JFrog Software Supply Chain Platform
Powerful Artifact Centralization, but Pricing and Large-Scale Setup Need Work
Smooth Process, Clear Communication, and Helpful Support
Standardized artifact workflows have boosted collaboration and saved significant delivery time
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for JFrog Artifactory is hosting artifacts for products, ranging from Docker images to Helm charts, and regular binaries.
I can give you a specific example of how I use JFrog Artifactory in my workflow: we have automated steps in our pipelines where once we build our artifact, such as Docker images, we push them to JFrog Artifactory, and then in the deploy pipeline, we have automated steps that pull the artifact from JFrog Artifactory and deploy them to different environments.
What is most valuable?
The best features that JFrog Artifactory offers are that you can have all kinds of artifacts, supporting many different ones such as Docker images, Helm charts, and different binaries from different software languages. It has versioning that you can use, proxying as well that you can use as a mirror proxy, and there is also nice access control around it, so you can limit who has access to which parts of your JFrog Artifactory tree.
Regarding access control and proxying, those features help my team by making it easy to provide read access to many different teams for different artifact repositories, which works really nicely when you have many teams requiring the same package but then have one team that is actually the developer of that package or artifact. In terms of the proxy, you can use it as a mirror proxy so that all your pulls for an image can go through JFrog Artifactory before they reach Docker or something, adding an extra layer of security in the company.
JFrog Artifactory has impacted my organization positively by helping us have a standard artifact management solution, so everybody is aligned, allowing us to use the same best practices and same documentation, making it easy to implement in many different pipelines.
Having a standard solution such as JFrog Artifactory has affected productivity and collaboration positively. Documentation is available for everybody that is using it, so my team, as clients to JFrog Artifactory, finds it easy to pull the documentation and implement it in our pipelines or for whatever needs we have related to JFrog Artifactory, which eases up collaboration by providing a single way of doing package management.
What needs improvement?
I cannot say much about how JFrog Artifactory can be improved.
I appreciate the opportunity to add more about the needed improvements, even small ones. Maybe around user experience, I think one improvement could be the UX, which shows its age, as it has not changed for a bit, but other than that, it is fine.
I do not think JFrog Artifactory needs any other improvements. I cannot think of anything else apart from the UX that I mentioned already.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using JFrog Artifactory for about seven years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
JFrog Artifactory is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
JFrog Artifactory scales very well for large organizations and is a nice enterprise solution.
How are customer service and support?
I think JFrog Artifactory's customer support is good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have not used a different solution before JFrog Artifactory.
How was the initial setup?
I do not have much experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing, as it was set up by a different team.
What about the implementation team?
My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment with JFrog Artifactory. It saves time by being a standard go-to product that every team uses, which avoids different paths to explore and spend time figuring out different solutions. When many teams collaborate on one solution for artifact management, it results in significant time cost savings.
I would estimate that my teams have saved around 70% of the time compared to figuring out their own solutions and using custom-built team solutions.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I do not have much experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing, as it was set up by a different team.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I have not evaluated other options before choosing JFrog Artifactory.
What other advice do I have?
My advice for others looking into using JFrog Artifactory is to give it a try. Once you set it up, it is very easy to use and teach other teams how to use it. I would rate this product an 8 overall.
JFrog Simplifies Artifact Management for Organized, Reliable Deployments
This has helped improve build reliability, simplify version tracking, and reduce issues caused by dependency mismatches. It also supports faster CI/CD workflows and provides better traceability for both modern and legacy applications, making release management more efficient and secure.
Seamless CI/CD Integration with JFrog
Efficient Artifact Management with Minor UI Challenges
Powerful Artifactory & Security Scanning, but Costly and Complex to Get Started
Great Fit for DevOps Pipelines with Strong Xray Security and Versioning
Strong artifact management platform for DevOps teams
Initial setup can also be heavier than expected if you’re not already familiar with artifact repository concepts. Storage management and cleanup policies need planning too, otherwise things can grow messy fast.
Efficient, Scalable Artifact Management That Streamlines the Software Delivery Lifecycle
In rapidly scaling engineering setups, where there is constant creation, deployment, and management of cloud-based applications from multiple engineering teams, having control over software packages, their dependencies, and the release pipelines has been a challenge. JFrog has been immensely useful for streamlining and improving the entire software delivery lifecycle.
The ability to manage artifacts and packages via JFrog Artifactory stands out as one of the main advantages for me.
Performance and scalability have also been strong in my experience, particularly when handling large-scale artifact storage, container registries, and high-frequency deployment pipelines.
One particular difficulty I've encountered is the necessity to understand various aspects of repository management, including permission handling, pipeline integration, and software supply chains. It becomes somewhat burdensome to onboard engineers into using the platform if there are not so many of them or their background is somewhat simple.
In terms of usability and user experience, one might say that the platform is very efficient and offers lots of opportunities but some administrative functions may come as challenging. Namely, working with multiple repositories, access controls, and distributed environments at once can require certain skills and experience.
Finally, I would mention some of the difficulties I had with some of the integrations and automation processes. While JFrog works excellently within different CI/CD ecosystems in general, it might take some effort to make the most out of advanced workflow configurations and automations.
The biggest advantage I found with JFrog is its ability to manage artifacts and packages through JFrog Artifactory. Previously, we had to manage different repositories and track dependencies manually, but now it’s way more organized. It's pricing is also balanced.