Best Octopus Deploy Alternatives & Competitors

Interested in learning more about Octopus Deploy and their competitors? We evaluated several other CI/CD and Software Delivery vendors in order to outline what the best alternatives for Continuous Delivery are.

What is Octopus Deploy?

Octopus Deploy is a deployment automation tool that helps you manage releases and automate complex application deployments and DevOps tasks. Their main value proposition is consistent, repeatable, and reliable deployments, and they have built a lot of success off of it. It was founded in 2011 and has been a dominating Continuous Delivery service since. It also has a strong integration with TeamCity by JetBrains for Continuous Integration capabilities, and its API is quite robust, earning praise from many users.

In an era where we need improved security, Octopus Deploy could improve. They handle secrets management with AES128, but that seems to be all that they offer. A lack of third-party integrations truly limits the functionality (and safety) of your Continuous Delivery pipelines.

The other big downside is the high amount of setup and configuration effort necessary. According to a review on G2, you have to manually install Octopus on each deployment machine individually. This requires more engineering hours and reduces the amount of time that developers are working on improving their own products/software. 

However, we don’t want to highlight only the (somewhat) negative reviews of Octopus Deploy.

Octopus Deploy User Reviews

"Octopus has deep integration with TeamCity, Microsoft Team Foundation Server, and also a cmdline application for deploying releases that can be integrated with any build server."

via G2

"You can really easily set up a deployment pipeline. If you need to deploy something specific, just look through all the plugins or the community plugins to find what you need."

via G2

"Easy to automate deploy for different environments, quick and flexible."

via G2

Octopus Deploy Competitors & Alternatives to Consider

Harness CD

Harness provides the industry’s first commercial and enterprise-grade Continuous Delivery solution for resource-strapped DevOps teams looking for a powerful and simple platform.

Harness auto-generates all deployment scripts based on built-in or custom deployment templates. It also has machine learning-based deployment verification, soon to be its own module named Continuous Verification, that ensures before-and-after performance and functionality. For more information on Continuous Verification - and some sneak peek screenshots - visit our article on The Importance of Continuous Verification now. 

Harness also boasts deep integrations with standard monitoring and observability platforms, and notifications (alerts) can be sent to your organization’s chat tool, such as Slack or Hipchat. Infrastructure provisioners are offered through robust integrations of CloudFormation and Terraform.

Harness also has a huge focus on compliance and governance, boasting fine-grained RBAC, integrated secrets management, permissions, and more. You can also create compliance rules regarding security, performance, and quality, then automatically enforce them in your CD pipelines and gain a full audit trail documenting every step of the process. 

The Harness software delivery platform has Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration, and Cloud Cost Management modules, allowing you to build, test, deploy, and verify on-demand. Harness is also heavily invested in the open source community with its acquisition of Drone. Lastly, Harness now fully supports Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Features

• Freemium Option Available
• SaaS & On-Premise
• Continuous Verification, Canary Deployments
• Full GitOps Functionality
• RBAC, SSO, & Secrets Management
• Accelerate Metrics, Dashboards, & Reporting

See a more in-depth Octopus Deploy vs. Harness comparison. 

Azure DevOps

Back in 2005 (yes, 15 years ago), Microsoft Azure began its initial investment into DevOps in order to provide assistance to software development teams who wanted to make software changes with high velocity. 

In late 2018, they announced Azure DevOps, which includes a variety of tools for CI/CD, reporting, artifacts, Git repos, testing, and more. They have a wide variety of plugins and extensions, like Slack, that work with the platform.

As a CD tool, Azure DevOps is pretty flexible and provides customizable pipelines. The one (pretty large) downside to Azure DevOps Pipelines is that it requires a high amount of scripting in the setup and configuration process. They do, however, have pipeline templates and triggers that improve the setup process.

Azure DevOps provides support for Azure, Kubernetes, and VM-based resources. Their GitOps functionality is for pipelines only, not for releases. They lack any deployment verification capabilities, and rollbacks are achieved using a plugin. You can view software delivery metrics such as build history and deployment status, but are limited to determining deployment velocity.

Lastly, Azure DevOps can be good for people who like having the safety of the Microsoft name backing their projects. We won’t get into it too much here, but IBM Cloud DevOps (UrbanCode Deploy, specifically) is another platform to consider if you need the ‘big name’ and reputation behind the platform. 

Features

• SaaS & On-Premise
• Cloud-Native & Traditional App Support
• Limited Infrastructure Provisioners
• Limited GitOps Functionality
• Granular RBAC & SSO

See a more in-depth Azure DevOps vs. Harness comparison. 

GitLab

GitLab is a complete DevOps platform that provides source code management, CI/CD, security, value stream management, GitOps, and more. Its roots were as a source code management tool and Git repository, in the same vein as GitHub and Bitbucket. Their Continuous Delivery tool helps accelerate and efficiently improve the software release process. They have an end-to-end DevOps solution, which positions them as a flexible pipeline management system. 

GitLab supports all of the major cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and GCP. They also support container orchestration tools, such as Kubernetes and ECS. In terms of infrastructure, GitLab recently released a Terraform integration.

GitLab has a beautiful UI, but where it lacks is its ease of use. There is definitely a learning curve to utilize the platform. They do not have any deployment verification capabilities, but can integrate with tools such as Prometheus – however, that is the only tool they integrate with to increase observability.

Similarly, they do not have native secrets management capabilities, but do integrate with HashiCorp Vault. They do, however, have good governance and compliance features available on their enterprise-level plans.

Features

• SaaS & On-Premise
• Cloud-Native & Traditional App Support
• Terraform Infrastructure Provisioners
• Full GitOps Functionality
• Manual Canary Deployments
• Pristine Linux Installation

See a more in-depth GitLab vs. Harness comparison. 

Octopus Deploy Alternatives to Avoid

Jenkins

Jenkins is another open-source platform that many would consider as a popular Octopus Deploy alternative. It is primarily a CI server and tool that requires much scripting and toil to extend to CD, and there are Jenkins Alternatives that you should consider as well. Jenkins is getting old in the CI/CD space, depending far too much on plugins and lacking modern features, and we believe that you would be better off with one of the other listed tools above. However, if you absolutely want to go with Jenkins, you can download it on their website. There are no license requirements - it is absolutely free.

See a more in-depth Jenkins vs. Harness comparison. 

Spinnaker

Spinnaker was famously a result of Netflix building their own Continuous Delivery tool internally back in 2015. In late 2015, they released parts of the tool as open-source and officially released the first, full version of Spinnaker in 2017.

Users are excited to try Spinnaker because of its low barrier to entry, especially for those who do not want to code. Unfortunately, for many, they realize that Spinnaker may not be enough.

They are useful in a multi-cloud environment but do not offer support for traditional applications like Java or .NET (bad news for .NET developers). They lack native secrets management, although they do have third-party integrations available. Lastly, Spinnaker is only on-premises - there is no hosted version.

See a more in-depth Spinnaker vs. Harness comparison. 

Make the Switch to Harness

If you are struggling to deliver your software or to build your software delivery solution, it may be time to consider a SaaS solution like Harness. You are looking for alternatives to Octopus Deploy, so be sure that you invest in a tool that is going to scale as you do. Harness software delivery platform packs a punch with modules for Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Cloud Cost Management. Build, test, verify, and deploy on-demand with Harness – start your free trial of Harness, or schedule your demo today.