# P4 Reviews **Vendor:** Perforce **Category:** [Version Control Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/version-control-software) **Average Rating:** 4.2/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 95 ## About P4 P4 (formerly Helix Core) is enterprise-class version control for faster, more collaborative development for teams of any size. With P4, developers can use their preferred tools — like Git and Visual Studio — while enjoying lightning-fast workflows, support for all file types, and faster builds from a single source of truth. Organizations around the globe rely on Helix Core to build and deliver complex digital products faster and with higher quality. P4 is trusted by the world’s most innovative brands, including Pixar, NVIDIA, Scania, EA, Ubisoft, and VMware. ## P4 Reviews ### 1. Helix Core **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sadaf R. | Senior Design Engineer, Semiconductors, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 29, 2023 **What do you like best about P4?** Easy to track changelists and file history. **What do you dislike about P4?** Managing multiples workspaces is very difficulty. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Heliz Core makes easy to track changelists and file history. We can identify the code changes snap very easily. ### 2. Great product, especially with Swarm **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Paul B. | Sys admin, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 26, 2022 **What do you like best about P4?** The upgrade service cost next to nothing and the upgrade to latest version, with Swarm added, is much more stable than my previous version. **What do you dislike about P4?** I could not be more happy with how the upgrade was run so professionally and with all questions answered as we went along. The gentleman that helped me was superb. **Recommendations to others considering P4:** Great product, at least give it a test drive **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Stability and addition of Swarm. Great products ### 3. P4V **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vincent B. | Principal Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 24, 2022 **What do you like best about P4?** Nothing special, I am just used to it and I find it pretty easy to use now **What do you dislike about P4?** When he fails to rename/move and when it freezes **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Not typing p4 commamd ### 4. The Best Version Control software available **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Faraji B. | IT Administrastor/Junior Visual Effects Artist, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2021 **What do you like best about P4?** I love the interface! It's extremely simple to find what you are looking for and use it to complete tasks and the ability to easily track assets makes it one of the best products available for version control on the market. **What do you dislike about P4?** Not a fan of how licenses are limited based on purchasing (given 6 for a standard license - others MUST be purchased in groups of 5 and not individually). **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** The benefits are being able to use the software thru its UI and not having to write lines of code to submit continually, check out, or modify assets. It makes working on projects with users who are not familiar with the software easier based on the ease of the UI. ### 5. Perforce Helix has transformed our development team **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Colleen C. | Director of US Support Operations, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2021 **What do you like best about P4?** The ability to have multiple versions of source stored at one time has helped us accurately keep track of our releases. Functionality which allows more than one developer to have the code checked out and still update all versions properly has eliminated the issues we had with bugs or incompatible code getting released to the field. **What do you dislike about P4?** We found that because of the resources required, it was most efficient to have the developers run their own development environment locally instead of on the network. We had to work out how to do periodic backups of their PCs to ensure that we didn't lose any code before check-ins were done. Once we got this worked out, we were able to ensure that all of their work was retained. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** We code in COBOL, and our biggest challenge was having incompatible code released to the field... and not being able to have more than one developer working on a single program. Both of these issues have been resolved with Perforce Helix. ### 6. Good standard enterprise-level version control **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Daniel H. | Chief Executive Officer and Lead Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 12, 2021 **What do you like best about P4?** P4 Helix Core is a battle-tested solution that supports large file systems. All of the standard and advanced features are here including branching, merging, diffing, file locking and more. **What do you dislike about P4?** GUI Client is too basic and won't detect local file changes automatically. This makes missing file checkins or misunderstandings about latest version vs. local version very confusing, especially for non-engineers. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Complete and reliable file version control solution for our software project that supports small and large teams. ### 7. Helix Core for Audio Visual **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 10, 2021 **What do you like best about P4?** Robust archive and versioning solution that is scalable with our business **What do you dislike about P4?** Lack of a defined workflow for streams cost us time to develop and is difficult to train and onboard our specific use of the Helix Core software. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Code starage time is greatly reduced ad it is now part of a Unfied workflow. We now have confidence that we have a backup of the deployed version of our code and configuration for every system we deploy. Searching for files is lightning fast compared to just using a network shared drive. This is also totally scalable as our team of coders grow. ### 8. Really amazing server tool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kaylee B. | Junior Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 05, 2021 **What do you like best about P4?** The ease of use and support documentation **What do you dislike about P4?** It's a little glitchy when dealing with large amounts of files **Recommendations to others considering P4:** Do it! **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** We needed a large server for worldwide use and this is perfect ### 9. Easy Initial setup **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Animation | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 12, 2021 **What do you like best about P4?