Plastic SCM. Is it the right solution? [closed]

Question

I know there are some questions already regarding Plastic SCM, but they are over a year old. Has anyone used Plastic SCM lately? What do you think about it.

I have used git, and I am currently using Hg. I love the Hg source control, but Visual Studio integration is not great, and related task/project management tools have not been great. Plastic SCM was recommended, but I like to get a community view on it. - And no, I don't care about grammar on the website. I prefer well engineered solutions to well marketed websites.

Answer 1

Yes, we use Plastic SCM (small team of 5) for 2 years already and it works great and even gets better every update!

Support is very good (within an hour or at least the same day a response!).

Also branching and merging works very good in practice. Every programmer can work on it's own in his own branch (using branch per task pattern). Such a big relief. When you switch to another branch all changes are automatically shelved/stored on the server. When you switch back, the changes are reloaded, which is a really nice feature! You don't have to worry to loose changes, because Plastic handles everything very good.

Without doubt Plastic SCM is the best Version Control System I've ever seen (used MS Sourcesafe, CVS, SVN, StarTeam). Also heard of other's the branch support is much better than MS Team Foundation.

Answer 2

We have used Plastic SCM for a few years already and it has evolved a lot. The integration with Visual Studio is pretty good, you have all the graphical views of their visual client inside VS.

The biggest challenge was the switch to the branch per task thing, kind of a best practice to use it. But now when we have to use SVN for a project, we miss our task branches.

Answer 3

we use Plastic SCM allready for over two years. it's probably the best product for doing SCM. Having used PVCS, Subversion and ClearCase in the past. I definitely recommend using the branch per task approach used in Plastic. It makes your integration work so easy.

Using scrum or another extreem programming process, plastic enables you to control the code in a very easy way.

Plastic is also evolving very fast and has a very strong technical team behind its development.

Answer 4

I made some investigation, in 2010, for my company considering PlasticSCM as option. I found some places to improvement which was critical for our company. I made this being in touch with really fantastic, extraordinary and responsive Plastic SCM Support Team.

The problem is missing triggers for push/pull operations. Also internal/external API is not done yet (but You can find some examples of plugins available at PlasticSCM's forum). Without hooks working on central server there is no way to use Plastic SCM in distributed scenario at our company. That is why we choose Git.

Second thing is not missing, but not released support for PostgreSQL. I red on forum You can ask about such ability - and PlasticSCM posses such code somewhere.

PlasticSCM contain so many functions available as plugin and so rich GUI that You want to implement something more "inside". But we still wait for some API to released. I can't wait this.

There is also no floating/enterprise licences and current, "per user", licence model is very expensive. Of course You can contact with sales :)

Answer 5

I have been using plastic now for about 3 years. It simply is the best Version Control Software out there. Excellent support and responsive feedback. Now it integrates with Git also. Excellent UI and all commandline capable as well. Xlinks are a very cool feature and now you can have writeable XLinks.