A modern alternative to Perforce

Keeping the things you like

Perforce was the industrial-strength solution used by leading global companies, especially in games.

Find out here if Plastic is the alternative you need.

You still need locks and flexibility, don't you?

We have helped many teams find an alternative to Perforce. Chances are you need to modernize your tools, but there are things in P4 you still need, correct?

Locks for files you can't merge

You know the Git ecosystem falls short here.

Simplicity for non-coders

Just sync what you need with a simple GUI. We call it Gluon mode.

Huge depots and big files

The alternatives shouldn't break when a repo goes past a few gigabytes.

Work centralized

Sometimes you just don't need the extra push.

But, of course, you need a few extras to switch

Switching to something just like Perforce wouldn't make sense. Here is why teams move to Plastic.

Stronger branches and merges

Streams improved a few things, but they are not as good as Git yet. Plastic is all about task branches and can deal with complex merges.

Git-like workflows (DVCS)

Plastic is a distributed version control system and it can also work fully centralized. Think of it as Git workflows at P4 scale.

Modernized toolset

Semantic diff and merge tools that understand the code, which is a few steps ahead of good-old p4merge. Branch visualization and improved GUIs.

Implement DevOps

This is one of the key reasons behind the migration from Perforce. Mergebots are our DevOps orchestrator solution.

Cloud hosting

It is not easy to host P4 in the cloud. Plastic offers a native solution run directly by us.

And still, speed is a big thing, right?

Let us show you some numbers of how Plastic compares to Perforce and Git in terms of pure speed. Because a well-run P4 installation was super fast, and that's something you can't lose.

MEDIUM - 182,749 files 14,852 directories - 7.16GB

The code for the MEDIUM repo is created as follows: linux + mono + openoffice + alienarena + war.dat

Plastic is 5.2 times faster than Perforce Helix Core doing add + checkin.

Plastic is 5.3 times faster than Git consider that Git is checking in locally while Plastic is sending data through the network from client to server.

Performance comparison between Plastic SCM, Perforce and Git

A few other improvements in Plastic compared to Perforce

Creating branches in Perforce is slow compared to Plastic

Even with streams, branching large codebases is a problem. This is not an issue in Plastic.

Perforce doesn't version directories

Plastic tracks moves and renames precisely, and it is able to merge them correctly. This makes a huge difference.

Handling local changes is much easier in Plastic

You need P4 reconcile to find local changes, and it is slow and error prone.

The concept of branches is radically different

Regular branches in P4 were just directories and that made them unmanageable. Streams impose too many restrictions and can't really show evolution through time. Check the Branch Explorer in Plastic to see how easy it is to understand the evolution.

Discover the reasons to move away from Perforce

Read online the guide to find an alternative to Perforce here

Or grab a copy of the guide in PDF. It is free!

Alternative to Perforce Guide, Download PDF

Plastic compared to Perforce

		Plastic	Perforce	Git	Subversion
Flexibility	Good to work centralized Just checkin, no push/pull	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Flexibility	Good to work distributed Push/pull + local repo	Yes	No	Yes	Can't do
Binaries	Good with huge repos	Yes	Yes	No	Not really
	Good with huge files	Yes	Yes	No	Sometimes
	Can lock files to avoid merging Binaries, art, documents	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
GUI	Visualizes your repos So that you don't need a PhD in branching	Yes It's our core strength	Nope	Nope	Nope
	Comes with great GUIs		Well Compare with ours	Uh-oh	Uh-oh
	Special GUI & workflow for artists And anyone not a coder	Gluon!	No	No	No
Workflow	Can really do task branches Thousands of branches, no matter what	Yes	Nope	Core could Tools??? uh-oh	Nope
Merge	Very good at detecting merges between branches	Yes	Not really	Yes	Painful
	Comes with great diff and 3-way merge tools	Super Good Our job	Yes But compare with Plastic	No Go grab one	No Go grab one
	Tools to help you understand the merge (a preview)	Yep	Uh-oh	What tools?	Uh-oh
	Good merging renames, moved files, directories, crazy refactors	My job
Cloud	Can host repos in the cloud	Yes Plastic Cloud	Some providers do	Superb GitHub/Lab/etc.	Some providers do
Cloud	Cloud hosting is good with huge repos	Yes
Diff	Can diff code moved across files	Yup
Diff	Can show you the history of a method	Yup
	You can reach the engineers	Here we are		Try to reach Linus

Perforce merge capabilities vs Plastic

	Plastic	Perforce	SVN	TFS	Hg	Git
Score	85	55	0	40	40	60
Move/change	Yes	Issues	Fail	Yes	Yes	Yes Issue with complex cases
Change/delete	Yes	Yes	Fail	Fail With complex cases	Yes	Yes
Move/delete	Yes	Issues with complex cases	Fail	Issues when directories are involved	Fail When directories are involved	Issues with complex cases
Divergent move	Yes	Yes	Fail	Fail With directories	Issue	Issue
Cycle move	Yes	Yes	Fail	Fail	Fail	Fail
Move/add	Yes	Fail In complex, issues with simple	Fail	Fail In some cases	Fail	Issue
Added evil twin	Issues	Yes	Fail	Yes	Yes	Yes

How to migrate your Perforce depots to Plastic SCM

We provide full assistance during migration

We have an ad-hoc importer to move depots from Perforce to Plastic SCM. Very often Perforce depots are huge (something especially true for game studios, where gigabytes of data are not uncommon), so we prefer to provide full assistance.

It is very simple: you contact us and we help you with the process.

Gradual migration from Perforce to Plastic SCM is available

Our P4 exporter works in two directions: it can import from Perforce to Plastic, and export from Plastic to Perforce.

Very often teams need to migrate gradually. They move part of the project to Plastic while the rest of the team still stays in P4. Normally, they use a branch as the rendezvous point for this; they can checkin changes to this branch in P4 to deliver changes, pull it to Plastic, and vice-versa - make changes in Plastic and push them to the P4 "sync" branch.