** The initial setup is relatively easy and you'll be up and running in minutes. **What do you dislike about P4?** For artists, it's a little bit difficult to get their heads around how it works. It also requires some more complicated steps to set up additional (sometimes necessary) features. It would be great if there was a floating license option. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Unreal integration and version control. ### 10. Couldn't do it without Helix Core **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Mechanical or Industrial Engineering | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 12, 2021 **What do you like best about P4?** The easy and quick access to files is most helpful **What do you dislike about P4?** It needs to be debugged occasionally. We have ran across minor glitching **Recommendations to others considering P4:** The product was great for team use. A multi-user interface helps make our integration process faster. HC provides good access to cloud-based files. HC has an excellent support team. Available when you need it. Help with fixing bugs. The price is semi fair, but maintenance costs are a bit high. The cost is per license (per person). **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** The benefits are that we can have multiple users, especially with cloud supported integration. ### 11. Does the job after lots of configuration **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sam N. | Associate Director of Communications, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 05, 2021 **What do you like best about P4?** The functionality of synchronized binary files **What do you dislike about P4?** How much time it takes debugging and configuring for it to work properly **Recommendations to others considering P4:** It's definitely worth it but budget some longer times to make everything work properly **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are building a game that uses unreal engine 4 ### 12. Must have for game development **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2021 **What do you like best about P4?** Perforce is excellent for handling large binary files. It has a lot of features that help our daily game development work such as reconciling offline work, diffing changes, creating steam depots, locking files unless pushed. **What do you dislike about P4?** Helix Administration could have APIs exposed to be controlled by other languages like python and javascript **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Handing large binary files ### 13. Perforce Corporate User **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 10, 2021 **What do you like best about P4?** Easy to use and integrate with reports and dashboards **What do you dislike about P4?** Billing ease of use is not straightforward **Recommendations to others considering P4:** Easy to integrate **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Integration and Release Management ### 14. Ease of use **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vidyanshu V. | Associate II SQA Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 22, 2019 **What do you like best about P4?** Helix core/ Perforce/ P4V is a GUI based VCS which itself is very unique and easy to use once have a good understanding of it. It is very easy to install, configure and use. A very user friendly interface with realtime comparison of the scripts you have in your local workspace and on cloud/ depot. Gives a detailed dashboard where you can see all the changes that have been submitted recently and a version comparison lets you know if your script is the latest or you need to pull a latest version. **What do you dislike about P4?** Initially understanding this software is a bit confusing, especially for people who has worked on GIT or BitBucket. It doesn't have a bash window where you can send commands to upload your scripts, instead you go through the directory, create a pending checklist, put your files there and then submit. Not used in most of indian IT companies so experience doesn't count, most organization always prefer GIT or BitBucket over helix. Branching concept is almost negated, you get your scripts reviewed and push directly to the Depot. No integration with pycharm or other IDEs available in market so you either have a cloud copy i.e. read only or a local copy of script in your hand. **Recommendations to others considering P4:** Take tutorials before using it, as this VCS is a bit confusing initially. Don't ever try to delete anything untill you know how deletion on Helix work. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Helix core makes it very easy to submit scripts to cloud (VCS), one can easily review their script version and pull a latest revision. ### 15. Clunky and User-Unfriendly **Rating:** 1.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ryan B. | Partner | Electronics Engineer - Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 29, 2019 **What do you like best about P4?** Stream Graphs and auto-resolving. Visual representation of the files currently checked out and need resolved. **What do you dislike about P4?** Pretty much everything else. Merging something from a task stream to a main stream takes 5-6 steps too many. Working with workspaces and streams is a confusing mess. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** File repo for a GUI ### 16. Great package for revision control **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Hardware | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 04, 2019 **What do you like best about P4?** The option to see all changes in different gui and command line options **What do you dislike about P4?** It is a centralized system, server is always needed **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Manage and control all our files ### 17. Functional, robust. **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Bruce C. | Senior Staff Engineer, Machinery, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 24, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** Consistent across all business units and developers. It keeps improving in ease of use and performance. **What do you dislike about P4?** It is expensive, and not particularly easy to work with. It does not tie in well to our BOM system. **Recommendations to others considering P4:** Now comes with Git compatibility, so one interface is needed. It will handle multiple nested projects well, and is used for all of our documentation needs. It does need a "champion" or administrator willing to put in the time to learn. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Coordinating VCS between 50 software developers, and sharing updates to libraries. The learning curve is small for simple things like checkin and checkout, but branch and merge have to be done carefully. ### 18. Pretty good version control software **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 27, 2018 **What do you like best about P4?