Section 4.7. Comparison of SCM Tools

4.7. Comparison of SCM Tools

Table 4-1 briefly summarizes my opinion of how each of the seven SCM tools described in this chapter matches up to the suggestions at the start of Section 4.6, earlier in this chapter, about what to look for in such a tool. Several such comparisons exist on the Internetfor example, http://better-scm.berlios.de/comparison (which has no comparison of merging and is undated) and http://wiki.gnuarch.org/moin.cgi/SubVersionAndCvsComparison (which is a mutable Wiki). However, when comparing SCM tools using these tables, be careful to choose one that will work for your project; don't just go by the number of features the tool has. In Table 4-1, a plus sign (+) indicates a strength and a minus sign (-) indicates a relative weakness.

Table 4-1. Comparison of SCM tools

Requirement	CVS	Subversion	Arch	Perforce	BitKeeper	ClearCase	Visual SourceSafe
Data integrity	+	+	+	+	+	-	-
Fast tagging	-	+	+	+	+	+	-
Easy branching/merging	-	+	+	+	+	+	-
Integration	+	+	-	+	+	-	+
Web interface	+	+	-	+	+	+	-
Good support	+	+	-	+	+	+	+