25 Best DevOps Tools for Agile Projects

25 Best DevOps Tools for Agile Projects in 2022 How to Choose the Best DevOps Tool for Each DevOps Stage?DevOps Stage 1: Plan DevOps Stage 2: Code DevOps Stage 3: Build DevOps Stage 4: Test DevOps Stage 5: Release DevOps Stage 6: Deploy DevOps Stage 7: Operate DevOps Stage 8: Monitor Honorable Mentions Useful Resources:

25 Best DevOps Tools for Agile Projects in 2022

Ever since the Belgian consultant project manager and an agile practitioner, Patrick Debois, coined the term “DevOps” to resolve the conflict, “It is not my code; it’s your machines,” increasing the transparency of the integration and interaction between business and technical people, the DevOps framework has played a pivotal role in the end-to-end responsibility. Numerous tools have entered this 8-step framework bringing their unique expertise in specific areas, while others have played within the ecosystem touching more than one segment of this framework as part of the more extensive application lifecycle management.

Consequently, delivering on the DASA’s DevOps principle of customer-centric action and code resilience holds the entire team accountable for the end-to-end implementation requires the right choice of tool. The right tools augment productivity, increase transparency, reduce the time for your products & services to go to market, and improve the KPIs contributing to the value generation process. Our Comprehensive List of DevOps Tools is one step towards understanding this landscape.

How to Choose the Best DevOps Tool for Each DevOps Stage?

The following factors should be considered while choosing the best DevOps tool set:

Integration with other tools

Robust API support

Cross-platform support

Automation of different processes of software development

Customizations offered

Easy to use and manage with a central dashboard

Performance

Price

Support for continuous integration and continuous delivery

Cloud support

Easy and real-time collaboration features

Bug detection and bug fixing capabilities

Monitoring and analytics features

Customer support

DevOps DevOps Stage	Potential Tools	Honorable Mentions
Plan	Asana, Spira, Jira	Smartsheet, Airtable, ClickUp, Monday.com
Code	GitLab, GitHub, BitBucket	IntelliJ, Microsoft Visual Studio
Build	Jenkins, CircleCI, TeamCity	Bamboo, SonarQube, GitLab, Codeship
Test	SpiraTest, JUnit, Rapise, Jmeter, Ranorex	JMeter, Selenium, BrowserStack, Tosca, TestSuite
Release	Jenkins, CircleCI, PyCharm	GitLab, BitRise, AWS Cloud Formation, BitBucket, CircleCI, Artifactory
Deploy	Docker, Kubernetes, AWS	Mesos, Harness, Flagsmith
Operate	Puppet, Ansible, Chef	GitHub, GitLab
Monitor	New Relic, Splunk, DataDog	Nagios, GitHub, GitLab

DevOps Stage 1: Plan

1. Asana

Asana is available on desktop and mobile platforms and is a good tool for managing a list of tasks within a project sharing tasks, deadlines, and notes. It integrates easily with many other tools in the DevOps process and outside - including but not limited to Atlassian tools, Google products, GitLab, GitHub, and Trello. The tool specializes in helping teams effectively manage and track their projects day by day through an efficient dashboard and organized project groups. A great feature of Asana is that it easily integrates with your email, allowing users to create and assign tasks from sent messages outside the platform. Such features allow the centralization of all team communication, even that from outside programs or teams.

Smaller teams are recommended standard Asana (free) while large teams would work better with Asana Premium ($10.99 per user, per month, billed annually) or Asana Business ($24.99 per user, per month, billed annually).

2. SpiraPlan

SpiraPlan is Inflectra’s enterprise-wide program planning and management platform with an integrated application lifecycle management functionality to plan for and manage projects, programs, risks, and portfolios. With SpiraPlan, manage your tasks, issues, code, templates, baselines, and workflows with high confidence and reliability with planning boards supporting agile, kanban, scrum and waterfall approaches. SpiraPlan is framework agnostic and supports plan-driven and adaptive approaches. It helps you track your progress against the planned work with powerful dashboards and real-time, portfolio-level reporting.