** It integrates fairly well with MadCap Flare, allowing us to keep a version history of documents that we create so we can roll back if necessary. It is easy to use once you know the layout, and the check-in/check-out system is great for version control. I also like that the desktop client lets you see your full file directory and open files from there in different programs. **What do you dislike about P4?** By default, you are allowed to check out and make changes to a file that someone else has checked out. If you don't know this and don't have exclusive checkout enabled, it's possible to lose changes that you make **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** We primarly use Perforce for version control and history. We need to make sure that multiple people have access to the same files, but all changes are tracked and saved and no one loses their changes because two people were editing a file at the same time ### 19. scalable enterprise solution for version control **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** AJ J. | Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 07, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** User friendly graphical tools like the Revision Graph and file history graphs. Securely manageable single repository as well as large repositories that delivers files quickly to distributed teams. Efficient and effect support. I think using the graphical interface to perforce (p4v) is a more effective way to work with perforce for most users. It makes it much easier to manage multiple workspaces, change lists, branch mappings, merging and most other functions. Time lapse tool is just fantastic I can not live without side-by-side diff tool at a mouse click Command line tools are powerful but needs little more experience, that comes with time. Applying the scripts is making daily work easy. **What do you dislike about P4?** nitial learning is slightly rough when you come from GIT background, as you pick it up, it becomes fun. I watched online videos from basic to advanced level and now I am comfortable using it. Everyday there is something I learn from my coworkers. Setting up Helix server is rigorous at the first go, but if you it once, then next time it is straight forward. **Recommendations to others considering P4:** User-friendly scalable easily manageable Good for large distributed teams Merging and branching a piece of cake File history easy to access **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** fast source code access in agile environments where each branch exists for short time period as we prefer to branch out, implement the functionality and then merge it back to main. We prefer short lived branches and frequent mergers than long waited mergers. ### 20. Powerful versioning engine with excellent graphical interface **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Lennart K. | Development Process Tools and Techniques, Automotive, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 06, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** There are excellent graphical tools like the Revision Graph and the Merge Tool included. The possibility to automate and access by scripts using command line and various API's is very useful. There is very good support and knowledge base available. The Swarm add-on to Perfore is exellent for collaboration and reviews but it actually should be even more tightly integrated as part of the basic product rater than an add-on. Perforce is very good at handling large files and large repos efficiently. **What do you dislike about P4?** The concept of a workspace and checking out files is non-intuitive and confusing to new users who are used to Git. The convienient way of doing Rollback/Backout is good but it is very problematic when it comes to integration records (merges). Server administration and setup gets a bit complicated when you need more advanced features like replication, broker, SSL-support. **Recommendations to others considering P4:** You need to take the time to understand the concepts and the features as traditional Perforce differs from Git. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Versioning of various types of development artifacts - all types of data. ### 21. Affortable source control solution with good visual interface that ease my software development. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Richard G. | Senior Software Design Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 21, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** Graph and History give a very interesting visual information about source changes. Customisation via scripts at submit or via P4Broker make the tool very flexible. Merge tool is good visually and it works well to integrate changes from multiple branches, it is very functional. Integration with Visual Studio IDE, SlickEdit, and other programming IDE is good. **What do you dislike about P4?** Labels are too easy to change, it cannot be used to identify official release for us. The fact that directory are not a controlled object in Helix (at least when not using Streams) force us to create dummy files to introduce file architecture for a project. It would also be good support directory link, like Linux system (this is maybe possible with Workspace views but it was not that easy or even not functionning for our projects. **Recommendations to others considering P4:** Very interesting tool for multiple OS platforms. Good visual interface and command-line interface (plus API's to Python, C/C++). This tool can be extended quite easily to enforce our processes within the whole developpement teams. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Good collaboration among team members and track all changes to our code. Il also allows us to perform efficient code reviews by shelving files with changes, without disturbing other developpers working in our branch. Reconciling changes made locally during customer site-support is very good to keep all changes performed away from the office and submitting the changes once returning from these interventions. ### 22. Intermediate Software QA **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 24, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** Ease of use, ease to admin. The capability of Helix to handle such a huge code base of the company with so much of features to offer. **What do you dislike about P4?** Swarm allows a lot of automation with shelved changes (as opposed to committed changes), to more easily identify change origins from integrations. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Software QA ### 23. Integrates well, is easy to use, is great for the company **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jordan T. | Senior Software Support Analyst, Oil & Energy, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 22, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** My favorite aspect is the ability to interact with 3rd party software or even with our own in-house-built applications. Additionally, the ability to use it at my own home-owned server to test various aspects is just fun to do. **What do you dislike about P4?