge we currently have is tracking down what project variables are used where. Between the deployment steps and runbook steps, it is sometimes challenging to find what is used where. The Config as Code feature starts to make this easier to track, once the runbooks are Config as Code enabled it should be much more manageable.

That I feel like it can do anything, or that I can do anything with it. The extensibility makes it feel like I can incorporate any deployment needs I have which is cool. We have a bunch of different applications and they're not all built the same, so it's nice to feel like there isn't any app we can't deploy with Octopus.

Sometimes it feels like I don't know what all the features are, or what features to use where. It can get confusing and sometimes I don't feel like the docs do a good enough job explaining this to me.

The ease of use from installation to new developer training. This tool thinks about every person involved. From the admin installing it, by giving them scripts to automate the install, to development teams using it with web ui built in help documentation. That and the support from Octopus Deploy, email, forum, Slack, calls when needed is top tier.

The only item of note is that although most deployment values are associated with a project, there are some that can't be restricted to certain projects. Some credential values can only be restricted by tenants or by environment. This is only a minor concern though as we have other ways of handling credentials.

Kubernetes Deployment options and customization along with a lot of integration with different providers and tools

- Needs to Support Kubernetes CronJob deployment type (supported natively)
- Needs to have a build in option to 'Wait' for Kubernetes Job type Deployments and read its exit code
- Needs to support more Artifact Repos, such as AWS CodeArtifact
- Cloud Agent needs to be 'faster' in general and ideally caches docker layers, we have deployments taking over 10mins, pooling/starting of the cloud agent takes time and also downloading the Octopus Tools Docker images takes very long on these agents (we're not using any custom one)

Octopus takes a complex challenge and simplifies it down to its simple elements. While you may outgrow the competitors and up-level to Octopus, I've never seen a piece of software too complex for Octopus.

It doesn't automatically integrate with the Roku store for deployment of streaming media channels. But neither do other products either.

Makes deployments, and management of VMs really simple and powerful. The API first approach also opens up lots of different ways of using Octopus

Keeping release processes in step with code changes has been difficult. I think the new configuration as code feature will solve this, but I haven't tried it yet.

The ease of setting up deployment pipelines, and future maintenance after the initial setup.

If I had a con its that there is too much customization! Not really a con, but we haven't begun to use all of the functionality Octopus offers.

It gives me the confidence to deploy applications and updates in a reliable and repeatable way. We are a small company so our skills are spread across many roles. Having Octopus Deploy handle deployments is like having an extra, reliable team member who takes care of deployments.

I was initially confused by the terminology as I was new to CI/CD. Once I progressed past that stage there were no worries.

The ease of use and how versatile it is.

I have nothing bad to say at the moment. I've been using it for just a month now so I'm just getting used to it.

We have been able to integrate Octopus Deploy with pretty much anything and everything we have thrown at it. We have all sorts of different types of deployments to various on-prem and cloud based targets. Even legacy based targets. We have not found a blocker that has stopped us from integrating our deployment requirements with Octopus yet. Octopus has ample amount of community based steps and first class steps out of the box that make it VERY powerful. Octopus is very customizable in how you handle deployments. Its really up to the end user to define what standard their business requires and Octopus makes it very easy to implement. For us we love step templates. Its re-usable code blocks that we can use at scale for thousands of deployments. No need to copy and paste the same code block into hundreds or thousands of deploys that are identical.

For the most part Octopus scales really well! We have over 13k projects with ~4k users in the tool and for the most part works fine. Though there are some inherent issues with UI/API performance when dealing with this many projects and users. They are working on these issues. But right now that's our biggest issue. Another topic of improvement would be around how step templates are version controlled. Right now all code in step templates is stored in the Octopus Database. I would love to see this moved to GitHub using the OCL language used for other parts of Octopus Config As Code. Lastly there are no good ways to template deployment processes besides cloning projects. I would love to see some sort of templating capability (similar to how TeamCity handles it). This would help greatly with scalability.

Easy to use. Fast. I think its reliable. Most of the things are straightforward. I like the way portal is build, where options are etc.

Basically we can improve each part but hard to recall. For example if i am in variables, maybe some compare functions ? Whenever i work with with varaibles, lots of libraries, sometimes it becomes hard. Also why i can leave empty scope, and everyone can updated ?? this is a security bridge i think. I dont like when octopus is loosing connection (* health check). Sometimes i have issues with the service. Even if se to automatic, it doesnt start after windows server reboot. When i pick a lot of machines during deployment ( target ) would be nice to type like in the search, or role attachment, just a names or like *name. When i have lots of machines to exclude would be easier. nothing very urgent. Process creation - adding steps, moving, sometimes but irritating. You know to know the tricks. What would be awesome - interacive checks. Like i attach a role in the process and a message that currently not attached or a variable and some hints. Adding description to the variables could be easier. I realy dont like that when i do even a small change in the process i edit a script or something i have to create a new release. Audit log could be improved. I alredy shared my ideas on the previous page. I guess integration with AWS maybe could be more usefull.

