Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Spinnaker comparison

Microsoft and Spinnaker are both solutions in the Release Automation category. Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.2, while Spinnaker is ranked #8 with an average rating of 7.3. Microsoft holds a 33.0% mindshare in RA, compared to Spinnaker’s 1.7% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 75% of Spinnaker users who would recommend it.

Microsoft Azure DevOps

Read 135 Microsoft Azure DevOps reviews

19,445 Views
9,917 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

Spinnaker

Read 4 Spinnaker reviews

366 Views
366 Comparison Views

75% willing to recommend

Microsoft Azure DevOps

Spinnaker

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 7, 2025

Microsoft Azure DevOps and Spinnaker compete in the continuous integration and delivery tool category. Spinnaker is preferred for its rich feature set while Azure DevOps boasts lower costs and comprehensive support.

Features: Microsoft Azure DevOps provides integrated development lifecycle management, including a strong repository system, robust tracking, and flexible pipeline management. Spinnaker shines with multi-cloud deployment capabilities, intuitive Kubernetes integration, and a pluggable cloud driver allowing seamless management of diverse cloud environments.

Room for Improvement: Microsoft Azure DevOps could enhance multi-cloud capabilities and intuitive UI for pipeline customization. Spinnaker may improve its interface for less technical users, require more comprehensive documentation, and offer better integration with existing non-cloud infrastructures.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Azure DevOps facilitates deployment with its cloud-based architecture offering easy setup and dedicated support. Spinnaker features a flexible deployment model suited for organizations with varied cloud providers, backed by a community-driven service model.

Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Azure DevOps offers competitive pricing with various tiers, making it cost-effective for small to medium-sized teams. Spinnaker demands a larger upfront investment but delivers high ROI for enterprises with complex deployment needs, justified by its advanced features and scalability.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Azure DevOps vs. Spinnaker Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs. Spinnaker

July 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Azure DevOps

Ranking in Release Automation

1st

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

135

Ranking in other categories

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (2nd), Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (1st)

Spinnaker

Ranking in Release Automation

8th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Release Automation category, the mindshare of Microsoft Azure DevOps is 33.0%, down from 40.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Spinnaker is 1.7%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Release Automation

Featured Reviews

Ivan Angelov

Project Executive at synergyc

Facilitates agile transformation with potential for enhanced intuitiveness

What I liked about the solution is that it offers numerous features that are not available by default unless you are agile. Transitioning from the traditional Waterfall model to an agile methodology was challenging for us. Until 2020, our team predominantly worked with the Waterfall approach, using local tools like ServiceNow. We had a few team members who were familiar with Agile ISO, but none had experience with Azure. Therefore, we pursued Azure certification at the AZ-900 level. Our company organized a training session with a certified Azure expert, which was extremely beneficial for adopting best practices during the initial three months. This preparation helped us get accustomed to the new tool, as transitioning to a new system invariably requires time. Managing a pipeline of deliverables became significantly easier with this solution. We utilized it for stories and integrated change management with Azure DevOps. Eventually, everything related to the environment was organized there, enabling us to follow up and track progress with our technical engineers on an hourly, daily, or weekly basis. Reports were automatically generated and sent to management, offering them insights into our progress concerning the predefined roadmap.

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Anurag Bandyopadhyay

Product Development Engineer at Razorpay

Useful to create custom pipelines

Regarding areas for improvement, one significant issue is the lack of maker-checker flows to ensure that newly created pipelines are accurate and tested. We currently use an in-house abstraction over Spinnaker to verify pipeline specs, environment variables, etc. It would be beneficial if Spinnaker could offer this functionality within their product.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"Azure Port is considered the most valuable feature."

"The most valuable feature is automation with version control."

"Stable and scalable solution for work planning and code collaboration. It's fast, and it offers a good user experience."

"Azure DevOps is complete and meets all of your expectations. You can develop your own plugins to customize it however you want, so it's highly flexible. We develop personalized plugins or use ones that other programmers create for the Azure Marketplace."

"Overall, so far we have no major issues to report."