** Honestly, there are a few small things that annoy me about the product, but they are so easily worked around that I can't even remember what they are. **Recommendations to others considering P4:** Out of the box, it's incredibly easy to use. It integrates well with a lot of other products that you may not even know exist, and it's easy to use for everyone involved, from the admin to the end-user. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have been able to create our own way to deploy fixes to customer sites by using changelists. We can create release notes from the changelist descriptions (with filters to determine what is only meant to be seen by customers), and it's been an easy process to accomplish this. ### 24. Mission Critical Tool for Company that does Software Development **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Brian P. | Staff Release Engineer, Wireless, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 24, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** 1. You can use Helix VCS as is for keeping version control of software. You can also use the Helix VCS server by installing a middle-ware, which gives you the capability of git command line to access the repository. 2. We also used the "Forwarding Replica Servers" for distributed sites. If you use ClearCase Multi-sites, you will realize that the designed from Helix VCS is maintenance free. You only need to setup it up once and you're done. As for ClearCase Multi-sites, you are required to learn how to use the ClearCase Mastership. 3. The final thing I want to mention is the support from Helix VCS support team is second to none. Making a great product and the support team is paramount in a "Mission Critical Application" in the software industry. **What do you dislike about P4?** There is a learning a learning curve on how to manage git server using Helix CVS. Once you learn how it operates, it works as advertised. **Recommendations to others considering P4:** Yes. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** We can use Helix CVS to keep our version control of the software. If we want to use Git, it is possible without changing the backend. Ease of Multiple sites development setup Lower maintenance cost. Easy to maintain. ### 25. Game Development with Helix (Perforce) Source Control **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rajan T. | Chief Technology Officer, Computer Games, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 24, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** The Helix ecosystem of products (server and clients) is mature and stable and because of its paradigm of not tracking local file edits it is fast. The GUI clients make it easy for a wide variety of users (in our case, engineers, artists, game designers and sound designers) to understand source control. The APIs and triggers on submits allow sophisticated tools to be built to streamline the development process. The 24/7 response team always quickly answers queries. The Helix Swarm tool is great for code reviews. The free 20 user option allows you to try it out though it does take some effort to set the server up well. **What do you dislike about P4?** My main issue with Helix as that the clients are not updated very often and a number of issues with the user interface have remained unaddressed for years. Also the MacOS client is much less stable than the Windows client. In our particular use case where we use Unity the integration between Perforce and Unity is still in need of further work though it is useable. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are building graphically rich video games which requires a team of many disciplines with differing levels of technical expertise and for the vast majority of users Helix's user interface does make it easy to work with source control. Game development also involves the creation and management of a lot of digital assets and Helix's storage scheme does store them efficiently and deliver new changes to a distributed team quickly. Game development is increasingly about building and maintaining a great live service with frequent updates to the game and Helix helps support this by allowing updates to be developed in different streams with different release dates. ### 26. Fast and reliable version control system **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nicola F. | Release and Build Technical Lead - Technology Group, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 23, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** Perforce is feature full and allows us to do pretty much what we want to do. It helps with our productivity and to manage the data of our large scale productions. I like the UI tool (P4V) but also a the command line tool option which we use extensively in our continuous integration system. The new Helix4Git is also a new and interesting feature within Helix Core. Easy to administer user and group rights. **What do you dislike about P4?** There is a little bit of a learning curve when new people join our teams and they do not have Perforce knowledge. It is somewhat different from other version control systems like Git. Not worth it if you have a smaller team with smaller projects, something like GitLab would be more suitable.. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Large-scale production repositories with a lot of data and big files. ### 27. Overall positive once the helix quirks has been learned **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tommy S. | Postdoc, Research, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 29, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** There are three things that I especially like - the revision graph view is excellent, and very nice to get an overview. - p4merge visual layout - The fact that there is no shadow folder, like in subversion or git **What do you dislike about P4?** The way workspace view is setup. It is very often the biggest obstacle when introducing new users. Also, it is very annoying that there is no easy way to download something from perforce, e.g. with a oneliner. If I have the p4 commandline installed,, and credentials, I think you should be able to download something, just to current directly, e.g. like git clone and them rm .git **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** The primary reason for our department for using Helix VCS compared to e.g. git is the innate support for big files. ### 28. High Performance Version Control for heavy lifting! **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ankit M. | Sr. Systems Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 22, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** Perforce can handle heavy artifacts like it is cakewalk and the security settings along with permission system is really comprehensive, best suited for large organizations which need good security. **What do you dislike about P4?