As a subscriber of Fogbugz and Beanstalk for my team and a pre-release user I figured I would give my 2 cents on Fog Creek’s new service, Kiln. Now of course nothing is without flaw, it is a matter of whther or not those flaws affect your circumstances more then others.
As many of us adored SVN and now embracing Git some of us are feeling the pain behind both great application’s. With SVN you have the oh so wonderful tree conflicts and with Git you have an overly complex (think designers) usage in comparison to its main competitor, Mercurial.
Due to my team’s dunamics we would have issues when running into SVN’s tree conflicts I decided I had to choose another SCM, even if Beanstalk’s founder is on my employer’s board. Of course none of these problems relate to a service using such technologies, it is the technologies. So with that in mind I was going to bring it in-house under another technology, Mercurial. The reason for not choosing Git was in some areas, at some times, is more complex then it should be and most of all because the difference between both Git and Bazar when compared to Mercurial showed me itt was best for my specific needs.
At around the same time, Fog Creek was getting ready to release Kiln, a Mercurial alternative to Beanstalk (who also now supports Git and SVN). As mentioned, being a Fogbugz subscriber and the low cost even though I was getting Beanstalk for free due to its relationship with my company I said, hey perfect timing, now I don’t have to worry about maintaining my own Mercurial shared repository along with several added benefits.
Of course I loved Beanstalk’s activity stream, so Kiln having the same thing is perfect. Also the code review feature was nice to have as well. That and due to the nature of Mercurial they are able to provide a much more intutive interface. Not only that but they built a SCM importer so you don’t have to lose your precious history of your current SCM. That and for Windows users they have a customized TortoiseHg installer with a few added extensions they built to work with the service.
Being that discussing the SCMs themselves is outside of the scope of this write-up there is not too much for me to write. Only that they also offer a 45 day free trial and if you are already a Fogbugz subscriber it is only an extra $5/mo per user on top of their already excellent cost effective pricing.
