Staying ahead of customer needs and market changes requires streamlined software delivery. That’s where value stream management (VSM) tools come in handy. They help you get an eagle-eye view of your end-to-end development workflow so you can spot and fix bottlenecks fast.
But what exactly is value stream management, and what are some of the best tools you can test?
What is Value Stream Management (VSM)?
Value stream management is like having a GPS for your software delivery process. It maps out the entire journey from initial idea to customer deployment. And when it comes to complex pipelines, this high-level visibility is gold.
VSM lets you measure cycle times across different stages like design, coding, and testing—you can see where delays are happening and zero-in on problem areas.
It also encourages lean thinking—optimizing workflow and reducing waste through constant improvement. VSM aligns disconnected teams and tools by taking a big-picture view across silos.
What to Look for in a VSM Tool?
VSM enables governance by tracking pipelines against business goals. You can quickly course correct if things go off track, and those insights can help drive data-backed decisions.
But before you pick a VSM tool, what should you look for?
- Customizability—you want to tailor it to your processes.
- Extensibility to add features as you scale.
- Robust analytics and reporting to get those aha insights.
- Integration across your existing systems.
- And easy adoption by team members.
Also, you want to pick a platform that complements your tech stack while allowing future evolution and as such, extensibility is critical.
The 7 Best VSM Tools in 2024
These 7 VSM tools made it to our list of the best value stream management software in 2024. Let’s take a look.
1. Facets
Facets is an influential platform engineering and cloud infrastructure management platform designed for modern Ops teams. It aims to provide a unified solution for developers and operations professionals to collaborate and automate cloud delivery workflows.
“The framework and collaboration aspect made us take the plunge. We can now focus on high-value activities and not mundane Ops. That's a big unlock for me!" — Suyash Katyayani, Co-Founder & CTO, Purplle
At its core, Facets offers:
- Architecture Visualization: Get a bird's eye view of your entire stack with the Microservice Catalog. See dependencies, owners, and interconnections across services.
- Automated Environment Provisioning: Devs can spin up new environments (within the set guardrails) in minutes without ops support. Hibernate, run spot instances, deploy across multiple clouds from one dashboard.
- Application Configuration Management: Centralized control panel for environment variables, config files, database settings, and secrets across all services and environments.
- Release Management: Manage and visualize infrastructure and app changes in one place. Do full, selective, or custom releases with one click.
- Observability: Comes pre-loaded with Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki. Start monitoring and logging instantly with pre-built dashboards.
Facets aims to work across all major cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. It can provide centralized visibility and control for large enterprises with complex infrastructure and smaller startups aiming to scale up efficiently.
Who is Facets suitable for?
Facets is best suited for companies with complex cloud-native stacks that want to control infrastructure drift. The self-service features empower developers while freeing up Ops teams from repetitive tasks.
“Our releases are faster, we need less developer time, and our teams are free to focus on building exciting features. We have saved hundreds of person-hours and seen significant cost savings.” — Piyush K, Chief Architect, Capillary Technologies
Large enterprises can benefit from the unified visibility and standards Facets provides. But it also offers enough automation for small startups looking to scale efficiently.
2. GitLab
GitLab is a DevSecOps platform that empowers teams to deliver software faster and better. It provides a unified solution to manage the entire development lifecycle: from planning to monitoring.
“The pipeline system is by far GitLab’s most important feature, though the extensive offering of supporting services such as project wikis, hooks and integrations make it a flexible control center for all needs of software development.” — Jörg S., Developer
GitLab offers:
- Integrated value stream analytics to identify bottlenecks across the development workflow. Cycle analytics and prioritization help optimize cycle time.
- Customizable value stream views to match specific processes and objectives. Tailor what you track and measure.
- Data aggregation from diverse sources like repositories, pipelines, and issue trackers for holistic visibility.
- Intuitive visualization of the entire workflow from idea to production. See your process.
- Actionable insights through advanced reporting on throughput, lead time, productivity, etc. Know what needs attention.
- Progress monitoring with crucial DevOps metrics to improve flow and team performance. Optimize your workflows.
- Alignment to business goals by connecting software delivery processes to organizational objectives.
“When you switch from other tools like GitHub you see features that are missing, mainly in CI/CD. You can't update a global variable from a job and must use workarounds. The pricing is a bit high, especially for the Ultimate plan.” — Tomasz J., CTO
Who is GitLab for?
With robust value stream management capabilities natively built-in, GitLab is ideal for organizations wanting an integrated solution to govern, visualize, and optimize their software delivery pipelines end-to-end.