** The distributed features are not inherent to the VCS and traditionally it is a Client-Server VCS remodeled to copy features from git. I feel there should be more self-innovated features rather than just copying git. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am helping our client secure their source code by providing a secure alternative for storing source code and artifacts in a safe place. ### 29. Perforce performance is good with with Helix **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gnana Sekhar S. | Principal Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 21, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** P4V made life easy with visual version control. Added Swarm review improved our code quality. **What do you dislike about P4?** Some times it asks for P4V password while doing some operations. But there is no way to authenticate password. Only way is to change password. Swarm is good, for big teams there are high chances same file modified by other people same time. After Swarm review approved and if we merge others changes it asks for review again. This blocks our check-in for review again delays our development time. **Recommendations to others considering P4:** It is easy to learn and use. Amazing features needed for developers and organizations with big number of people. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Version control for many models by branching same code. Merge restrictions for Integration branches etc. ### 30. Integration functionality is fundamentally flawed **Rating:** 1.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 29, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** Generally, I like that Helix operates well at large scales; I have to support almost 1000 users, and the performance problems are much smaller than they could be. **What do you dislike about P4?** I have major issues with the integration functionality, two specific problems in particular. For one thing, the fact that Helix is smart enough to recognize when files have been moved, but by default chooses not to use that power in integration, seems fatally flawed. Second, it is bizarre to me that the only way to undo an integration is to delete metadata; Helix provides both "rollback" and "backout" capabilities, but none of those touch the integration history, which inevitably leads to the situation where a developer wants to back out changes and then re-integrate from trunk, but is forced to perform an elaborate hopscotch routine of integrations, backouts, and re-backouts to do so. This is absurd **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** At the moment, Helix supports 90% of our version control needs. ### 31. Great VCS with poor platform support and vendor lock-in **Rating:** 0.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Hardware | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 23, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** Perforce is a solid VCS. Its centralized nature makes it faster and more scalable than git or mercurial, but its merge tracking is far better than Subversion's. It's very reliable too. It also comes with a decent built-in code review tool, Swarm. **What do you dislike about P4?** p4d is proprietary software, with all the attendant problems. It's needlessly difficult to install, because Perforce doesn't understand how the OSS community distributes software. Worst of all, after many years Perforce dropped support for our operating system, FreeBSD. They even accept payment for our license renewal without telling us that they were abandoning it. Now we're in a bind. We can't easily migrate away from Perforce because it stores merge tracking information in a way that is incompatible with other VCS tools. Worst of all, we have good reason to believe that newer versions of p4d aren't using any APIs unavailable on FreeBSD. So if we had source access, we could simply recompile it. But that sadly isn't an option with proprietary software. **Recommendations to others considering P4:** Don't. Use an open-source VCS instead, or you may get trapped. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's our primary VCS. It does everything that any VCS would do. ### 32. Perforce makes version control easier and more secure. Everything is in one place. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Medical Devices | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 30, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** Perforce is fast and I know exactly which repository to start looking at... there is only one and we have it replicated to multiple sites providing rapid access to users all over the world with lower bandwidth requirements. Perforce support is amazing. They really take the time to help with workflows, understanding how to build a more efficient pipeline and many other things. The Auditing capabilities allows us to see how people are using the product and helps us find trends. **What do you dislike about P4?** Perforce upgrades could be more automatic, but I like the security of knowing what versions are running. We **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** With Perforce we are able to keep everything where it can be found easily. With Git we have to sew back together our codebase it is so easy in perforce to branch and to merge branches, sewing together git repositories is a huge challenge. ### 33. Perforce is Industry standard for medium-large teams! **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Games | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 22, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** It's fast and easy to track the changes my team is making to our repo. I can quickly look at the history of an asset and manage a large number of branches with relative ease. Simple enough for almost anyone to use, but very powerful suite of options for customizing it to your team's needs. **What do you dislike about P4?** Some admin functions still require command prompts that require sifting through documentation and lots of trial and error to figure out. I wish it were easier to lock/unlock checked-out files with admin privileges. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Version control is imperative for any medium-large team working in a fast-paced development environment. ### 34. Fast and Reliable **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Murray H. | Developer, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 21, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** Perforce (Helix) is one of the best source control providers for medium to large projects and companies, especially those who need tight security. Their product suite has expanded to cover other needs like code inspections and git services which make it a more complete solution.. Many top tier companies rely on it, The ability to handle very large files is a must for us. They offer a free tier for up to 5 users which is a great way to get started. Every time i have dealt with support they have been fast, efficient and often local. They are not afraid to reinvent themselves which in this market with competitors such as git and microsoft team services is a must. They also offer service licences which is good to not have to use admin accounts for core services. **What do you dislike about P4?