--- title: Subversion Reviews meta_title: 'Subversion Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 64 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Subversion works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 3.9 review_count: 64 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-12' parent_category: name: Source Code Management url: https://www.g2.com/categories/source-code-management --- # Subversion Reviews **Vendor:** The Apache Software Foundation **Category:** [Version Control Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/version-control-software) **Average Rating:** 3.9/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 64 ## About Subversion Subversion is an open source version control system. Founded in 2000 by CollabNet, Inc., the Subversion project and software have seen incredible success over the past decade. Subversion has enjoyed and continues to enjoy widespread adoption in both the open source arena and the corporate world. ## Subversion Reviews ### 1. Currently, the grey old man of SCM **Rating:** 1.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mykel A. | DevOps Computational Demonologist, Financial Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 15, 2015 **What do you like best about Subversion?** Centralized control of SCM is important to some people. The URL scheme is easy to manage and user management with Apache integration means I rarely worry about users. **What do you dislike about Subversion?** Branch management is terrible. Built-in merge isn't much better. Basically, very few modern repositories use Subversion. Most have gone to distributed systems from centralized ones. **Recommendations to others considering Subversion:** Are you sure you need a centralized SCM system? If you're not absolutely, legally bound to use centralized control, then you shouldn't. However, retraining a ton of people to use a new SCM tool isn't a good idea, either. The C/B analysis has to be done across your entire workforce. **What problems is Subversion solving and how is that benefiting you?** We were collaborating with hundreds of developers and centralized management was necessary. Github and it's like simply weren't mature enough at the time to handle the work. ### 2. Not as easy as others **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 07, 2016 **What do you like best about Subversion?** I enjoyed the speed most of all, and the overal design of the platform **What do you dislike about Subversion?** Did not get quickly to set up my environment, after thtat though had a good experience overall **What problems is Subversion solving and how is that benefiting you?** I've been developing software which required the use of the platfrom ### 3. Centralized version control for people managing development teams **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 15, 2015 **What do you like best about Subversion?** Having used a number of different version control systems, I would always consider Subversion for a general purpose SCM. It works very well with teams of varying skill set, where the individual developers need supervision, training and review, as may be the case with trainees, juniors, contractors and overseas developers. Centralized SCM means the leads and seniors are in control and can review work and manage processes such as CI, build, test automation and delivery. Subversion is free and open source software with a mature feature set, and a large number of client integrations and tools. Despite claims to the contrary, multi-site configurations with Subversions are both simple to set up and robust to operate. In Subversion, there is usually one way to do something, and to do it right. If that way is followed, the user will be blessed with success. **What do you dislike about Subversion?** Subversion's strengths may turn into a weakness when a distributed SCM is required. These are more popular in teams composed of highly skilled, individually motivated contributors. The reader must decide whether this is the case. For most professional development teams the point is moot, and subversion's maturity may be the deciding factory. **Recommendations to others considering Subversion:** This is an open source project, a number of vendors for binaries exists. Virtually every GNU/Linux distribution comes with the complete set. VisualSVN Server (free edition) is a very good start on the Windows Platform. On the client side, TortoiseSVN is the most pooular client on Windows, and it includes a CLI. Virtually every IDE has integration and tooling. **What problems is Subversion solving and how is that benefiting you?** We required centralized version control for the development of a number of commercial software projects, including integrations to bug tracking systems, continuous integration, code review and deployment. Subversion's performance is solid both on the server as well as the client side, with few developer issues. The most important benefit was that due to it's simple usage model (one way to do things right), developer training was straightforward and cost effective. From a single-server setup, I extended the deployment to a 3 site replicated Subversion with transparent write-through proxying for committing from anywhere and fast reads from the LAN. Full disclosure: This review is based on my prior professional experience, and I have since become a code contributor to the Apache Subversion open source project. ### 4. use it almost every day **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 15, 2015 **What do you like best about Subversion?