"I definitely like the pipelines and the ease of management once you're in an enterprise."

"I like the cloud infrastructure of Microsoft Azure DevOps."

"My first impression of DevOps, after using Jira, is that it has a much better, more intuitive, and more user-friendly interface."

More Microsoft Azure DevOps pros

"The most valuable feature of Spinnaker is the rollback."

"Spinnaker is used for automating a variety of deployment tasks, infrastructure, provisioning tasks, and all kinds of things."

"There is a good community around the product that makes troubleshooting possible."

"The tool's most valuable feature is its intuitive interface for converting existing Kubernetes specs into working pipelines. It's easy for anyone to deploy anything on any environment when they need to test or deploy for a specific merchant or use case. Instead of going into the specs and changing different variables, they can do it through the UI, which is very useful."

Cons

"We would like some bidirectional synchronization. It's the requirement if you want to analyze it to software requirements, et cetera. That's something that most of the tools aren't that good at."

"The dashboards need bigger with better extensions and layouts. There isn't a workflow related to the statuses on the dashboard. It only lists the statuses. You can have one started, and once done, but everything in between is only in progress and could be in any order you want, it lacks flow."

"The ability to extend work items was more flexible than it is now. Talking version control, one of our customers had some issues because they found it very difficult to manage more than 1000 repositories for one team project."

"They do very frequent releases, there's a complete change in UI kind of stuff. Sometimes it feels like they change it too often."

"Right now, they tend to have a limit of 1,000 tasks per sprint, and some of their web-based boards, such as the Kanban boards, no longer display tasks. Once you hit over a certain number of task limits, you need to increase those limits."

"Non-functional testing such as security testing, log testing, and performance testing can be improved with a better visualization."

"The solution could be made faster because it can be a little unnerving to browse through too many pages and press too many buttons."

"As for room for improvement, more features need to be added to the classic pipeline. The build and release pipelines are present, but there has not been much improvement there."

More Microsoft Azure DevOps cons

"Spinnaker's configuration setup is too complicated and should be made easy."

"Every time it goes to run a pipeline, it just generates a lot of data, and its database is not exactly tuned out of the box, meaning it is not tuned for high scalability."

"Log-wise, we need to understand why something has failed so that we can understand and try to fix it the moment the issue is reported. The solution could use more robust monitoring."

"Regarding areas for improvement, one significant issue is the lack of maker-checker flows to ensure that newly created pipelines are accurate and tested. We currently use an in-house abstraction over Spinnaker to verify pipeline specs, environment variables, etc. It would be beneficial if Spinnaker could offer this functionality within their product."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is relatively inexpensive compared to other solutions that necessitate servers and physical hardware."

"The pricing of Azure DevOps falls within the average range and it is fixed."

"There are additional costs for some functionality, such as increased scalability."

"I am not aware of any licensing subscriptions for the solution."

"Most of the things that we need and use are incorporated in the corporate solution — there are no additional costs."

"I don't know the pricing of DevOps. It would be much cheaper than ALM because ALM came out as a software product initially. Now they are moving into a cloud and subscription model. In that case, Microsoft is coming from Azure and the cloud and DevOps and software as a service, so it would be much cheaper, but the catch would be that they are trying to get money on all the sides, like an operating system, Microsoft Office, or Microsoft Azure DevOps."

"For the basic license, it is around five euros per month."

"Licensing cost per user is approximately $11 to $15. We have about 400 users, but not all are active. We have around 200 to 300 active users."

More Microsoft Azure DevOps pricing and cost advice

"Spinnaker is a free-to-use, open-source solution."

"Spinnaker is an open-source product. The tool is completely free for users."

"The solution is open-source."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

13%

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

Which is better - Jira or Microsoft Azure DevOps?

Jira is a great centralized tool for just about everything, from local team management to keeping track of products and work logs. It is easy to implement and navigate, and it is stable and scalabl...

See all answers

Which is better - TFS or Azure DevOps?