** While they offer the main perforce server on windows, other services must be deployed to Linux machines such as gitfusion. Setting up some of these services require a lot of experience and I had to have a few support calls (which were some of the best I've had and local to my country Australia) to get going. **Recommendations to others considering P4:** Try out the free tier to see if it meets your business needs. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using perforce for source control management storing code, documents and binaries. We also use Swarm to manage our source code reviewing process. We were able to consolidate and move away from multiple vendors like our previous Code Collaborator program. We have dabbled in using their git solution for a few of our smaller projects. ### 35. Everything you need from version control for larger projects. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Guy D. | Coding Manager, Computer Games, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 22, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** Being able to shelve changes and unshelve them on other branches and other machines is fantastic. **What do you dislike about P4?** The UI can be a little slow. The fuel gauge in the bottom right of the window seems to bear no relation to reality. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have a huge code and data solution which Helix easily swallows and versions for us quite happily. ### 36. Enterprise level source control which can truly scale - and you can talk to it via Git **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gabor M. | Sr. Build & Release Engineer, Education Management, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 18, 2016 **What do you like best about P4?** Helix is a state of the art tool which allows a lot of flexibility and is very fast. Many of the recent releases put out by Perforce Software, the maker of Helix, have given it similar capabilities to Git: distributed VCS aspects, the ability of using a Git client through Git Fusion, or the ability to connect it to GitLab, a solution similar to GitHub or BitBucket. The level of support offered with a Helix license is unparalleled. Bugs are fixed in a timely fashion and each major release brings about many exciting new features. **What do you dislike about P4?** The initial learning curve is a tiny bit steeper than some of the other version control solutions. The concept of workspaces takes a little effort to fully understand, but it is workspaces which also make Helix more flexible than some of the other solutions out there. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Safeguarding of intellectual property while providing fast source code access in agile environments. ### 37. Perforce has been the corner stone of our software business since we started 17 years ago. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Warwick H. | Software Engineer and Team Leader, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 21, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** I can have one massive repository (depot) or lots of small ones. I can control exactly which parts of any depots I want to download, I don't have to sync an entire depot. **What do you dislike about P4?** Some of the IDE plugins (third party) can be immature and sometimes buggy. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Software development. ### 38. Perfect for Game Development **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Games | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 21, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** Our repository is very large due to the various binaries we store. This eliminates many of our other options out there. Our studio of veteran game developers have been working with P4 throughout their professional careers. After a brief stint with SVN and Git, it was nice to come back home to P4. **What do you dislike about P4?** I wish P4 had its own depot hosting service that could accomodate out very large repository **Recommendations to others considering P4:** Amazon AWS EC2 with elastic block storage **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Depot for code, art assets, and binaries ### 39. Solid core server product **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Brian H. | Configuration Engineer/Software Engineer I, Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 17, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** The visual interface is mostly intuitive. I think they are still working to bring the visual client in line with the server product's feature set so I expect things to improve as time goes on. They have made large changes to their offerings and while it's taking a bit to get things sorted it seems like they are heading in a good direction. Visual interface has a plethora of tools to visualize the changes in your code lines to see what has changed and when and by whom. Perforce Support has been really good and helpful in resolving issues we've encountered as well as helping me get up to speed on administering their product. **What do you dislike about P4?** The visual client seems to have multiple ways to accomplish certain things which leads to confusion as to which is the correct way to go about things. Not everything is intuitive and I've found myself digging on more than one occasion at first for how to do something. Once you're situated though it's not so bad and things are pretty simple to operate. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Getting out of ClearCases managed network filesystems which gave us very slow performance for our developers. Perforce is much faster because it stores things locally in a workspace. It allows easy importing of other modules into your code line as well. ### 40. My Go to for source control software **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Electronics | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 21, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** 1. How intuitive and user friendly the software is. 2. The user guide is very helpful 3. Easy to use UI. 4. Speed of getting results **What do you dislike about P4?** 1. There are some bugs which need fixing. 2. Constant refreshing is needed. 3. The results are not always updated soon enough. 4. Sometimes there is a mismatch between what is there in the server and what is shown at client side **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** 1. Source control 2. Automated build. 3. Automated testing ### 41. For college and work an essencial tool in the developing process. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Esteban R. | Applications Engineering, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 22, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** It has its own user interface, I don't have to depend on third party programs to use them as User interfaces. We are using perforce for source control management storing code, documents and binaries **What do you dislike about P4?** I still haven't figure out the best way to create a branch of a older version. I always run into issues. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** For college, I can have repositories and depots to work on my projects safely creating branches and directories. ### 42. Good but expensive **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 22, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** Reliable, have used for the past two decades and have never had any data loss. Command line based (there is a GUI as well but not nearly as good). Powerful and easy to learn. **What do you dislike about P4?** Helix4Git. Causes lots of internal pressure as some developers like git and others perforce, so this is used as a wedge for git users rather than having a consistent environment. **Recommendations to others considering P4:** Git is free. The yearly cost for perforce is not small, and while support is awesome, if you are a good admin, git is not a major burden. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Source code management Protecting source code from data loss tracking where source code goes (primarily for security purposes) ### 43. Perforce for everything **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Thandesha K. | Release Engineer, Consumer Electronics, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 05, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** It is best suited for small project, big projects - projects of any size. Granularity of access control is great. Great tool for today’s CI/CD solutions. Excellent support **What do you dislike about P4?** It demands for bigger HW resources compared to GIT It demands for larger admin team compared to GIT Not dynamic as GIT **Recommendations to others considering P4:** Must checkout tool for your SCM solutions **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Build a single source of truth for all our IP ### 44. Easy to use, scalable and fast **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 22, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** Native support for DVCS is my favorite feature with streams being an equal. I cannot state enough how important it is having a stable version control system that does not lose your history and shows you what streams have to be updated by changes made by other users. **What do you dislike about P4?** My biggest grip is with p4v for macOS, in which you can connect to a DVCS, but the connection only works once and after that, there are failures reported by the app that does not seem to be addressed by Perforce. **Recommendations to others considering P4:** Understand that p4helix supports not just p4 but other systems like git and svn. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Development of iOS and macOS apps. ### 45. Perforce Helix - version control for all. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Simon P. | Principal Software Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 18, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** Perforce Helix is a very fast and reliable source control engine. It's client tools are easy to use and provide great visualizations of file and branch differences. Time lapse view is a very useful way to see the evolution of one files changes. Managing branches with a streams depot is easy and makes enforcing a branching methodology simple. **What do you dislike about P4?** Some of the concepts surrounding merging between branches can be a tricky to explain to all users. Merging changelists between branches where files have been moved, renamed or deleted can be a bit tricky with obscure error messages. Better guidance on how to resolve these issues when they occur would be appreciated. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** A fast and reliable source control system. P4V, the dekstop client for Perforce is easy to use for most operations, and its integration with Visual Studio is excellent. ### 46. Helix Swarm offers power & control **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 21, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** Helix Swarm allows me the power to review my team's code, automate QA verification status, and limiting commits to approved & verified code. **What do you dislike about P4?** Swarm allows a lot of automation, but it would really be useful if the Perforce 'changes -i' command worked with shelved changes (as opposed to committed changes), to more easily identify change origins from integrations. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Helix allows us to maintain versions of code going back over 10 years, and gives us the ability to rebuild any historical version. Helix also gives us the ability to work on both private and group branches, to more easily segment our workflow. ### 47. Perfect tool in making daily life easier for companies in such a demanding market . **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sumit P. | DevOps Engineer, Computer Software, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 22, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** The capability of Helix to handle such a huge code base of the company with so much of features to offer. **What do you dislike about P4?** The Helix behavior with in house written perforce trigger should be supported. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** We deliver lot of products on daily basis and development team will create lot of branches which helps them in fixing & testing the bug very fast. ### 48. Best versioning tool i have used so far **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Thiagu M. | Principal Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 05, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** I like perforce as the best versioning tool I have used so far in my 12 years of career in software engineering. If u r looking for client-server model versioning engineer perforce is the best solution u can get. now they have updated with git clients and perforce server which is closing the gap between distributed and client-server model of versioning. **What do you dislike about P4?** not having the facility of creating personal branches and tracking versions for them **Recommendations to others considering P4:** its a good tool if u r considering client server versioning model **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** our source code repo is in perforce wihch enables us to track the code changes across the sites and able to build it with full control on whats, which and when it is build ### 49. A powerful, scalable source control and security tool **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Scott G. | Software Developer, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 23, 2016 **What do you like best about P4?