SpiraPlan is available both on-premise (air-gapped) and cloud versions and can be evaluated with a 30-day trial.

3. Jira

Atlassian’s JIRA specializes in tracking your project and the statuses of different issues. One of its best features is that it easily integrates with Atlassian’s products, such as Bitbucket, which allows for a completely centralized DevOps process and a smooth transition between steps.

JIRA costs $7 per user per month on their standard plan and $14 per user per month for their premium plan.

4. ProofHub

ProofHub is an all-in-one project management tool that helps teams worldwide achieve their goals. ProofHub is used by everyone from marketing to construction to race car teams to keep track of their daily tasks. The tool can be integrated with third-party applications like Google Drive, FreshBooks, DropBox, etc.

ProofHub allows teams to manage tasks, facilitate discussions and conversations, get a bird's eye view of projects and ensure everyone meets deadlines. The tool is simple to use and has a short learning curve. On top of that, the tool comes with a flat pricing plan with unlimited users and no dedicated per user fee.

ProofHub is a highly scalable solution for coordinating project activities, whether you have a team of 10, 50, or 500 project team members. Managers can use it to manage a wide range of project tasks while maintaining complete control over project communication.

DevOps Stage 2: Code

4. GitHub

GitHub is a code hosting tool that allows for easy collaboration within the DevOps process. In addition to the distributed version control, branched code history, and source code management (SCM) functionalities that it shares with Git, GitHub also includes collaborative coding between team members facilitating automation, continuous integration (CI), and continuous delivery (CD). Rapid iterations to the code will send off notifications to all developers involved, altering them of changes, and with its branched code history functionalities, code can be quickly restored if an error occurs.

GitHub starts free for individuals but for advanced team collaboration, $40 per user/year will be required.

5. GitLab

GitLab is a special tool on our list because the platform includes functionalities for every step of the DevOps process. From Planning to Coding to Testing to Monitoring, this all-in-one platform allows for users to not have to hop between platforms or struggle to find tools that integrate with one another- all just to become DevOps. GitLab simplifies the process, with no worry about finding the right integrations or getting the ok on 5+ tools. Beyond that, GitLab also has built-in automated security and code vulnerability management that allows for a steady pace for your DevOps process and a secure project to boot.

For teams, we recommend GitLab premium ($19 per user/month) but for company-wide work, we recommend GitLab Ultimate ($99 per user/month).

6. TaraVault

TaraVault is our enterprise-grade cloud-based source code management solution that is fully integrated with SpiraTeam and SpiraPlan. It provides you with the choice of Git and Subversion repositories. You can choose Git for distributed version control with powerful branching and merging capabilities, or Subversion when you need centralized versioning or support for large binary files and media assets. TaraVault's integration with the Spira platform lets you manage your source code repositories, link source code revisions, and ensure quality before you deploy.

7. Bitbucket

Atlassian’s Bitbucket is a web-based hosting tool. Similar to the positives of using Jira in planning, using Bitbucket allows for easy integration with other Atlassian tools to complete the DevOps process. Code history and changes are saved and an effective code review system is present to allow for easy editing and reviewing of past code. Beyond code management, BitBucket includes functionalities for planning, collaboration, testing, and deployment. This coupled with other Atlassian tools allows for a comprehensive DevOps cycle that easily integrates with one another. Similar to GitHub, BitBucket has private repositories. A loved function by users is the inbuilt CI/CD functionality that allows users to build, test, and deploy all in one app.

BitBucket has all the core features you could want in a code & build DevOps tool but its easy integration with many products and integrated CI/CD makes it a loved tool across the industry.

We recommend BitBucket Standard (starting at $3 per user/month) for basic teams and BitBucket Premium (starting at $6 per user/month) for teams looking for all the added functionality.

DevOps Stage 3: Build

8. Jenkins

Jenkins is an open-source tool that the DevOps community loves for its support in continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). Even with its many features, Jenkins is easily set up and configurable and cleanly distributes work across multiple machines to keep confusion to a minimum. Their pipeline feature allows developers to have code automatically saved in the repository, fetch testing reports, and run project test cases. Supported by numerous plugins and coupled with the instant feedback that allows for developers to quickly fix broken builds, easy customizability, and large integration options, Jenkins is a great tool for your DevOps process.

