It was built completely on the concept of remote PowerShell and it treats everything as a package to deploy. This simplified the mindset of how to get work deployed and running. It also had a decent community and fair number of extensions to use. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It was not straightforward to get the actions of what it was doing in the code repo. Which makes it hard to test beyond writing some conventional PowerShell inside your repo. It also felt a little icky packaging some of the things into nuget that you wouldn't normally think to do.

Until recently you couldn't deploy directly to a linux agent which makes sense for a Windows type tool but it still became an issue and needed to be solved in goffy ways. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

OctopusDeploy is Easy to install, configure, use and maintain. OctopusDeploy, comes with out of the box deployment templates, as well as interception points for full customization. There's nothing you cannot deploy wit h this tool. I have automated deployment of Windows services, IIS hosted websites, old school (nested virtual directory) websites, Azure Websites, PowerShell scripts, and even scheduled tasks in windows. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I can't think of something that I dislike about OctopusDeploy. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Makes deploying solutions to both on-premise and cloud services a breeze.

Octopus agile development upgrade cycles - they release a lot of nice features on regular basis.

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There is nothing to dislike. I've been preaching about the product since I started using it.

Initially, their azure support was limited, but thanks to their regular updates, that area has improved greatly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Octopus is a special class of service, which takes care of installing your product after it gets build, to different Windows machines. The build server builds the code and runs tests, while Octopus takes care of deployment.

What I like is that 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. It can be totally automated (with notification to administrators) to install new builds whenever the build is complete. This is absolutely brilliant and I cant really tell how so many hours of my work time have been saved just due to this.

Beyond just deployment which can also be done with some ad-hoc script using SSH, what really shines is that it identifies the machine versions and installs the required driver and database versions appropriately on each of them with latest security updates. Anyone who have dealt with a number of Windows servers each locked to different versions of Windows have definitely faced the missing driver problem. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

My biggest complaint is that it must be manually installed on each deployment machine, there is no hosted service for this. Maintaining Octopus itself becomes a problem with time, with manual up-gradation required on each machine. There is also no facility to host it as web service on your own intranet which would allow you to get away with installing it only once, on your central server.

Other than this, the UI is not too well-designed and sometimes advanced options are hard to find. It can sometimes crash while doing many operations during a ongoing deployment state. Good thing is that the deployment continues in the background even when it crashes and restarting it often solves the problem. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Being able to control a deployment through a shared UI that is easy to use and configure means the whole team can be involved in getting our code to production. The workflow is extremely flexible with a number of plugins available, so it can automatically pick up builds from TeamCity, set our automated tests to run, and deploy to our test environments - it's then a one-click deploy when we're ready for production. The biggest change for us is that it has made managing our environment variables so much easier. The ability to change variables on an existing build, share common variables and update them so quickly has saved us so much time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Initial configuration can be time consuming and complex, especially when you're dealing with a massive, complicated infrastructure. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Octopus Deploy is for pushing your built executables to a cluster of Windows machines. Once your build server is done with a new build, you can notify Octopus with its API or keep it looking for changes in a folder, and as soon as it is notified, the built objects are transferred and deployed (including setting up servers and configuring machines) to those remote machines in parallel. Doing this manually is a horror for DevOps and the products that existed before it (like those made by Microsoft as part of VS itself) were either too integrated with other products or way too simple for complex architectures.

1. Push new releases automatically or manual approval - Permissions model for deployment is top-notch here - Pushes can be automated fully if you are very confident about its reliability, or a person can be in charge of authorizing it.

2. Cluster Management - Arguably, the most important part of the deployment is the configuring the class of servers according to their role in your IT architecture and must be done beforehand. Its possible to assign groups, sub-groups and labels to different machines and configure them in batch mode. The visual management options is much better than the older command-line configurations.

3. Documentation - What Octopus does is itself not too complex, but it is all about how good it does the job. Its UI acts as active guide for the Deployment Engineer and the icing on the cake is the nice documentation. Both its UI options and API are explained well in the docs and is welcoming to new users. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I have had a few problems while on the beta build -

Installation failed initially due to missing DLL on our Windows 2008 server but after changing it to Octopus username and password (as suggested by their support) fixed the problem. But it still didn't work, showing an internal error message which I couldn't make much out of. At this point, their support just dropped the case asking us to revert back to the primary build, which obviously worked fine. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Octopus Deploy gives us the power to control our deployments from development through to production. I can't fault the system in any way however I think the best part of OD is how they give you full control over your variables throughout your deployment workflow by using project variables, role variables, server variables, environment variables and it all works hierarchically so you can get as granular as you like. Variables can even have other variables within them!

OD is also one of the only deployment solutions I found that has a proper and easy integration into Microsoft Azure Web Apps, this was an absolute must for us.

OD's permissions system allows you to give control over to those who need it. Your developers can control deployments across your development severs, you Q&A team to your QA servers and your development managers for production. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The cost is a bit high for my liking. When considering the alternatives and the functionality differences the price actually does match the value you get, however, for a small company or even a home developer, it can be quiet expensive. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Octopus vastly simplifies the deployment of Windows-based services and websites. What used to be an hour long process of copying files around manually and editing config files is all automated into a process that takes a fraction of the time. The lifecycle management and ability to prevent deployments to production unless they have gone through earlier test environments is a lifesaver. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The initial setup of octopus could be a bit more streamlined. Their support and articles are good but the initial setup can take some time to wrap your head around. Some sort of wizard that walks you through setting up a test project and some sample steps would be nice. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I really like the deployment log where you can see pretty much everything and diagnose any occurring issues. Many times I managed to resolve issues just using the deployment log. Also I like the variable substitution which I also use when configuring the application for each environment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

To be honest I find it slow as user experience. It'll be nice if OD put some effort (which I am sure they did) in increasing the speed of the user experience.

Also I don't like lack of a feature that I find useful - check releases per environment. There is only history if all releases on the environments.

Also variable sets turned not to be working very well for us. We have multiple components sharing variables and single change is breaking for all components. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

You can install it on the servers that need your application deployed and when hooked into TeamCity and BitBucket or GitHub it makes deployment just a case of pushing your latest code changes and then magically you have deployed your latest changes. no hassles. no human error. encourages continuous deployment Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There isn't much to dislike really the only downside is that it isn't open source or free so while there is a free plan if you want to scale it you will have to get your credit card out and it becomes a paid dependency but then again how much time do you save by not having to write this yourself. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.