** Perforce is an incredibly powerful and flexible centralized source control management system whose support is second to none (not that you'll need it that often). Their development teams are always improving the existing core of the tool in addition to adding new features and support for elements such as security, distributed SCM, and many others. Surrounding the main Helix software are a plethora of equally well developed and maintained satellite services such as Git support (GitSwarm), team collaboration (Swarm), visual merge tools (p4 merge), etc. As to their reliability and scalability, you need only look to the companies who have trusted their source to Perforce to understand its capabilities in this arena, and I will mention again the first rate support you receive with the tool, I have experienced none better. Perforce is extremely stable tool as well, and once it is set up and running as required, it will faithfully continue to run without any fuss or muss. **What do you dislike about P4?** As the sole (part time) admin of an 834 user system I have found myself wanting for greater granularity in the delegation of certain administrative functionality to trusted development team leaders. Perforce is adding these functions as the tool moves forward (currently running server version 2015.2 as of this writing) which will help me with this, but as of right now, this is a small pain point for me. Another difficulty that can be experienced, especially if migrating from a non-branch based SCM tool, is the learning curve for the use of client workspaces and proper branch policy. This is not an issue with the Perforce service itself, but it is a more powerful (and hence more complicated in some aspects) tool which may require more effort in initial training with the tool and its concepts. Well worth the effort however. **Recommendations to others considering P4:** If you are looking for an enterprise grade, highly scalable and expertly supported centralized source control management tool, Perforce is the best there is. If decentralized SCM is preferable or then Git is a great option as well, but know that Perforce also support DSCM capabilities as well, along with excellent integration with Git repositories, again with excellent support. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** We migrated off of Microsoft Visual SourceSafe in order to make user of the concurrent checkout and branching abilities of Perforce. This was back in 2007. The benefits however extended far beyond the core benefits that the system provided us. Whereas in VSS most development was performed against the main trunk of development (development occurred on mainline in Perforce parlance), we could begin to practice stable mainline procedures within Perforce where development would take place in development branches and once vetted through a build and QA system, promoted to mainline once deemed stable. The "copy up, merge down" process allowed us to further ensure the integrity of our mainline and allowed for development branches to catch up with mainline when it changed. We have not implemented Streams because they do not currently fit into our use of the system, but provide yet more ability to enforce process on the movement of code and maintaining the correct hierarchy of codelines. The various tools that come with Perforce out of the box such as the Merge tool, Revision graphing, stream graphing, distributed source control, Time Lapse Vies, etc are also a boon for developers as it allows them to track down where modifications to a file were received from, and by whom. It has also allowed us to improve our resilience through the use of replication servers, proxies, and in the future Edge servers (where remote sites can hold their own set of metadata [database] files while still syncing source to the primary server). Our checkpoints can happen nightly against the replica server, leaving the master server online to continue to serve users non-stop. And of course, I'll mention for a third time the Support team at Perforce, which is absolutely fantastic. ### 50. Enterprise level centralized Version Control System **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Semiconductors | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 21, 2017 **What do you like best about P4?** Perforce is a scalable system that works well in a large organization with a lot of users and different permission requirements. Integration with third-party systems like Jenkins and Jira is good. I like the Swarm review system and possible integration with Jenkins for blocking commits based on test builds. **What do you dislike about P4?** Without proper replica servers, a centralized perforce server can be slow. **Recommendations to others considering P4:** Perforce works well in an enterprise environment especially with a lot of large files. **What problems is P4 solving and how is that benefiting you?** Efficient exchange and tracking of IP in a large organization. Faster development on multi site projects. ## P4 Discussions - [What does Perforce software do?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-does-perforce-software-do) - [I have a global workforce that requires quick access to digital files. How does Helix Core provide remote teams with the files they need quickly?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/global-scale) - 1 upvote - [My team includes engineers, artists, and designers who all use their own tools. Can they version and access their files directly from their tools?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/collaboration-ba084d6b-dfbe-41c9-89f3-fa82e0611879) - 1 upvote - [My team uses Git but is looking for a VCS that can scale and work with large projects. Can Helix Core be used in conjunction with Git?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/git-60ffb9cd-2ea3-48f0-a07f-0b07ea372cda) - 1 upvote - [What are the benefits of using Perforce Helix rather than Git?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/git) - 1 upvote - [View P4 pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/p4/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-13+10%3A24%3A02+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=185e4a96-4d6e-498b-a73f-eaca2a5da08c&secure%5Btoken%5D=f5e21e22b0b8ce974cc8b9ce2f41453d5c93f2ec630ddba2d1c61e3ad052522e&format=llm_user) ## P4 Features **Functionality** - Package Management - Integration - Code Analysis - Vulnerability Checks **Management** - Package Access Control - Package Tracking - Automation - Rollback ## Top P4 Alternatives - [Azure DevOps Server](https://www.g2.com/products/azure-devops-server/reviews) - 4.2/5.0 (192 reviews) - [Bitbucket](https://www.g2.com/products/bitbucket/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (977 reviews) - [Git](https://www.g2.com/products/git/reviews) - 4.7/5.0 (517 reviews)