P4 Reviews & Product Details

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Perforce upgrades could be more automatic, but I like the security of knowing what versions are running. We Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Being able to shelve changes and unshelve them on other branches and other machines is fantastic. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The UI can be a little slow. The fuel gauge in the bottom right of the window seems to bear no relation to reality. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some of the IDE plugins (third party) can be immature and sometimes buggy. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I wish P4 had its own depot hosting service that could accomodate out very large repository Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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 Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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 Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.