The need to understand how open source software is built has never been greater. Today, 90% of IT leaders use open source for their organizations and value streams. Thus, they need to quickly identify risks and opportunities to succeed. This blog post is about two solutions that Bitergia offers: Bitergia Analytics and Cauldron Cloud.
There are a lot of ways to get the necessary insights. A data-driven approach relies on collecting data and metrics about software development projects. For doing this effectively, it is important to have clarity of one’s goals to then know what data points to look for. Depending on your goals, you would choose a different solution.
We often get asked what their differences and similarities are between Bitergia Analytics and Cauldron Cloud, so let’s dive in and get to know them better. We’ll start by highlighting the similarities and strengths that the products share. Then, we’ll describe the differences.
First approach.
Bitergia Analytics and Cauldron Cloud are both built on top of the GrimoireLab tools. GrimoireLab is 100% free and open source software and so are Bitergia Analytics and Cauldron Cloud.
Both services allow IT project managers, analysts, and developers to understand more about the community and processes involved in software development. However, they have different ways to establish software development analysis strategies for different business goals with different levels of flexibility. More on the differences below.
Both, Bitergia Analytics and Cauldron Cloud are your secured private dedicated instances in which public contributor’s information is gathered and available to you. This includes usernames, email addresses, and organizational affiliations when contributors make them publicly available. As a big plus, they include Sorting Hat to manage and curate that information. This allows the merge duplicate identities, and to add affiliation information. Also, attributing contributions to the same contributor even when they used different email addresses, such as personal and work email, or usernames. This also allows building reports about which organizations are engaged in open source projects and how much.
Let’s see the best of both worlds.
Let’s dive into the differences and begin with the highlights of each solution. This informs for which use case you may choose which solution.
First, the biggest benefit of Bitergia Analytics is its full-service offering that includes training, customization, strategy consultancy, and support. In contrast, the community of users provides the support for Cauldron, the users have to create custom reports by themselves, and the training is self-guided through resources available online.
A highlight of Bitergia Analytics is the professional services that give you access to a team of software development analytics experts. That helps you to develop a metrics strategy and customize the analytics platform to your organization’s business goals. In contrast, Cauldron is a self-service platform for users who have simple scenarios that don’t need expert help.
A unique feature of Bitergia Analytics is that it can collect data from 30+ different platforms to give you a more holistic picture of the software development projects that matter to you. This is valuable for understanding both open source projects and InnerSource projects. In comparison, Cauldron Cloud supports only four data sources: GitHub, GitLab, Meetup, and Stack Exchange, which is enough to understand most open source projects.
In addition, Bitergia Analytics works both on public and private repositories (even on-prem for internal software development). Cauldron Cloud supports the analysis of open source projects only.
ISO Certification.
Also, we achieved the ISO certification for Bitergia Analytics. This means that Bitergia has passed the ISO’s standardization & quality requirements. Thus, we are enhancing our continued commitment to producing high quality products, reducing time waste within our processes and delivering a consistent service to all our clients. The ISO certification only covers Bitergia Analytics – not Cauldron. Cauldron Cloud has fewer security controls.
So now, let’s next take a closer look at each of the solutions and what they include.
About Bitergia Analytics
Bitergia Analytics is a complete solution to get full insights to software development projects. It is a comprehensive solution that includes an analytics platform, training, support, and consultancy to make the most use of it. Customers of the Bitergia Analytics services are equipped to reach their goals and make data-driven decisions about their software development teams. We achieve this through the 4 services: Strategy, Customization, Analysis, Reporting.
Also, Bitergia Analytics is a centralized source for metrics and data about the software development projects that matter to you. It provides dashboards that help companies and organizations to understand open source and inner source software projects through quantitative analysis of their communities, activity, and processes.
How does Bitergia Analytics help you to have easy reporting?
Bitergia Analytics core platform provides a consistent reporting mechanism, no matter the diversity of projects to track or analyze. It also provides great flexibility through custom dashboards and through a secured REST API that allows organizations to connect these to their own Business Intelligence tools.
But what can I do with Bitergia Analytics?
- Track growth, performance, progress, and diversity.
- Discover influencers & analyze trends in your project.
- Understand code review processes, ticketing, and issues.
- Cross, combine and visualize data.
- Easily analyze comments, forums, and chats.
What do you get with Bitergia Analytics Dashboard?
Bitergia Analytics Dashboard is based in Kibana, with some extra features integrated or developed by Bitergia, like:
- A navigation menu to make it easier to reach some panels.
- Customized Search Guard plugin for your security needs.
- Some extra visualizations that we added to Kibana:
- Network Analysis: Kibana develop a plugin that display a network node that links two fields previously selected.
- Search-Tables: a plugin developed for Kibana 5 that you can build tables and search with an input without applying filters.
- DotPlot: a plugin developed for Kibana 5 to provide dotplot (bubble) visualizations.
- Radar: a plugin developed for Kibana for radar visualizations.
In our blog post “Customizing Bitergia Analytics Dashboard for your goals and metrics” you can find tutorials on how to configure it by yourself.
You can request a demo to find out all the tools that Bitergia Analytics offers to you!
About Cauldron Cloud
On the other hand, Cauldron is a SaaS analytics platform offering metrics and insights about open source projects. Cauldron helps managers save time and remove pain points to get insights and reports on open source projects.
What kind of metrics do I get with Cauldron Cloud?
Cauldron Cloud provides data about activity (contributors engagement analysis), community (growth and demographic analysis), and performance (issues and community requests management analysis).
But what can I do with Cauldron?
Therefore, here we list 3 examples that you can do with Cauldron to maximize your data analysis.
- Measure covid-19 impact: We can see if COVID-19 affected open source projects by comparing periods.
- Analyze GNOME & KDE GitLab Projects: you can analyze GNOME and KDE projects hosted on GNOME’s/KDE custom GitLab instance.
- Analyze Open Source Ecosystems: Open Source Ecosystems are the different OSS projects a company releases, contributes, or uses.
In our blog post “The 3 things you can do with Cauldron” we talk about this, take a look!
Want to start using your cauldron? configure and get your Cauldron Cloud instance within one business day. So, try it out and get use to our public instance. It is free and fully functional but it is shared and server as is, without any guarantee.
Time to decide, what is the best for me?
Now that you have a clear idea, let’s compare the similarities and differences to get a good overview. In short, Bitergia Analytics is Bitergia’s full-service offering. If you don’t need all the bells and whistles, we recommend using Cauldron. Check the below comparison list against your needs to help decide which option is right for you.
So, Bitergia Analytics is your best deal if you’re interested in a full-service offering that includes training, customization, strategy consultancy, and support, you can start by scheduling a demo. If you prefer a SaaS analytics platform that you manage yourself, you can configure and get your Cauldron Cloud instance within one business day.
🦉The Owl’s advice: If you have a unique situation and would like to explore which option best meets your needs, don’t worry! Contact our team who will answer all your questions and give you the information you need for your decision.
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