20 Best Version Control Tools Reviewed For 2024

New Relic is a software analytics product that's all about providing real-time insights into your software performance. It's not just a version control tool, it's more like a Swiss Army knife for your software, helping you monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize your applications.

Why I Picked New Relic: New Relic's mobile monitoring involves a comprehensive examination of the adoption and operational effectiveness among different iterations of your application. This encompasses key versions distinguished by factors such as interaction duration, active user sessions, and error occurrences. On the Versions page, there exists a table that juxtaposes each version based on its creation date, average memory and CPU usage, mean sessions per minute, as well as the average requests per minute (RPM) per active application. For more in-depth insights into a particular version, the option to delve into supplementary details is also available.

New Relic Standout Features & Integrations 

Features include the ability to drill down into your data. You can get really granular with your analysis, which is super helpful when you're trying to troubleshoot a specific issue or optimize a particular aspect of your software. Plus, it's got some helpful, custom alerting capabilities, so you can stay on top of any issues that arise.

Integrations include over 500 apps that include cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, CI/CD tools like Jenkins, CircleCI, and Travis CI, communication tools like Slack and PagerDuty, and other monitoring and analytics tools like Grafana, Datadog, and Splunk. It also has an API you can use to build custom integrations.

Datadog is a leading monitoring and security platform that provides the monitoring capabilities you need to see inside your infrastructure at any scale and from anywhere.

Why I picked Datadog: This platform is on my list due to its unique infrastructure monitoring capabilities. It gives you visibility into your infrastructure performance and lets you know when there is a need to optimize anything with minimal maintenance and unparalleled breadth of coverage. Datadog offers real-time visibility, metrics, visualizations, and alerts to help you keep track of your cloud or hybrid environments and manage changes effectively.

Datadog Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features include container monitoring, CI visibility, and database monitoring. Datadog provides your agile team with comprehensive visibility into your CI environments, helping you to streamline your CI/CD workflows. It helps you track the health and performance of your codebase and also allows you to monitor your CI data by repository, branch, or commit. Comprehensive CI visibility makes it easier to fix issues, reduce CI costs, and ship better products.

Integrations are available with a wide range of third-party tools, including Slack, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, GitHub, Jira, Microsoft Teams, Rippling, Zendesk Suite, Google Cloud, and MySQL.

CVS, Concurrent Versions System, is one of the open-source projects that offer version control functionalities. It helps developers to collaborate and function as a single team with the version history stored on a single central server.

Why I picked CVS: In addition to helping you record and keep track of source code and documents, CVS makes collaboration among remote teams effortless and very efficient. It saves version history on a single, centralized server. Developers have access to the resources they need regardless of their geographical location. This makes working as a single team very streamlined.

It comes with unreserved checkouts, making it possible for more than one programmer to work on the same files concurrently.

CVS Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features: CVS allows developers or teams to maintain their version of the files. Through CVS’s vendor branches, you can import a version from another team, and then CVS can merge the modifications from the vendor branch with the latest files. This version control system stands out with its CVS Help and Bug Reports, which handles requests and bug requests for free on a volunteer basis, on the CVS mailing lists.

Integrations include Rational Rhapsody, FogBugz, SpiraDocs, Jira, and Collaborator.

This is a free and open-source distributed version control tool designed to help developers manage coding projects (small and large) with speed and efficiency.

Why I picked Git: Git is on my list because it offers industry-standard version control capabilities for free. I also considered Git because global giant companies, like Google, Microsoft, and Netflix, are using it. Git is easy to learn and has a very small footprint with ultra-fast performance.

Git is designed from the ground up to perform with exceptional speed and efficiency. Most of its operations are executed locally, making it very fast since there is no need to communicate with a server somewhere. It can handle large repositories as it was built to work on the Linux kernel. In addition, the overhead of runtimes that come with high-level languages is reduced since Git is written in C.

Git Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features that set Git apart include cheap local branching and convenient staging areas. Git’s branching and merging model allows you to create multiple local branches that are entirely independent of each other. This empowers you to execute frictionless context switching, role-based codelines, feature-based workflow, and disposable experimentation.

Git has an outstanding feature known as Staging Area or Index. Staging Area is an intermediate area where commits can be formatted and reviewed prior to completing the commit. This capability enables developers to quickly stage some of their files and commit them without committing all of the other files that are modified in their working directory.

Integrations include Datadog, GitHub, TIBCO Data Virtualization, Visual Studio Code, Coalesce, Telerik, TestComplete, and Sisense.

This is an enterprise-level configuration management tool that offers controlled access to software assets. IBM Rational ClearCase offerings include automated workspace management, secure version management, and build auditing.

Why I picked Rational ClearCase: This software gives you better control of your development activities. It allows you to manage personal workspaces and offers access to the file and directory versions you need. Rational ClearCase helps you meet compliance requirements by providing user authentication and audit trails all with minimal administrative challenges.

Another thing that sets this tool apart is that it offers improved time to value. It helps developers avoid mistakes, minimize bugs, and spot errors in code earlier.

Rational ClearCase Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features: Rational ClearCase provides developers with scalable deployment. It supports thousands of users that are handling terabytes of data at a wide range of sites. With this tool, you also enjoy security version management and IP protection with a centralized repository in which you can capture and version assets with maximum security.

