Software release management is critical for any organization that builds tech. An effective release management strategy ensures new features and fixes are delivered to customers predictably and reliably.
However, managing releases across complex infrastructure and development pipelines can quickly become cumbersome without the right tools.
In this article, we'll examine the top 10 software release management tools to streamline and automate your deployments in 2024.
Why Use Release Management Software?
Effectively managing software releases is crucial for several reasons:
- Reduce errors - Structured release processes minimize opportunities for mistakes or oversights that lead to problematic deployments. Automated workflows reduce manual errors.
- Mitigate risk - Release management tools allow you to thoroughly test in staging, implement rollback plans, use feature flags, and control the blast radius of each deployment. This minimizes risks associated with new releases.
- Implement Standardization - Organization-wide release standards and pipelines improve consistency across teams and projects. This makes releases predictable.
- Accelerate release velocity - Automation, policy enforcement, and built-in approvals speed up deployment cycles and allow for more incremental releases.
- Improve visibility - Detailed release dashboards, notifications, and reports provide end-to-end visibility into all environment deployments.
- Ensure compliance - Release tools allow you to implement audit control approvals and enforce regulatory policies for environments that meet compliance standards.
- Align teams - Collaboration features align Dev, QA, Ops, and business teams on releases. Shared visibility improves cross-functional coordination.
With the rapid development requirements, release management tools are essential for balancing speed with reliability.
The 3 Categories of Release Management
Release management tools typically fall into three main categories:
1. Release Automation
Release automation tools focus primarily on automated deployments and lifecycle management capabilities. They provide deployment pipelines, orchestration, rollbacks, and built-in approvals/gates.
2. Agile Planning
Agile release planning tools center around planning capabilities for scheduling releases and sprints. They integrate with work tracking systems and support agile ceremonies.
3. Release Intelligence
Release intelligence platforms focus on analytics, visibility, and risk insights across the release process. They ingest data from multiple sources to provide comprehensive reporting and a "single pane of glass" for release health.
Factors to Consider When Choosing a Release Management Tool
Selecting the right release management tool involves evaluating several key factors:
Usability
The tool's UI and workflows should be intuitive and easy to navigate. It needs to support your release processes without imposing unnecessary overhead on users. More straightforward tools can enable faster adoption.
Integration capabilities
Review which 3rd party tools and platforms the release manager integrates with out-of-the-box. Native integrations will be more robust. Key integrations include code repositories, build servers, test automation, and infrastructure automation tools.
Pricing
Evaluate both self-hosted and SaaS options to compare pricing models. Consider long-term costs with usage growth. Open-source tools are also available but require more in-house management.
Scalability
The release tool must handle larger codebases, teams, and deployment frequencies as your organization grows. Check benchmarks for scale.
Security
Necessary for managing releases to production infrastructure. Review security features like role-based access, credentials management, and audit logs.
Support and documentation
To ease onboarding, look for responsive customer support, comprehensive documentation, and training resources.
With a solid understanding of why release management is critical and what to look for in tools, let's explore the top 10 solutions to consider in 2024. These tools represent today's leading options to simplify and strengthen your release processes.
10 Best Software Release Management Tools in 2024
There is a diverse set of capabilities and approaches among the top release management tools. Based on our extensive evaluation, these ten options provide enterprise-scale release orchestration, insights, and automation for organizations of all sizes.
1. Facets.cloud
Facets is more than just release management—it is revolutionizing infrastructure automation. This cloud-native platform is a control plane to unify developers, ops teams, and processes under one roof.
Transforming infrastructure-as-code into infrastructure-as-product, Facets provides self-service access to provisioning, deployments, monitoring, and more through no-code automation. Developers can spin up environments and manage releases through intuitive workflows while ops retain guardrails.
With Facets, engineering teams can easily build templatized golden paths that become reusable blueprints for infrastructure. This delivers remarkable gains in velocity, efficiency, and reliability.
Key capabilities of Facets:
- Release scheduling and management
- Easy rollback to previous working versions
- Custom workflows to promote changes through different environments and release streams
- Highly extensible, so you benefit from the advantages of both bought and custom-built IDPs
- Infrastructure provisioning automation
- Built-in monitoring, logging, and observability
- Configuration infrastructure drift prevention
Brands that used Facets saw 25x faster deployments, a 95% reduction in Ops tickets, and a 70% reduction in production issues.