9. CircleCI

CircleCI is not an open-source tool but it enables rapid software development with its CI/CD capabilities across the phases of coding, testing, and deployment. It integrates with GitHub and BitBucket to create the software builds as soon as new code is committed to the repository. The continuous integration component can be on-premise or cloud-hosted. With features such as containerization, testing, debugging, automated parallelism, continuous and branch-specific deployment, notifications support, and automated merging,

CircleCI offers 6,000 build minutes free per month and starts at $15 per month for its cloud performance plan.

10. TeamCity

TeamCity is a commercial non-open source CI tool from JetBrains. It runs on Java but integrates well with Visual Studio and runs on both Windows and Linux platforms. It supports both GitLab and Bitbucket and allows running parallel builds simultaneously on different environments. Its distinguishing features include cascading project settings from parent projects to subprojects and flexible user management.

Its free plan includes 3 build agents with 100 build configurations. For additional build agents, TeamCity price starts at $299 with its enterprise plan starting at $1999.

DevOps Stage 4: Test

11. SpiraTest

SpiraTest is a QA and test management platform meant for end-to-end software testing. It includes a robust set of building test cases, linking existing modular test cases as test steps, packaging test cases as test sets for scenario testing, customizable parameters for test steps at test cases and test set levels, runtime configurations of test sets, exploratory testing, and support for automation.

SpiraTest is available both on-premise and cloud versions and can be evaluated with a 30-day trial.

12. JUnit

JUnit is an open-source testing tool that allows for the running of repeatable tests. The testing framework supports various test annotations that allow for easier unit test cases to be developed. Like many other tools on this list, its many integrations make it easy to mesh with the rest of your DevOps process. Integrations include Jenkins, GIT, and more.

13. JMeter

Apache Jmeter is an open-source testing tool that is focused on measuring website performance for teams. It’s often integrated with Jenkins, another DevOps tool, and fits into the DevOps lifecycle. The tool allows for performing load testing for different server types. While the tool does have a focus on website performance measurement, it includes functionalities that allow users to perform functional and automated testing for projects.

14. Rapise

Rapise is a test automation suite for web, mobile, desktop, and APIs. Rapise does not just test but it understands helping to manage tests spanning multiple technologies at once. Using Rapise, anyone can automate. Its record-and-play functionality, easy-to-use spreadsheet-based editor, and advanced JavaScript-based engine allow scriptless automation support for the novices and more advanced, flexible, and extensible test framework and APIs support for experts. Rapise supports HTML5 controls, multiple browsers, Ajax frameworks, and hybrid web pages with Java applets as well as popular packages such as Microsoft Dynamics 365. It supports iOS and Android mobile platforms along with simulated devices with Appium. On the desktop, Rapise supports Microsoft Windows, Java Swing, packaged applications such as Microsoft Dynamics AX and NAV, Oracle Fusion ERP, and SAP.

15. Ranorex

Ranorex is an automated testing tool that allows for testing on both real devices and simulators. It’s often claimed as an all-in-one tool for your testing needs due to its capabilities from everything from cross-browser to cross-device testing. With all test automation needs packaged together in a single license, it is a great addition to a widespread team or company that tackles different applications. Ranorex easily integrates with various tools, from test management (TestRail, SpiraTest, SpiraTeam, etc.) to version control (Git, Subversion, etc.) to Issue & Defect Management (JIRA, Bugzilla, etc.).

Ranorex starts with its perpetual studio license at $3,950 binding the license to one physical machine. For virtual machines, the enterprise license starting at $6,590 is recommended.

DevOps Stage 5: Release

16. PyCharm

PyCharm is developed by JetBrains as an integrated development environment (IDE) for Python. It features code completion, code navigation, safe refactoring, and smart debugging. The Professional Edition comes with wide support for Python web frameworks, modern JavaScript development, as well as with advanced database tools and scientific tools integrations.

PyCharm IDE for professional developers starts at $199 per user for the first year.