3. ServiceNow
ServiceNow's Value Stream Mapping tool provides end-to-end visibility into software delivery workflows. It connects the entire process—from gathering initial client feedback to managing operational features. With this complete picture, organizations can analyze their development lifecycle and find opportunities to optimize speed and quality.
“It was simple and easy to understand. User friendly. Easy to customize the dashboard. We can keep track of tickets according to the ticket status, which made my life easier. It is the best tool for maintaining incidents, SCTasks, change requests, and organizing work. We can have the history of work done.” — Monika V.
The key benefits are:
- End-to-end integration: ServiceNow combines capabilities from DevOps, IT Business Management, and the Now Platform into a unified value stream. This connects planning, building, testing, deployment, and service management.
- Increased speed: By identifying bottlenecks, you can accelerate innovation cycles and deliver features faster. Automated governance also speeds up change approvals.
- Reduced risk: Integration with Governance, Risk, and Compliance provides built-in audit trails and adherence to regulations. You can deploy rapidly without compromising quality.
- Customer-centric: ServiceNow puts the customer view front and center. VSM focuses on quantifying value from the client's perspective at every step.
- Actionable insights: With value stream visualization and metrics, you gain visibility into throughput and capacity. You can pinpoint opportunities for improvement.
“After every upgrade system properties resetting to out of box default, even customized properties also. It is difficult to maintain customized properties data after version upgradation.” — Harish Kumar
Who is ServiceNow for?
It is ideal for large enterprises, mainly regulated ones as it brings end-to-end automation to software delivery.
4. Plandek
Plandek is a Value Stream Management (VSM) solution that integrates data from tools like Jira, Git, Slack, and more, offering end-to-end visibility into delivery metrics and analytics. These data-driven insights aim to help organizations optimize agile processes, enhance reliability, manage risks, and drive continuous improvement across the software delivery lifecycle.
“The tool provides a wide array of dashboard templates, catering to diverse needs and preferences. You can easily select the right dashboard template to gain the insights you need. The ability to obtain real-time insights through Liveview is great. It ensures that you're always up-to-date with the latest data and can respond promptly to changing circumstances.” — Review from G2
Key Features
- Management Data Context Functionality: Structures and normalizes data from disparate systems into a unified model to enable flexible analysis.
- Powerful Analytics: Supplies intelligent metrics, visualizations, and productivity tracking to deliver enhanced visibility into trends.
- Value Analysis: Pinpoints bottlenecks, risks, and opportunities through data correlations to inform continuous improvement efforts.
- Enhanced Jira Reporting: Expands Jira's native reporting with additional views and flexibility to empower data-driven decision-making.
“UI performance can be a pain-point at times, particularly when we're looking at larger datasets, or trying to make many configuration changes at the same time.” — Ramsay
Who Plandek is suitable for?
Plandek is designed for enterprise software delivery teams seeking to optimize their agile practices.
5. Jellyfish
Jellyfish gives engineering teams the complete picture to align with business goals and deliver results. It's an engineering management platform for data-driven teams.
Jellyfish analyzes signals from your existing tools—think Git, Jira, roadmaps, and HR systems. This context lets engineering leaders focus on what matters most to the business.
“Jellyfish has been a trusted tool for providing insight into where our development teams are spending their time. We've used Jellyfish to identify bottlenecks in our development organization. We've also been able to use Jellyfish to observe trends in our software development, as well as tracking performance through Epics, and org-wide Initiatives.”—Alex M.
Key capabilities of Jellyfish:
- Single Source of Intelligence: Unified platform for visibility into software engineering effectiveness and investment.
- Business Alignment: Focus engineering on critical areas aligned with business objectives.
- Engineering & Product Operations: Identify and address inefficiencies in operations.
- Engineering Metrics: Gain visibility into engineering performance to build trust, empower teams, and improve predictability.
“There is a lot of configuration to be done before you're able to get meaningful data, and depending on what you're looking for, it can be difficult to get to the place where you'll get the data you want.”—A G2 User
Who is Jellyfish good for?
Jellyfish is great for leaders seeking to align engineering with business priorities through data. The platform enhances visibility, communication, and collaboration between engineers and executives.
6. Copado
Copado helps companies get the most out of their DevOps and cloud investments. It gives visibility into development workflows and helps you find ways to go faster while maintaining quality. With Copado, you can create value stream maps to optimize processes within Salesforce and other low-code platforms.
