Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Azure DevOps VS Fossil

Compare Azure DevOps VS Fossil and see what are their differences

Azure DevOps logo Azure DevOps

Visual Studio dev tools & services make app development easy for any platform & language. Try our Mac & Windows code editor, IDE, or Azure DevOps for free.

Fossil logo Fossil

Simple, high-reliability, distributed software configuration management
  • Azure DevOps Landing page
    Landing page //
    2024-05-21
  • Fossil Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-23

Azure DevOps features and specs

  • Comprehensive Suite
    Azure DevOps offers a complete suite of tools for DevOps practices including Azure Repos, Azure Pipelines, Azure Boards, Azure Test Plans, and Azure Artifacts, making it a one-stop solution.
  • Scalability
    Azure DevOps is highly scalable, catering to organizations of all sizes—from small startups to large enterprises.
  • Integrations
    Seamlessly integrates with numerous third-party tools and services, as well as other Microsoft products like Azure, making it highly flexible.
  • Customization
    Offers extensive customization options such as personalized dashboards, customized pipelines, and tailor-made workflows to suit specific project needs.
  • Cloud-Agility
    Being a cloud-based service, it offers the benefits of easy access, regular updates, and reduced need for maintenance.
  • Security
    Provides robust security features including role-based access control, auditing, and compliance with various industry standards.
  • Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)
    Supports end-to-end CI/CD processes, making it easier to automate builds, tests, and deployments.
  • Community and Support
    Large community of users and strong support from Microsoft, offering plenty of resources for troubleshooting and getting help.

Possible disadvantages of Azure DevOps

  • Complexity
    The rich feature set can be overwhelming for new users, requiring a steep learning curve.
  • Cost
    Can be expensive for small teams and organizations, particularly if advanced features and higher user limits are required.
  • Azure Dependency
    While it integrates well with other cloud providers, the full potential of Azure DevOps is best realized when used in conjunction with other Azure services.
  • Performance
    Users have reported occasional performance issues, particularly with complex pipelines or large repositories.
  • Limited Offline Capabilities
    As a cloud-based service, Azure DevOps offers limited capabilities when offline access is needed.
  • Usability
    Some users find the interface to be less intuitive compared to other DevOps tools in the market, requiring additional training and adaptation.

Fossil features and specs

  • Version Control Integration
    Fossil is a distributed version control system that integrates bug tracking, a wiki, and a blog, providing a comprehensive development environment in one tool.
  • Self-Contained
    Fossil is a single executable that contains everything needed, making it easy to install and manage with low dependency overhead.
  • Simple UI
    Fossil includes a built-in, easy-to-use web interface that allows users to browse repositories, manage tickets, and handle wiki content without needing separate tools.
  • SQLite Backend
    Fossil uses an SQLite database to store all its data, making it reliable, efficient, and easy to backup and transfer.
  • Integrated Bug Tracking
    The integrated bug tracking system allows developers to manage issues and bugs directly within the same environment, streamlining the workflow.
  • Cross-Platform
    Fossil is designed to work on multiple operating systems, including Linux, macOS, and Windows, ensuring a consistent experience across different environments.
  • Strong Documentation
    Fossil comes with extensive documentation and a supportive community, which helps users quickly get up to speed and solve issues.

Possible disadvantages of Fossil

  • Niche User Base
    Fossil has a relatively small user base compared to more popular version control systems like Git, which may result in fewer resources and community support.
  • Limited Third-Party Integration
    Due to its smaller market share, Fossil has fewer integrations and third-party tools available compared to its competitors, limiting extensibility.
  • Learning Curve
    Users new to Fossil might find its all-in-one approach with integrated tools to be complex initially, especially if they are accustomed to using separate systems for version control, bug tracking, and wikis.
  • Performance
    While suitable for many projects, Fossil might not perform as well as other VCS systems when handling very large repositories or extremely high volumes of transactions.
  • UI Customization
    The built-in web interface, while simple and functional, may lack the level of customization and modern design aesthetics that some users expect.