Facets brings order and efficiency to complex, multi-cloud environments and messy SDLC workflows, helping you build, manage, and deploy software and new features effortlessly.
Backed by world-class customer support and documentation, it accelerates Ops transformation through a productized approach to cloud delivery. And the extensible platform fits within your existing workflows instead of your team wasting time learning yet another new tool.
2. Unleash
Unleash is an open-source feature flag and release management platform built for enterprise scale. It provides powerful toggling capabilities to gradually roll out or test new features in production with targeted user groups.
Unleash gives dev teams granular control over all feature releases without needing new code deployments. Products and apps can continuously deliver innovation while reducing risk.
Key capabilities of Unleash:
- Feature flags and user segmentation
- Progressive rollouts and A/B testing
- Integration SDKs for significant languages
- On-premises and SaaS deployment options
- Role-based access control and audit log
- Metrics on feature usage and experiments
The platform scales to support complex microservices architectures and global user bases. Unleash offers both cloud-hosted and private on-premises deployment options to meet security needs. Companies that require air-gapped environments can easily deploy Unleash behind their firewall.
3. Jenkins Release Plugin
Jenkins is the leading open-source automation server Ops teams use for CI/CD. While not a dedicated release management tool, it is highly extensible and can be configured to support release orchestration.
With the Jenkins Release Plugin, teams can configure pipeline jobs to execute pre-flight checks, bump versions, run tests, tag repositories, and more on release builds. Builds can be auto-promoted through environments with Ops approvals.
Key capabilities enabled by Jenkins:
- Manual release triggering
- Release build parameters
- Pre/post-build steps
- Release version templates
- Release build reporting
- Integration with deployment tools
Jenkins is used to power release pipelines at a massive scale, especially by organizations already invested in Jenkins for automation. While Jenkins is powerful, it requires hands-on configuration and scripting to implement robust release processes.
It lacks some out-of-the-box capabilities of purpose-built release automation tools. But it excels at integrating release tasks into broader CI/CD pipelines.
4. Jira
Jira is Atlassian's popular project and issue-tracking platform. Jira, similar to Jenkins, isn’t a dedicated release management tool. But it provides agile planning and visibility capabilities that support release processes.
With Jira, teams can map out releases, break down user stories, assign tasks, and track progress. This gives shared visibility into the status of features and issues slated for upcoming releases.
Key capabilities of Jira:
- Customizable workflows
- Release road mapping
- Sprint planning
- Progress tracking
- Reporting and dashboards
The platform integrates with various CI/CD tools and helps align teams while streamlining agile release processes. The best part is that Jira scales to support large engineering organizations with up to 35,000 users. The vibrant Atlassian Marketplace allows enhancement with plugins.
5. Chef
Chef is a powerful infrastructure automation and policy engine with robust configuration management capabilities. With Chef, engineering teams define desired system configurations and policies in code. Chef automatically converges infrastructure to these states across servers, VMs, containers, and more fleets.
Key capabilities of Chef:
- Use policy-based config for uniform infrastructure
- Auto-correct system divergences to eliminate drift
- Describe system states with Cookbooks
- Validate policies with Test Kitchen and InSpec
Chef provides enterprise-grade policy management and security for organizations with complex, regulated environments. Leading brands rely on Chef to enforce compliance at scale.
While Chef requires Ruby scripting skills, it excels at centralized policy control and security for infrastructure. It brings consistency and governance to on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments.
6. GitLab
GitLab is an integrated DevOps platform delivering end-to-end DevSecOps capabilities on a single platform. It provides robust release management functionality from planning to monitoring.
GitLab also helps teams track releases from planning through production monitoring. Developers can self-serve deployments while release managers maintain control and visibility.
Key capabilities of GitLab:
- End-to-end software release management and orchestration
- Deployment pipelines
- Feature flags
- DORA metrics tracking
- Reporting dashboards
With built-in security and compliance tools, GitLab enables teams to balance release velocity with governance controls. GitLab can present a learning curve for those new to consolidated DevSecOps platforms. But it delivers tremendous end-to-end release automation for complex environments, making it a worthwhile tool.