Integrations include ClearQuest, Apex, ClearDDTS, PurifyPlus, Rose, RequisitePro, and Rose RealTime.

Mercurial is a distributed source control management system designed to manage development projects of any size. It's free, easy to use, and comes with an intuitive interface.

Why I picked Mercurial: This version control solution is fast, powerful, and capable of handling projects of any size and kind. Mercurial supports a wide range of workflows; this allows you to use the system in ways that suit your project and your team’s preferences. You can enhance Mercurial’s capabilities with extensions.

Mercurial Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features: Mercurial provides a simple and detailed tutorial on how to version control your documents. Its comprehensive guide provides the information new and existing users need to maximize the tool’s features. With Mercurial, committing, branching, and merging are fast and cheap due to its distributed architecture.

Integrations include IntelliJ IDEA, Black Duck, QF-Test, Coverity, TestComplete, and RAD Studio. Mercurial has a wide range of other extensions, including Bugzilla, Balckbox, Censor, Churn, Clonebundles, and Githelp.

Apache Subversion is a feature-rich version control system originally designed to replace CVS. It's an enterprise-level, centralized, open-source version control tool that supports the needs of a wide variety of users and projects.

Why I picked Subversion: In addition to industry-leading version control capabilities, Subversion allows file locking. This feature lets you lock files so that developers can be alerted when other users are attempting to edit the same file. This prevents the modification of certain files by unauthorized users.

The tool also offers merge tracking, which provides automated assistance with managing the flow of modifications between lines of development and with the merging of branches back into their sources.

Subversion Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features include interactive conflict resolution, atomic commits, and cheap branching and tagging. Subversion supports interactive conflict resolution as one of the ways of fixing conflicting changes. Atomic commits entail that no part of a commit becomes active or takes effect until the entire commit has succeeded. Moreover, common operations are versioned, including copying, deleting, and renaming. 

Integrations include ReqView, Alert Logic MDR, TIBCO Data Virtualization, Coverity, Collaborator, Visual Expert, C++Builder, devZing, Kanbanize, and Allstacks.  

Unity Version Control, powered by Plastic SCM technology, is designed to offer developers version control solutions they need to overcome game development challenges. Plastic SCM is now a part of Unity DevOps after it was acquired by Unity in 2020.

Why I picked Unity Version Control: It’s a scalable version control and source code management solution specially designed for game development studios. It features optimized workflows for artists and programmers. Unity Version Control helps developers reduce conflicts and speed up production by providing industry-standard branching and merging capabilities. 

It enables you to set up dedicated cloud servers to empower your teams to collaborate effectively. Your team members can collaborate and share resources from anywhere in the world, regardless of the complexity of the project.

Unity Version Control Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features: It comes with built-in capabilities for handling the complexities of game development. As a result, its speed and performance are not impacted when it handles big files and huge repos. This system is designed to handle large files and repos. It also gives you the flexibility to code in a centralized or distributed environment with full branching and merging solutions.

Integrations: It allows you to integrate with tools for issue tracking, collaboration, communication, CI, IDEs, and more. Key integrations include Unity, Rider, TeamCity, Bamboo, Jira, and Unreal Engine.

Perforce Helix Core is a version control system that allows you to version everything in one place without limits. It provides the tooling you need to accelerate innovation at scale, manage your teams, and store and track changes to your digital assets.

Why I picked Helix Core: The platform streamlines software development processes by helping you store and version everything in one place. With Helix Core, you can save time and resources by tracking code modifications and other digital assets from a central point. It’s scalable so you don’t have to worry about outgrowing the tool or sacrificing performance as your project needs continue to evolve.

Helix Core Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features: It lets you collaborate securely with your team members. Users (global teams and stakeholders) can only gain access to what they need. IPs of team members stay secure. Helix Core implements standard security measures to keep your source code and other assets secure. Additionally, it versions in the background, enabling you to focus on your work instead of your tools.

Integrations: Helix Core has 30+ integrations, including Jira, Unreal Engine, Jenkins, IntelliJ IDEA, Slack, Unity, ActiveState, Adobe, AWS, and Bamboo.

AWS CodeCommit is a managed source code control service. It allows you to host very scalable private Git repositories and provides collaborative features for working together on code.

Why I picked AWS CodeCommit: It makes things a lot easier for developers by getting rid of the need to host, maintain, backup, or scale their source control infrastructure. AWS CodeCommit improves collaboration, enabling development teams to boost productivity. You can implement collaborative workflows, such as code review and feedback.

The software allows you to control who can execute changes to certain branches. This is a project management feature that enables you to ensure that only authorized users are permitted to alter some sensitive parts of your code repository. It reduces conflicts and improves efficiency.

AWS CodeCommit Standout Features and Integrations

Standout features: AWS CodeCommit allows you to build up to a thousand repositories by default. You can store and version any kind of file and create up to 25,000 more repositories by request. It offers an outstanding alerting solution, which helps you get notified when there is an event affecting your repositories. Additionally, AWS CodeCommit gives you control over your software projects by allowing you to keep using your favorite development environments and DevOps toolset.

Integrations include SAS Visual Analytics, SAS Customer Intelligence 360, Relution, Kaholo, Eclipse, Visual Studio, AWS Cloud9, Sourcegraph, Jira Cloud, and Tenable.