Azure DevOps videos

Introduction to Azure DevOps

More videos:

  • Review - Agile with Visual Studio Team Services
  • Review - The Top 5 BEST VSTs of 2018
  • Review - Visual Studio Team Services vs Team Foundation Server
  • Review - Should You Buy Purity VST still ? "Top 5 BEST VSTs of 2020"
  • Review - Azure DevOps Project, is it Worth it?
  • Review - Pull Requests in Azure DevOps
  • Review - Git with Visual Studio Team Services

Fossil videos

Why Is EVERYONE Giving This Watch 5 Stars?! - A Brutally Honest Fossil Watch Review

More videos:

  • Review - What Happened To Fossil Watches?
  • Tutorial - Fossil watch real vs. fake review. How to tell counterfeit Fossil wrist watch

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Azure DevOps and Fossil)
Git
76 76%
24% 24
Code Collaboration
75 75%
25% 25
Project Management
83 83%
17% 17
Continuous Integration
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Azure DevOps and Fossil

Azure DevOps Reviews

Top 7 GitHub Alternatives You Should Know (2024)
Azure DevOps is a cloud-based platform from Microsoft that offers a suite of tools and features for the entire software development lifecycle.
Source: snappify.com
Top 10 Most Popular Jenkins Alternatives for DevOps in 2024
Azure Pipelines tightly integrates with GitHub to display pipeline statuses in your PRs, run jobs automatically in response to repository events, and automatically deploy your projects. The solution is also extensible with custom tasks and integrations, making it a good fit for teams that need to retain Jenkins’ customization capabilities but want a managed service that’s...
Source: spacelift.io

Fossil Reviews

We have no reviews of Fossil yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Azure DevOps should be more popular than Fossil. It has been mentiond 99 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Azure DevOps mentions (99)

  • The Pain That Is GitHub Actions
    Although, I never saw a public announcement of this discontinuation, ADO is kind of abandoned AFAICT and even their landing page hints to use GitHub Enterprise instead [1]. [1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/devops. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago
  • Top 17 DevOps AI Tools [2025]
    Azure DevOps is a comprehensive set of tools and services provided by Microsoft. It is one of the most used DevOps AI tools when integrated with Azure’s AI and machine learning services. This integration enhances CI/CD processes, test automation, and infrastructure management. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Azure Container Instances vs Sliplane
    By default ACI deploys containers from a registry, which means if you want to setup a CI/CD pipeline, you need to configure some addional services like Azure Container Registry to store your images and Azure DevOps to build your images. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • The Hidden Costs of Poor Code Quality: Why Testing Matters
    Microsoft's Azure DevOps team saw 80% fewer customer-reported bugs in 6 months with automated testing. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Effective Software Development Workflow: From Idea to Delivery
    Azure DevOps: Comprehensive CI/CD by Microsoft for software delivery. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
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Fossil mentions (25)

  • I struggled with Git, so I'm making a game to spare others the pain
    Sort of repeating a nested comment, but - I've been using fossil ( https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki ) for years and absolutely love it. Single executable you just download and put in your path. Sane, well-documented interface (CLI, API and web). Full repo in a single SQLite file. Highly intelligent and efficient diff-based storage and compression (including network transfers). Rock-solid code.... - Source: Hacker News / 2 months ago
  • jj: A Git-compatible VCS that is both simple and powerful
    Neither do I. This discussion isn't about what someone else runs or doesn't run on their computers. By all means, run `jj`. Or use `fossil`[1], which I maintain is technically superior to both `git` and `jj` (if you disagree, show me another VCS that also gives me a ticketing system, wiki, documentation system, forum and webui, all from a single executeable that allows me to set everything up with a few command... - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • Htmx Is Composable?
    Feedback to author: The diagram and explanation took a beat longer than normal to scan, since this buries a bit that it's not about the beautiful source control system called fossil shipped as a composition of modules: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki Great diagrams, so of course that's the first thing a reader will skim. People biuld things based on git all the time, the diagram looks like... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Cloudflare API Down
    There are (all too rare) tools that back those objects with git as well. And there's always fossil ... https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki But it's not git. :-(. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Git Based SDLC
    I don't think git should be the infrastructure of collaboration. It's good for long-lived artifacts, but isn't good for discussion, for rights management, ... Fossil (https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki) is of course better, but if git must remain, I believe the base infrastructure should be the mailing list. Patches, branches and releases can live inside a mailing list, it is naturally built for... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Azure DevOps and Fossil, you can also consider the following products

Jenkins - Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration server with 300+ plugins to support all kinds of software development

Mercurial SCM - Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management tool.

CircleCI - CircleCI gives web developers powerful Continuous Integration and Deployment with easy setup and maintenance.

GitLab - Create, review and deploy code together with GitLab open source git repo management software | GitLab

Travis CI - Simple, flexible, trustworthy CI/CD tools. Join hundreds of thousands who define tests and deployments in minutes, then scale up simply with parallel or multi-environment builds using Travis CI’s precision syntax—all with the developer in mind.

Git - Git is a free and open source version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. It is easy to learn and lightweight with lighting fast performance that outclasses competitors.