“It provides an integrated solution for deploying our changes through the pipeline management and also takes care of the test runs, coverage and static code analysis so that we can monitor the health of out application before sending to production and lessen the risk of vulnerable code present in prod.” — Ealisha C.
Key Features:
- Value Stream Maps: These provide process visibility by mapping each stage of development. They help uncover bottlenecks, waste, and risks.
- Multi-Cloud Framework: Recently enhanced with a new architecture, this enables easy job engine creation across clouds.
- DevOps Analytics: Tracks key metrics like deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and recovery time. Critical for optimizing processes.
- Low-Code Compatibility: Copado is designed for low-code platforms like Salesforce. It simplifies software creation in these environments.
“There are still some functionalities I think is very time-consuming; an example is the ability to do rollbacks with just a click of a button, instead, the rollback process seems to be a series of deployment, which makes it painful.” — Dayo O.
Who Copado is good for?
Copado is ideal for teams looking to improve their DevOps practices and maximize cloud investment returns. It is especially valuable for those using Salesforce or other low-code SaaS platforms.
7. CloudBees
CloudBees offers an enterprise-grade Value Stream Management (VSM) platform designed to enhance software delivery effectiveness through superior visibility, management, and intelligence.
The platform aims to accelerate the realization of business vision and customer experiences by instrumenting, measuring, and continuously improving end-to-end value stream flows—the pathway from idea conception to delivery in a software development lifecycle.
“Operation Center is the most valuable feature I found on Cloudbees CI. At my company, we have more than 50 jenkins instances and CJOC provides us the perfect solution to manage all of this from a single point of view.” — Jordi B.
Key features of CloudBees:
- Holistic Visibility: Enables visibility across pipelines, applications, tools, and teams to provide contextualized, big-picture insights.
- End-to-End Governance: Traces outcomes from idea inception to production deployment with comprehensive governance.
- Flow Optimization: The platform optimizes overall value flows through visibility, analytics, and comparison of flows across apps, environments, and teams. The governance and metrics framework empower continuous fine-tuning for efficiency and business alignment.
- Actionable Intelligence: The platform provides actionable intelligence through analytics that map dependencies, identify problematic areas, track deployment metrics, evaluate team progress, and compare release status.
- Flow Metrics Framework: Connects business strategy to software delivery by correlating value flows with expected business outcomes. Enables measurement of performance from customer request to software delivery.
“The downsides of using CloudBees could include its complex configuration, high pricing for larger deployments, and potential difficulties in troubleshooting and resolving issues. Especially if you are trying to figure it out alone without taking the help of the technical support department.” — Chidiebere Moses O.
Who is CloudBees good for?
CloudBees is great for business teams looking to optimize the overall health of product delivery and customer experiences.
How To Pick The Best Value Stream Management Tool?
When selecting a value stream management platform, you need to evaluate how well it aligns with your business needs and technical environment. Most importantly, assess the tool's ease of use, customizability, and collaboration features.
- First and foremost, you need the UI to be intuitive and clean with interactive dashboards—especially if you want quicker adoption across teams.
- The VSM tool of your choice should also be flexible enough to fit within your existing workflows—instead of requiring all your team members to learn a new one.
- Finally, VSM tools should have as many out-of-the-box integrations as possible while enabling teams to build integrations for custom tools.
Facets.cloud stands out with its clean and minimalist UI. It is as extensible as your business needs. Your business will never be limited to the capabilities that are pre-built by Facets. You can customize process workflows, data integrations, and value stream views to match your organization's unique needs.
And while you ensure that your VSM solution integrates with existing systems and scales as you grow—simplicity, customization, and collaboration should be top priorities. Facets.cloud checks all these boxes while providing actionable data insights through robust analytics.
Achieve End-to-End Visibility and Optimization With VSM Tools
After exploring value stream management and reviewing some of the top tools, it all comes back to visibility and optimization. With intricate pipelines, siloed teams, and complex architectures, it's easy to lose sight of the big picture—bottlenecks and waste creep-in—progress stalls.
But the right value stream management platform provides that elusive end-to-end visibility. It maps your workflow, measures cycle times, and exposes inefficiencies.
Facets enables this streamlined oversight and continuous improvement beautifully. With its intuitive visualization and seamless integrations, Facets gives you the GPS to navigate software delivery. It equips you with data-driven intelligence to remove roadblocks, tighten alignment, and accelerate release velocity.
Stop driving blind and start unlocking the potential of your development lifecycle. Request a 1:1 demo today and see how we can help enhance your SLDC workflows.