7. Octopus Deploy
Octopus Deploy is a leading release automation and deployment orchestration tool. It provides robust pipelines, approvals, and governance for managed, error-free deployments.
Octopus empowers the teams with standardized deployment pipelines to automate releases from dev through production. Teams gain reliability and velocity through reusable pipelines, automated rollbacks, and policy enforcement.
Key capabilities:
- Deployment and release orchestration
- Automated environment promotion
- Easy rollback support
- Automated provisioning for dev teams
- Built-in approvals based on reusable blueprints
Octopus shines for organizations managing complex infrastructure deployments across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments. While Octopus is powerful, it lacks native functionality for earlier dev stages like code collaboration. But for enterprise-grade deployment automation, Octopus can be a great choice.
8. Digital.ai
Digital.ai offers an integrated DevSecOps platform that unifies software delivery with predictive intelligence. The platform provides end-to-end release management capabilities similar to other platforms, with a touch of AI.
It combines Agile planning, CI/CD, deployment, security, and intelligence solutions. This consolidated platform aims to connect silos and provide insights across the delivery lifecycle.
Key features:
- Unified DevSecOps toolchain
- Automated release management and orchestration
- Deployment automation with minimal upkeep
- AI-powered analytics
The Release module delivers robust release automation capabilities out of the box. The integrated AI-based analytics help you further optimize release processes and pipeline health.
While promising, the integrated platform requires significant investment, which is why the company caters to large enterprises pursuing unified DevSecOps at scale.
9. Plutora
Plutora provides an integrated value stream management platform to connect, visualize, and coordinate software delivery. It offers robust release management and environment management capabilities.
Plutora gives teams an end-to-end view of work flowing from ideation to delivery. The platform integrates with existing tools to centralize visibility.
Key features:
- Release planning and scheduling
- Deployment management and orchestration
- Automated test environment provisioning
- Reporting and analytics
Plutora enables customizable workflows, approvals, production deployments, and release reporting for release management, giving you the flexibility to create your workflows for releases and deployments. It also provides governance features like audit trails and role-based access. It aims to help large enterprises align software delivery with business objectives.
10. CloudBees
CloudBees provides an integrated platform for CI/CD, release orchestration, and DevSecOps. The platform aims to standardize and govern software delivery workflows.
It gives teams reusable pipelines and self-service access to streamline development. The platform enables governance with role-based controls, compliance policies, and analytics.
Key capabilities:
- Streamlined and integrated CI/CD pipelines
- Release planning, management, and scheduling through integrated tools
- Deployment automation
- Feature flag management
CloudBees focuses on repeatability and oversight for enterprise deployments. While powerful, CloudBees requires scaling of specialized teams like Platform Engineers. But it can unify software delivery workflows at large organizations, helping you achieve faster deployment cycles.
How to Evaluate the Right Tool for Your Team?
Choosing the right release management tool for your team can feel overwhelming, with many evaluation options. Here’s some food for thought:
- When evaluating release management tools, consider your team's size and structure. Is it a large distributed team or a small, tight-knit group? The more complex and dispersed the team, the more you'll need strong access controls and permissions management.
- How is your release frequency? Are you shipping daily, weekly, or monthly? The tool needs to scale with your release cadence, especially if it's fast-paced. Automation is critical here to keep up with frequent releases.
- Map out your infrastructure environment—on-prem, cloud hosting, containers, or a mix? Tight integration with infrastructure automation tools is essential to smooth releases. Robust container management abilities are a must for container based setups.
- Highly regulated teams in healthcare or finance have extra compliance needs, like stringent auditing, permissions, and policy enforcement.
- Based on your team's technical skills, consider the right balance of customization vs. out-of-the-box workflows. Solutions like Jenkins allow heavy customization, while Facets offers faster turnkey setup.
- Clearly define must-have visibility needs around release dashboards, analytics, and reporting. Tools like Facets provide robust capabilities here.
Ready to Upgrade Your Release Management Processes?
Using an optimized release management strategy can help you balance speed with reliability. Modern tools like Facets provide intelligent release automation to help engineering teams deliver innovation faster.
If you’re ready to take the leap, book a demo with Facets and let our experts help you determine what processes you can optimize for your business.
