OpenText StarTeam Reviews & Product Details

It is clunky, and open-source controls are way better. The only thing I would give it credit for is the addition of helpful sprint tabs that my organization fails to use. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The failure to implement a commit-all for several years, failure to compare to its competitors in any meaningful way, and the amount Micro Focus StarTeam overcharges are insane. If you are a competent developer, you will steer clear of StarTeam for your organization; the only reason it has survived is that various companies used it in 1995 when it had no competition. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

StarTeam is not a very complicated software when it comes to file system. It easily allows users to lock a file and edit it to prevent others from overwriting it Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The UI is very outdated and not very modern at all Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

For our needs, StarTeam provides a good balance between documenting the need for a change (a Change Request, for either a defect or an enhancement) and providing source control. Rules can be set that require comments for every check-in as well as linking each check-in to a Change Request, which help us ensure the quality of what is checked in and provides a trail for every check-in. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are several things that I dislike, although I've only seen a couple of competing products that work as well as StarTeam does for us.

1. The product focus since being acquired by MicroFocus has changed away from being a product that benefits us. There were promises made by Borland when the acquisition was announced that were not kept by MicroFocus.

2. StarTeam is very expensive. For a small team, it is difficult to advocate using StarTeam when there are so many alternatives available that a either open source or have a much lower cost. As mentioned before, those products can't do everything that StarTeam can.

3. Only the most expensive edition, which we don't have, allows for customizations (such as the data stored, values for built-in fields, and user workflow).

4. In order to add additional user licenses when using an older version, we were forced to upgrade to the newest version. Even worse, we were using StarTeam Personal Edition at the time, which had been dropped and was no longer available. What started as a $1,500 solution became a $12,000 burden.

5. To compete with open source products, MicroFocus very briefly released a "free" StarTeam Express that had 10 user licenses. Since we had paid for 8 user licenses, I asked our MicroFocus contact if they would give us two additional user licenses at no cost. They declined to do so, so I switched to the StarTeam Express edition. StarTeam Express disappeared soon after its release.

At this point, we're not going to spend more money on StarTeam. We've started considering alternatives, the most likely being Team Foundation Server. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.