TFS and Azure DevOps are different in many ways. TFS was designed for admins, and only offers incremental improvements. In addition, TFS seems complicated to use and I don’t think it has a very fri...

See all answers

What do you like most about Microsoft Azure DevOps?

Valuable features for project management and tracking in Azure DevOps include a portal displaying test results, check-in/check-out activity, and developer/tester productivity.

See all answers

What do you like most about Spinnaker?

The most valuable feature of Spinnaker is the rollback.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Spinnaker?

The solution is open-source.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Spinnaker?

See all answers

Comparisons

GitLab vs Microsoft Azure DevOps

Compared 40% of the time

Jira vs Microsoft Azure DevOps

Compared 13% of the time

Rally Software vs Microsoft Azure DevOps

Compared 6% of the time

OpenText Application Quality Management vs Microsoft Azure DevOps

Compared 4% of the time

TFS vs Microsoft Azure DevOps

Compared 4% of the time

More Microsoft Azure DevOps Competitors

Octopus Deploy vs Spinnaker

Compared 37% of the time

GitLab vs Spinnaker

Compared 25% of the time

UrbanCode Deploy vs Spinnaker

Compared 16% of the time

More Spinnaker Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure DevOps

August 2025

Download Microsoft Azure DevOps product report

Buyer's Guide

Release Automation

July 2025

Download Spinnaker product report

Also Known As

Azure DevOps, VSTS, Visual Studio Team Services, MS Azure DevOps

No data available

Overview

Microsoft Azure DevOps is a cloud service that enables developers to collaborate on code development projects and create and deploy applications quicker than ever before. The service helps unite developers, project managers, and software development experts through a collaborative experience while using the application. For the users' convenience, Azure DevOps offers the user cloud services through Azure DevOps Services or an on-premises service using Azure DevOps Server. In addition, it supports integration with additional services and adding extensions, including the ability for the user to create their own custom extensions.

Azure DevOps provides a variety of unified features that can be accessed through their web browser or IDE client, such as:

Azure Pipelines - Develop and deploy services to support ongoing application integration and delivery. Azure pipelines, which work with almost every project type and most languages, will automatically test code projects in order to make them available to others.
Azure Artifacts - Share packages and integrate package sharing between teams. Packages include NuGet, npm, and Maven, in addition to other private and public sources. Developers can now share and consume packages with other developers from different public registries.
Azure Repos - Offers source control of your code through Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) or Git repositories. Developers can now keep track of any changes that are made in their code over the course of their project.
Azure Test Plans - Offers continuous and manual/exploratory app testing through several tools. Test Suites, or a collection of Test Cases, are grouped together in a container called a Test Plan.
Azure Boards - Provides a suite of Agile tools to track work, support planning, code defects, and general issues while using Kanban and Scrum software. Teams are in need of tools that are flexible and will help them grow. Azure Boards is a service that helps developers manage their software projects.

Benefits of Microsoft Azure DevOps

Microsoft Azure DevOps offers many benefits, including:

A quick setup and easy deployment
An elastic scale
Exceptional security
No-maintenance operations
Effortless collaboration through domains
The ability to create and deploy products faster than traditional software

Reviews from Real Users

Microsoft Azure DevOps stands out among its competitors for a variety of reasons. Two major ones are its ability to forecast how long each task will take and the ability for users to follow the entire development process.

PeerSpot viewers note the effectiveness of this solution. An executive chief operating officer for a cloud provider notes, “We can forecast tasks and the number of hours a task will take and can compare it with how long a task actually takes.”

Carlos H., a product and system director at SPCM, writes, “I think the most usable thing is that you can follow the whole progress of the development process. This makes it very useful for us.”

Microsoft

Spinnaker provides application management and deployment to help you release software changes with high velocity and confidence. Spinnaker is an open-source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform that combines a powerful and flexible pipeline management system with integrations to the major cloud providers. If you are looking to standardize your release processes and improve quality, Spinnaker is for you.

Spinnaker

Sample Customers

Alaska Airlines, Iberia Airlines, Columbia, Skype

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs. Spinnaker

July 2025

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