When comparing TeamCity vs TFS, the Slant community recommends TeamCity for most people. In the question“What are the best continuous integration tools?” TeamCity is ranked 1st while TFS is ranked 26th. The most important reason people chose TeamCity is:
TeamCity has different installation packages for different operating systems. All the user needs to do is download the correct one and run it.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy installation
TeamCity has different installation packages for different operating systems. All the user needs to do is download the correct one and run it.
Pro Cross-platform build support
The fact that it is based on Java does not hinder TeamCity's ability to support different build environments. TeamCity in fact supports a large number of languages and tools for each of those languages (build runners and test frameworks).
Some of the languages/platforms that are supported include: Ruby, .NET, Java.
Pro Brilliant interface
The user interface of TeamCity is clear, well thought out and the dashboard is highly customizable.
Pro Supports build chains
The user can easily compose dependencies between builds by adding snapshot and artifact dependencies, all on the one screen. All output of upstream builds is available to downstream builds. Triggering sets off the entire build chain and supports re-running of the portions of the chain that failed.
Pro Well documented
Pro Extensible
TeamCity offers well defined APIs for extending, as well as a REST interface.
Pro Testing support
TeamCity supports both MSTest and NUnit (which is open source) to run tests.
Pro Best choice for .NET
Seems to be the best choice for .NET applications, but to be honest: if you stray from the default settings you will be in a lot of pain most of the time.
Pro Concurrent
TFS contains very few locks and aims to be as suitable for multithreaded
systems as possible. It makes use of multiple truly concurrent structures
to manage the data, and scales linearly by the number of cores. This is
perhaps the most important feature of TFS.
Pro Usable in other systems
It was never planned to be Redox-only.
Pro Revision history
TFS stores a revision history of every file without imposing extra
overhead. This means that you can revert any file into an earlier version,
backing up the system automatically and without imposed overhead from
copying.
Pro Data integrity
TFS, like ZFS, stores full checksums of the file (not just metadata), and
on top of that, it is done in the parent block. That means that almost all
data corruption will be detected upon read.
Pro Copy-on-write semantics
Similarly to Btrfs and ZFS, TFS uses CoW semantics, meaning that no cluster
is ever overwritten directly, but instead it is copied and written to a new
cluster.
Pro O(1) recursive copies
Like some other file systems, TFS can do recursive copies in constant time,
but there is an unique addition: TFS doesn't copy even after it is mutated.
How? It maintains segments of the file individually, such that only the
updated segment needs copying.
Pro Guaranteed atomicity
The system will never enter an inconsistent state (unless there is hardware
failure), meaning that unexpected power-off won't ever damage the system.
Pro Improved caching
TFS puts a lot of effort into caching the disk to speed up disk accesses.
It uses machine learning to learn patterns and predict future uses to
reduce the number of cache misses. TFS also compresses the in-memory cache,
reducing the amount of memory needed.
Pro Better file monitoring
CoW is very suitable for high-performance, scalable file monitoring, but
unfortunately only few file systems incorporate that. TFS is one of those.
Pro All memory safe
TFS uses only components written in Rust. As such, memory unsafety is only
possible in code marked unsafe, which is checked extra carefully.
Pro Full coverage testing
TFS aims to be full coverage with respect to testing. This gives relatively
strong guarantees on correctness by instantly revealing large classes of
bugs.
Pro Improved garbage collection
TFS uses Bloom filters for space-efficient and fast garbage collection. TFS
allows the FS garbage collector to run in the background without blocking
the rest of the file system.
Pro SSD friendly
TFS tries to avoid the write limitation in SSD by repositioning dead sectors.
Pro Full-disk compression
TFS is the first file system to incorporate complete full-disk compression
through a scheme we call RACC (random-access cluster compression). This
means that every cluster is compressed only affecting performance slightly.
It is estimated that you get 60-120% more usable space.
Pro Asynchronous
TFS is asynchronous: operations can happen independently; writes and
reads from the disk need not block.
Cons
Con Expensive
TeamCity has a free tier which includes a maximum of 100 build configurations and up to 3 build agents. If you want to add 10 more configurations and 1 more agent, it will cost $299; unless you choose to buy an enterprise license which starts at $1999.
Con Poor quality plugins
At least some of them do not work, probably because they're not updated to more recent TeamCity versions.
Con Inter-branch merges trigger emails to unrelated committers
Whenever an inter-branch merge occurs, TeamCity pulls up the first parent of the merge commit and sends them an e-mail. However, this sort of information would be more useful to the merge author.
Con Not ready for use
While many components are complete, TFS itself is not ready for use.