DevOps Stage 6: Deploy

17. Docker

Docker is a tool leading the charge for containerization in the IT industry. Docker containers include everything needed to run an application all in a single package, from libraries to source code to supporting files. Each package is integrated with strong security and the container format allows for accelerated workflows as well as lower infrastructure costs. They support virtual machine environments, automated app development, and more. A large plus of using Docker is that it works with any language, which often can be a trouble for teams using more than one language or lesser-used ones. While not the only containerization tool in the industry, Docker stands apart from the others with its comprehensive packages and additional features that aid in the quick and easy release and deployment of their applications.

We recommend Docker Team ($7 user/month) for small to midsize teams and Docker Large (price upon request) for larger teams and organizations.

18. Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open-source container tool used for automating scaling, management, and deployment. Working especially well with larger teams, Kubernetes helps streamline complex and large-scale projects for the user’s ease. The tool includes automated distribution, allowing for deployment across multiple machines at the same time. Different from other tools in this category, Kubernetes allows team members to make changes to applications or configurations at the same time that it’s being monitored. With self-healing abilities available and the automatic mounting of a chosen storage system, Kubernetes builds upon the successful features of tools like Docker while still providing special functionality. It can also work side by side with other container tools, such as the aforementioned Docker.

19. AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a web hosting service that is loved for its scalability and reliability. The flexible features allow for easy scalability for teams of all sizes and the cost-effective solutions provided are similarly helpful. There is no worry in setting up IT infrastructure due to the cloud setup, allowing to cut wasted time.

DevOps Stage 7: Operate

20. Puppet

Puppet is a configuration management platform that is used for configuring, deploying, and managing user servers. One of its most-loved features is its easy scalability and support of dynamic scaling on a need-only basis. Such functionalities allow for easy changing of team and project sizes without compromising time or cost. Puppet includes functionalities for master-slave infrastructure and can handle hybrid infrastructure as needed. A large plus is that the tool automates and simplifies manual tasks. Overall, Puppet is a great tool for teams that have mixed environments, need easy scalability for their projects, and manage complex configurations in an easy-to-understand way.

21. Ansible

Ansible is an open-source community platform that connects the entire IT infrastructure to simplify the automation of continuous and complex deployments. It provides a simple automation language facilitating the configuration of application deployment and workflow orchestration through an agentless architecture across the enterprise infrastructure by allowing flexible daily task automation.

22. Chef

Chef’s primary goal is to effectively adopt a DevSecOps approach to deploy applications and maintain IT infrastructure with security by design principles. By defining security and compliance as human-readable code, Chef ensures that security and compliance standards are upheld for easy audit while supporting the flexibility of on-premise, cloud, and hybrid deployments to address business needs.

DevOps Stage 8: Monitor

23. New Relic

New Relic is an analytics tool that measures the performance and customer satisfaction of web applications. The application performance monitoring (APM) tool gives real-time data to the team, allowing for web trends to be apparent and for teams to make the needed changes from said data. New Relic supports end-to-end transaction tracing, allowing teams to see where delays and errors occur in the process and fix them more quickly. A large plus for visual teams is the different color-coded graphs, charts, and trend reports that are generated from application monitoring.

24. Splunk

Splunk is a useful monitoring tool that translates machine data to be more usable and accessible. The tool monitors the project infrastructure on all levels - from physical to in the cloud. A loved feature is an ability for AIOps with machine learning that allows for automatic prevention or fixing of certain errors, helped by the predictive alerting functionalities. Knowledge objects can also be made for operational intelligence projects and accelerated innovation within the tool allows for modern applications and webfaces.

25. DataDog

Datadog summarizes metrics and events across the full stack of tools in the DevOps cycle. Users can trace requests from end to end across distributed systems, track application performance with auto-generated service overviews, graph and alert on error rates or latency percentiles, and code using open source tracing libraries. Users can also search, filter, and analyze logs for troubleshooting and open-ended data exploration, automatically collecting logs from all services, applications, and platforms. These observations can be summarized in dashboards with visibility across the teams to see how alerts are being distributed through notifications and addressed.