Octopus Deploy makes it really easy to automate software deployments. It handles the variables for different environments and just works with minimal fuss. It's really easy to use.

We haven't experienced any issues with Octopus Deploy.

I love how easy it is to set up projects and the visibility that this tool offers. I liked it so much that I brought it over to my new organization. I have been using this tool for about 4 years now and have seen the gambit with it. Deployments were a mess before we introduced this in both companies. I love the Tenent feature, that really changed the world for me. Customer/Production management became a breeze at that point.

There are some things I do not like about octopus, but they are not deal breakers. The view can some times get a little wonky when you are changing releases and pushing different versions all the time, and the "view" can become out of sync with reality.

Consistency of use over 7 years has proven OD to be a valuable tool to the organization. We have an 'admin' who runs the tool but our expectation is it more or less runs itself and allows us to focus on other technology issues.

Moving from a 'per server' to 'per seat' license has caused some initial issues, for instance we didn't used to renew every year due to not requiring upgrades, but now it's forced so that is getting extra scrutiny from the purchasing department. I've never found the reporting function in OD to be overly useful as I'd prefer it to be.

We startet with continuous deployment with octopus, it was really easy do deploy our IIS Applications on mutiple environments. The deployments can easily be triggered from our CI plattform (TeamCity) and/or manual with user confirmation.
In combination with Jira, every changes with each package are displayed during deployment making it easy to track when did any change reach the server

Despite there are a lot of build in steps, unfortunately a "rollback" step does not exist (or we haven't found it yet) thus implementing a rollback strategy must be done manually via script or manual. This could be a helpful improvement, to enable an automatic rollback in case any error occurs during deployment

I have found Octopus Deploy to be a very well thought out and intuitive deployment orchestration system. It is very easy to use and quite simple to get started. Originally it was focused on .net / Windows platforms but now can be used to deploy anything to Windows or Linux. We use it for both. It is a very stable, reliable and easy to use product and I highly recommend it.

For many years my organisation has been given a free community licence as a not-for-profit, but this is now changing and we will have to pay starting 2022. Even so, I think it is still worth the money by a long shot.

The only issue we have at the moment is we need to upgrade to a newer SQL Server version to support the latest version of Octopus Deploy as there is some security vulnerability in older versions. Due to Microsoft licensing and infrastructure issues, this is dragging on and we are trapped on a certain version for now.

Octpus Deploy is a very simple concept that is elegantly executed.
I really like the ability to configure releases, (they can be either simple or complex). Once configured, it's then a very simple process to move a release from one environment to another.
Octopus Deploy does not dictate infrastructure, so it's up to you as to what environments etc you want. As the needs of our organization has changed so has the release process. Octopus Deploy is straight forward and simple to configure.
The ease of use of creating releases. . I love the fact that Octopus Deploy removes any drama about releasing or "rollbacking" software. It just works.

Not a big fan of version immutability, but I understand it and have accepted it.

While being extremely modular, and customizable, it is still easy to use.Integrates very well with our CI/CD

Understanding how environment, deployment targets, target roles can be difficult to understand without help, outside of the octopus documentation. When working with a space with lots of projects and environments, it can be difficult to find the right environment, project, and version number of the package i am looking for. Although I'm not sure that can be fixed, I'm not a UI guy.

Extensibility and customizability without overwhelming the admins and users, this is a well thought out product

Lack of config as code has been a sore spot, please get this to GA ASAP

I very much like the dashboard and space concept in octopus deploy, its so simple yet very relevant.

Sharing the resource like step template or feed etc. across space is something I feel would be very helpful from the platform team perspective.

Easy to use for deployments on different environments.

The blue Octopus icon looks strange for me.

Octo Deploy have thought about everything involved in software deployment, and have either implemented it, are improving its implementation, or its on the roadmap. It is incredibly user-friendly, but also has serious depth if you need to work edge cases. The software itself is really well written and easy to operate and maintain.

I've never quite got the Users vs Teams setup...its not clear where you start - do you add a User to a Team first? Or add a User to the Org first? Or invite them?

Continous deployment and version control

It will be interesting to link Octopus and Service Now to have a complete feedback and tickets were updated automatically when a release have been deployed. I see it in your roadmap so impatient :-)

While I don't have anything else to compare it to and I didn't have any prior DevOps experience, I was able to quickly get up to speed and become fairly self-sufficient in little time. Granted there was a prior admin and he was available to answer questions so I wasn't completely in the dark. But the ease of use and the docs on Octopus.com have been paramount to keeping everything running smoothly.

I can't really pinpoint anything particular at this moment.