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How does Soft.xyz collect data?

Soft.xyz pulls data from public APIs including GitHub (stars, forks, commits, open issues, last commit date), npm (weekly download counts), and official pricing pages. Community sentiment data comes from Reddit and Hacker News mention tracking. All metrics are refreshed weekly and timestamped so you can see exactly when data was last updated.

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Yes, Soft.xyz is completely free to use. All tool pages, comparisons, benchmarks, DX scores, pricing analysis, and category rankings are available at no cost. For teams that need a deeper analysis, we offer a paid Stack Audit report ($199) that evaluates your entire tech stack with personalized recommendations. An API is also available for programmatic access to our dataset.

How many tools does Soft.xyz track?

Soft.xyz tracks 232 developer tools across 69 categories including databases, hosting, authentication, payments, analytics, CI/CD, monitoring, search, CMS, and more. Each tool page includes real-time GitHub metrics, npm download counts, pricing breakdowns, and side-by-side comparisons with alternatives in the same category.

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Visual Studio App Center

Shut Down — March 2025

Reviewed byRoman K· 2025-03-31

What was it?

Microsoft's mobile DevOps suite: build, test, distribute, crash analytics, push notifications. The HockeyApp successor.

What happened?

Microsoft retired App Center, recommending customers move to Azure DevOps, GitHub, or third-party services. Mobile DevOps unbundled across products.

Migration Guide

Crashes/Analytics → Sentry or Firebase Crashlytics. Build → GitHub Actions, Codemagic, or Bitrise. Distribution → TestFlight/Firebase App Distribution.

Timeline & context

Visual Studio App Center shut down in March 2025, 1 year ago. It sat in the ci-cd category, where Soft.xyz tracks 7 discontinued products in total. If you are still running it in production, the migration path above is the shortest route off it.

FAQ

Why did Visual Studio App Center shut down?

Microsoft retired App Center, recommending customers move to Azure DevOps, GitHub, or third-party services. Mobile DevOps unbundled across products.

What should I migrate Visual Studio App Center to?

No drop-in replacement is tracked yet — check the ci-cd category for current options.

Is there a free alternative to Visual Studio App Center?

Not among the tracked alternatives.

Also dead in ci-cd

Visual Studio App Center — 2025 Ionic Appflow (Free) — 2024 Heroku GitHub Integration — 2024 CircleCI Free Tier (6000 build mins) — 2024 Apache Cordova — 2024 Expo Classic Builds — 2024