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Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Spinnaker comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 7, 2025

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
4
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 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Anurag Bandyopadhyay - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

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."
"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."
"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."
"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
9%
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...
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...
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.
What do you like most about Spinnaker?
The most valuable feature of Spinnaker is the rollback.
What needs improvement with Spinnaker?
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 ov...
 

Also Known As

Azure DevOps, VSTS, Visual Studio Team Services, MS Azure DevOps
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Alaska Airlines, Iberia Airlines, Columbia, Skype
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Azure DevOps vs. Spinnaker and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.