GForge: The Best

Alternative

Replacement

For CloudForge

By now you’ve probably heard that CloudForge is shutting down on October 1, 2020. Naturally, many CloudForge customers are now scrambling for a replacement, which can be a tall (and expensive) order to fill.

You don't have to string together a bunch of different tools, spend lot more money, or lose your existing data and workflow. GForge can give you a seamless migration to a vastly better user experience, with more features - and often for less than CloudForge, let alone other options.

GForge Is A Natural Fit

GForge and CloudForge share a common past and, in fact, if you give GForge a look you’ll notice a number of similarities like version control with SVN and Git, Trackers, Docs and Wiki. Yet despite these similarities, GForge meets your collaboration needs in a much better way.

GForge and CloudForge are both descendants of SourceForge, the grand-daddy of open-source collaboration. GForge shares many basic similarities with CloudForge that customers find familiar and easy to use - but with powerful new features and a vastly improved UI.

Hands-down, GForge is more elegant, comprehensive and scalable than CloudForge

All-in-One Collaboration

A long time ago, CloudForge made a decision to offer new features through new product offerings and by integrating with third parties. While the concept can work, the execution missed the mark. The result? Bolted-on solutions, downright clunky integrations, clumsy, laborious navigation and outdated APIs that are partially broken, incomplete and lacking documentation.

GForge, on the other hand, went with an All-in-One approach. GForge features share deep integration and your team and project needs. We provide a robust, well documented API allowing you to integrate GForge with other parts of your business.

Hands-down, GForge is more elegant, comprehensive and scalable than CloudForge. Click through the tabs below to compare GForge and CloudForge on user experience and features, and how to make the switch:

• Compare
  Experience

  

• Compare
  Features
  

• Make The
  Switch

  

Make The Switch

Pricing

GForge pricing is on par with that of CloudForge/TeamForge. But we know that CloudForge customers didn't plan time or budget money for switching collaboration tools. Migrate from CloudForge to GForge and we'll waive license and hosting costs for the remainder of 2020.

Migrate Your CloudForge Projects to GForge

We've taken advantage of our shared history with CloudForge to create a seamless migration path for your CloudForge projects:

• Projects, and Team Members
• Source Code (SVN / Git)
• Trackers/Artifacts, including workflow, custom fields, comments, and attachments
• Documents
• Packages and Releases
• Wiki

Easy, Portable Project Snapshots

With GForge, you will own your data whether you're on our SaaS platform, using GForge-managed hosting or your own on-premise server. Want to change your GForge Next hosting option later? We've got you covered.

Compare Features

Here's a more detailed breakdown of various features and capabilities between CloudForge and GForge. Got questions that aren't answered here? Book a demo and we'll be happy to answer all of your questions.

		CloudForge
Workflow	YES	YES
Full Agile Support	YES	YES, BUT...	CloudForge Agile sses a complicated set of separate Trackers, custom fields and "planning folders".
REST API	YES	NOT REALLY	There's a SOAP API. And there's a REST API. And they're both incomplete and fragile. And there's very little (accurate) documentation about either one.
Internal & External Collaboration	YES	YES, BUT...	Admins have to set up permissions separately for the SCM, for TeamForge, and any integrations.
Managed Hosting	YES	NO
Cloud & Server-based Deployment	YES	YES, BUT...	CloudForge is only offered on their own cloud
Offline Installation & Upgrades	YES	NO
Customized Tickets	YES	YES	Users of the TeamForge Tracker/Artifact system will find GForge familiar, simpler and more powerful.
Pull Requests	YES	NO
Document Management	YES	YES, BUT...	GForge Next is elegant, easy and powerful, like modern web document-management should be.
Chat	YES	NO
Continuous Integration	YES	YES	TeamForge and GForge both have Jenkins plugins.
Knowledge Management	YES	YES
Centralized Search	YES	YES, BUT...	CloudForge has a "Jump To" feature on every page, but Advanced Search requires extra navigation.
Single Sign-on (SSO)	YES	NOT REALLY	CloudForge can integrate logins across project tools, but it does not allow logging in with your corporate SSO provider or third parties like Google.

Compare Experience

Even though CloudForge and GForge share a common history, structure and deep task-tracking features, it's hard to argue that they look similar at all. We've spent the last several years building a brand-new GForge user experience - streamlining processes and workflow, adding new flexibilities and features, and making it easier to navigate between tasks, projects and data in a single click.

These are just a few screen shots for comparison - book a demo with us and we'll gladly show you all the other highlights, and show you how GForge Next can make your personal workflow more effortless and automatic than ever.

Navigation

Since CloudForge is assembled from several different pieces, navigation is not always straightforward. You've got a top-nav menu, a set of buttons (within TeamForge), and a left-nav menu, depending on what page you're looking at.

GForge takes a completely different approach with the Mega-Menu. You can get to nearly all of your projects, project sections, and personal tasks from one place, in just one or two clicks - with no reloading or waiting.

It's always in the same place, and always organized the same way, no matter where you are.

Task Management

We're only looking at TeamForge's built-in task tracking - using Jira, Trac, Redmine or other integrations might look a little better, but make for a clunky experience and poor integration.

GForge can show any query or custom filtered task list in tabular or kanban (shown) form. Depending on the view, you can re-assign, prioritize and move items through workflow right in the view.

Grooming backlogs and balancing workloads can be "flow" activities instead of tedious click-fests.

Source Control

Source Code hosting is treated as a third-party tool in CloudForge. This means poor integration, tedious navigation between tasks and the related code changes.

GForge Next has a unified API and user experience for all supported SCM tools (currently Git, SVN and CVS). This means that browsing files, branches/tags and commit diffs looks and works the same way for every project.

For Git repositories, GForge Next even offers online code review and merge.

Team Chat

Well, this isn't exactly fair. TeamForge DOES have Discussion Forums, that allow for forum and mailing-list messaging.

What they DON'T have is a real-time interactive view on this data.

GForge Next has the same Discussion Forum functionality, but we've also added a real-time chat view on that data.

Chat adds integrated project activity, allows participants to @-mention each other, image uploads, video player and URL previews.

Document Management

TeamForge document management is functional but not intuitive or frictionless.

GForge Next offers drag-and drop uploading, downloading and organization. In tile view (shown), you also see a thumbnail preview for most image and document types.