Axosoft OnTime vs Countersoft Gemini [closed]

Question

We are "upgrading" the systems at the company, moving from SourceSafe/BugNet/... (yeahy!) to some more serious systems. TFS is too expensive. We have come down to comparing OnTime vs Gemini. They both seem OK with an "OK" price-tag. We will of-course download and try them out both, but it would be nice with comments from experienced users. To me, they seem quite equal.

Has anyone used both, and can compare the two against each-other? If you would recommend one of these, which one, and why? Any other experiences with these systems? (Especially Gemini, seems hard to find reviews regarding this-one..?)

(We are talking about a smaller dev-team, max 8 dev in a project at a time, a couple of testers and some stakeholders/managers etc... Several projects running simultaneously. Need to be able to integrate to Visual Studio, Subversion with feed-back to the issue tracker etc)

Thanks for your time!

Ruckus

So what did you end up going with and how has it turned out? I'm at this same situation now, and I'd like to learn from what you've done. – Corporeal

Answer 1

We use OnTime here - it has a good workflow environment but be warned that it does not scale well at all. We currently have 35 licenses with only 10 to 15 users online at any one time and it struggles.

Also be careful of the sales pitch for using the web or "remote" servers for distributed environments - it works fine with the demo/eval database but slows to a crawl once you start getting a decent amount of items in the database. All you have to do is look at a SQL profiler and you'll see the number of calls made to the DB.

If you profile the web services you'll also see that the web and remote environments have not been optimized at all to batch calls, so as soon as you move to an environment where there is any kind of communication latency it crawls.

Axosoft's support has been less than helpful on this as well - they strangely do not view these as bugs and instead view this as something we should expect in these environments. We have contacted their support over a number of other things as well and it is surprising how poor it is over other things as well.

Axosoft's excuse is that we should have found these things out in the eval period, but I don't know how they expected us to scale the data to production environment levels within a 30 day eval period...

We have been forced to revert to using the WinForm client over Citrix for our distributed teams.

Overall - it is a nice application if you have a small team in a single location. But if you have larger teams or people spread out in multiple locations I would avoid it at all costs.

Andyane

"does not scale" - you should highlight this part in bold. :) – Gravimetric

Answer 2

Gemini is great, we selected gemini over many other bug tracking systems...

main features we liked:
user interface
extensibility (API's, REST based)
addon products (visual studio, outlook plugins)
source control integration (subversion)

source code available (asp.net c#), easy to setup and great support.

Nickelplate

Answer 3

For a broader comparison with Gemini bug tracker and others in the same space, wikipedias Bug tracking comparison page might be of use. Although I don't know of a direct, in depth Gemini / OnTime comparison.

Sedgewick

Answer 4

Take a look at Project Kaiser (short demo available). It is fast, web-based, supports embedded wiki, forums and chats. And it is free for 5 users :)

Josephinejosephson

And how exactly does it relate to either Ontime or Gemini? – Gravimetric