** easy to control the source code in a team in different areas **What do you dislike about Subversion?** can't fetch the log of a branch few years before. I work on a program from 2012, and can't fetch the log of a branch of a project sometime. **What problems is Subversion solving and how is that benefiting you?** our team is global and this a very useful tool for use to work together and cooperate easily. ### 5. Gets the job done **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Restaurants | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 20, 2016 **What do you like best about Subversion?** It's highly functional, and easy to use. There is little concern as far as getting it setup or working. Works great across multiple OS and environments. **What do you dislike about Subversion?** It's not the fastest, easiest to integrate, or even the most versatile repository management software. **Recommendations to others considering Subversion:** Make sure you are on the newest version available. We are currently stuck on an older version (1.6.X) and I believe a lot of the areas we suffer in are due to this. It works great for enterprise level use however, and overall gets the job done. **What problems is Subversion solving and how is that benefiting you?** We currently use this to manage our companies repository. It is heavily used and handles a lot of load pretty well. Very simple to get new users setup. ### 6. Source/Version Control **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Blake C. | Application Developer, Financial Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 09, 2015 **What do you like best about Subversion?** Our version of SVN has integrated Windows support, so unlike like git, there is no need to push and pull code through a command line interface. **What do you dislike about Subversion?** There is a little bit of a learning curve when using SVN through the Windows interface, but it is still easier than git. **Recommendations to others considering Subversion:** Use tortoiseSVN with SVN **What problems is Subversion solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use this product to pull and push code to a central repository. We also use it as source control when working on code. ### 7. Used Subversion as primary VCS for more than 8 years **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 18, 2015 **What do you like best about Subversion?** - easy to learn - easy to setup on own environment - flexibility in setup (configure hocks, access privileges etc.) - good GUIs (Versions.app etc.) **What do you dislike about Subversion?** - commit conflicts - performance in general - repository size **Recommendations to others considering Subversion:** Check out Git as well. **What problems is Subversion solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are a team of five and we work on mid sized web development projects with Subversion. From time to time we include external developers into our own Subversion environment. ### 8. Subversion Review **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Federico B. | Software Engineer, Consumer Electronics, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 15, 2015 **What do you like best about Subversion?** Newer system based on CVS, Includes atomic operations, Cheaper branch operations, Wide variety of plug-ins for IDEs, Does not use peer-to-peer model. **What do you dislike about Subversion?** Still contains bugs relating to renaming files and directories, Insufficient repository management commands, Slower comparative speed **What problems is Subversion solving and how is that benefiting you?** Collaboration is a fundamental part of Software Development. Having control of what's happening in your application, make everything fast and secure. ### 9. Good code repository, but terrible for document storage **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dusty J. | Principal Consultant, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 28, 2015 **What do you like best about Subversion?** Like any version control system, I liked the ability to maintain a single copy of documentation (requirement docs, data models, etc.), rather than having 10 copies of the same document, each with a different "version" number. Subversion provides a "lock" safeguard to prevent multiple people from making updates to the same item at the same time. I found it fairly simple to be able to locate the previous version of a document. **What do you dislike about Subversion?** Since you maintain a "working copy" on your desktop, I've broken the fragile link between the desktop app and the online repository. I've broken Subversion about every way possible, and learned how to manually remove the "sync" feature for the folders in my Subversion repository so that I could re-sync my folders properly. In my organization, I found that few people actually used the lock feature before making changes. I found that the merge feature wasn't as robust as I would have liked. If I'm merging a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with another similar Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, I'd expect that to work. **Recommendations to others considering Subversion:** Subversion was a step up from CVS, which the company used previously, but the version-control system of choice today is Git. It's built to work with the open-source community in mind, meaning it's robust enough to allow just about anyone to contribute code and make changes to the code base. **What problems is Subversion solving and how is that benefiting you?** Developers were using Subversion as a code repository and were quite satisfied with it at the time. Other resources were using it for version control of documentation, and finding merge issues for Microsoft Word & Excel documents. We found that Subversion was never intended as a robust document repository. ### 10. Subversion - Mariellen **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mariellen P. | Senior Quality Assurance Engineer, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 10, 2015 **What do you like best about Subversion?** Very basic, very simple. Command line mode does everything you need. Nothing complicated about it. **What do you dislike about Subversion?** No real workflow and it doesn't tie into other systems. If you need something quick and easy, subversion is your best bet. **Recommendations to others considering Subversion:** This text is already in English and does not require translation. **What problems is Subversion solving and how is that benefiting you?** Tracking software incidents. Traceability. ### 11. Efficiency for source code merging amongst development team **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 18, 2015 **What do you like best about Subversion?** An increase in efficiency due to being able to submit multiple changes to the same line of code from within the development team **What do you dislike about Subversion?** Performance can sometimes be an issues especially when observing particular file types **Recommendations to others considering Subversion:** NA **What problems is Subversion solving and how is that benefiting you?** As referenced, coding efficiency which allows visability of changes within the code and amongst the development team ### 12. Development manager and SubVersion custodian **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Simon H. | Development Manager, Internet, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 07, 2015 **What do you like best about Subversion?** It can store anything easily. Easy to setup. **What do you dislike about Subversion?** Merging algorithms often show conflicts that are too easy to resolve **Recommendations to others considering Subversion:** Move to a DVCS instead as SubVersion is non-DVCS. If you do temporarily need to version control binaries, SubVersion is far more suited than Git. There are a few Free subversion providers available, but they are slowly disappearing. **What problems is Subversion solving and how is that benefiting you?** How to version changes in code ### 13. Seasoned Subversion **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 20, 2015 **What do you like best about Subversion?** Very clean. Easy to understand and use. The Subversion plugin with Intellij is excellent. TortoiseSVN is also very helpful. Very clean. Easy to understand and use. The Subversion plugin with Intellij is excellent. TortoiseSVN is also very helpful. **What do you dislike about Subversion?** tag vs branch are almost the same, distinction between them will be helpful. Maybe better overall documentation. tag vs branch are almost the same, distinction between them will be helpful. Maybe better overall documentation. **Recommendations to others considering Subversion:** n/a **What problems is Subversion solving and how is that benefiting you?** code revision and integration between team members. ### 14. Good code repository with lots off features. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jayesh V. | Software Development Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 29, 2015 **What do you like best about Subversion?** its very good tool for marinating and keeping our source code safe. Its best suitable when development is done by group of people. All the functionality tortoise in windows is best features of SVN. **What do you dislike about Subversion?** username is case sensitive. So some times its make confusion. Also merging from trunk to branches will takes some time and some times it fails. **Recommendations to others considering Subversion:** its awesome tool for managing source code And every one should have to used it .. **What problems is Subversion solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using for maintaining our source code repo. ## Subversion Discussions - [What is Subversion used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/subversion-what-is-subversion-used-for) - [Why you should switch from Subversion to Git?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/why-you-should-switch-from-subversion-to-git) - [What is meant by SVN?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-meant-by-svn) - [Is Subversion still used?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/is-subversion-still-used) - [What is subversion used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-subversion-used-for) - [View Subversion pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/subversion/reviews?page=2§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-13+09%3A00%3A13+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=d144cbe2-3213-4d4b-b90b-8c263db2c7c3&secure%5Btoken%5D=b56b18e0244702c66abbb255792ec52cc845f5ad164dc4a9926b5cf16f8e4558&format=llm_user) ## Top Subversion Alternatives - [Git](https://www.g2.com/products/git/reviews) - 4.7/5.0 (522 reviews) - [Azure DevOps Server](https://www.g2.com/products/azure-devops-server/reviews) - 4.2/5.0 (192 reviews) - [P4](https://www.g2.com/products/p4/reviews) - 4.2/5.0 (93 reviews)