The 5 Best Azure DevOps Integrations for a Smoother Software Development Lifecycle

Azure DevOps is your command center for every aspect of your software development projects, from planning and coding to testing and deployment. It’s where your software developers will spend most of their time, but they can rarely do all of their work in it. They’ll often need to get context from other tools or at the very least collaborate with people in other tools. That’s where Azure DevOps integrations come in.

Here’s Unito’s full guide to how these work.

What are AzureDevOps integrations?

Azure DevOps integrations bridge the gap between ADO and other tools, like Jira, Smartsheet, ServiceNow, and Smartsheet. Depending on the type of integration you use, this might only involve creating new work items in other tools or updating a single field. Other integrations create true, two-way relationships between tools, meaning work items are automatically kept up to date as you work.

Integrations can give you snapshots into other tools, enable seamless collaboration, and centralize data from throughout your organization.

Why integrate Azure DevOps with other tools?

Integrating Azure DevOps allows you to:

• Save time on collaboration.
• Save money on unnecessary software licenses.
• Unlock new opportunities for cross-team workflows.
• Back up essential data in real-time.
• Enable workflows like ticket escalation.

With the right integration, you can seamlessly transfer data back and forth between tools, eliminating the need for a team member to manually copy and paste updates. Everyone in your team can work with up-to-date information without any extra work.

What are your options for integrating Azure DevOps?

All integrations transfer data between Azure DevOps and other tools. But the technology behind these transfers can completely change the actual impact of each integration. Here are some of the most popular options for integrating Azure DevOps.

Built-in Azure DevOps integrations

Since Azure DevOps is a Microsoft product, it integrates natively with other Microsoft 365 products, allowing data from Azure DevOps work items to appear in other Microsoft products. This approach requires some technical knowledge to deploy, however, meaning it’s not very accessible to the average user and will usually be deployed in larger organizations. Azure DevOps also offers a few other built-in integrations with tools like GitHub, though they have that same technical requirement.

Automation tools

Automation tools like Zapier or Make.io use “if-this-then-that” to automate actions between Azure DevOps and other tools. That includes creating new work items or updating a single field. With these tools, you could, for example:

• Automatically send messages to chat apps after pushing code in Azure DevOps.
• Create new work items in Azure DevOps from Jotform submissions.
• Add new Notion database items to Azure DevOps work items.
• Create new Azure DevOps work items to match Zendesk tickets.

These actions are pretty simple, but they can make a big impact on your team’s overall productivity, especially at scale.

2-way sync tools

A 2-way sync tool goes beyond automation, creating two-way relationships between work items in Azure DevOps and items in other tools. That allows these tools to automatically create new work items to match the ones you create in either tool, all while updating fields as you work.

Say, for example, that you’re syncing ServiceNow with Azure DevOps, so tickets automatically become tasks in Azure DevOps when they’re escalated. Not only will a 2-way sync create that new task, it will automatically update both task and ticket as developers and customer success agents work. New context in ServiceNow is automatically transferred to Azure DevOps, while customer success agents in ServiceNow get updates on the work developers do.

Tools like Unito create an environment for seamless collaboration across tools and teams, while being easy enough to deploy that anyone can learn to use them.

The 5 best Azure DevOps integrations

If you’ve yet to integrate Azure DevOps with any of your tools, here are the tools you should prioritize.

Project management tools

Azure DevOps is a great place for handling every stage of the software development lifecycle, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the best platform for managing software projects. Team leads and project managers typically prefer dedicated project management tools for planning and dispatching development work. Not only that, but important context for that work might come from other project management tools — few organizations use only one, after all — and require manual copying and pasting to get to the right place.

By integrating project management tools with Azure DevOps, you can keep all priorities in one place, meaning team leads never have to chase an update in another tool.

Examples of these tools

• Jira
• Asana
• ClickUp
• Trello

CRMs and customer support tools

If you’re offering a software product or a service that requires development work, your developers need to work closely with customer success, sales, and other customer-facing teams. They might be involved in resolving complicated issues for customers and scoping custom development work for sales deals, time-sensitive tasks with heavy collaboration.

Integrating Azure DevOps (where development work happens) with your CRM and customer support tool (where the requests are created and fleshed out) improves collaboration between developers and these teams. Asking for an update or sharing progress reports can be done in either tool, with your integration serving as the communication channel between the two.

Examples of these tools

• ServiceNow
• Salesforce
• HubSpot
• Zendesk

Chat and meeting tools

Chat and meeting tools are the communication infrastructure that keeps software projects moving smoothly. Email is too slow, and finding the right way to get someone’s attention in a project management tool can quickly become its own workflow. That’s where chat apps shine, allowing anyone in your organization to send a quick update or surface a change they’ve made to your codebase.

By integrating Azure DevOps with your chat tools, you can automatically send messages when important work gets done, get comments transferred over and more.

Examples of these tools

• Slack
• Microsoft Teams

Knowledge bases

Your knowledge base is where you keep best practices, product information, and more. For many software developers, your organization’s knowledge base has a semi-permanent spot on their second screen as they work. But not everyone works with it often enough that such a setup makes sense, and they’d be better-served by having data from that knowledge base right where they work.

With the right integration, updates from Azure DevOps can automatically show up in relevant pages in your knowledge base. Similarly, context from your knowledge base can automatically be added to relevant ADO work items.

Examples of these tools

• Confluence
• Notion

Other software development tools

Azure DevOps might be the platform of choice for many of your software developers, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only place product work happens. If you’re collaborating with external contributors or even just combining codebases with an organization using a different tool, an integration can help you unify product work no matter which platform you’re using.

Examples of these tools

• GitHub
• GitLab

Integrate Azure DevOps with your tool stack using Unito

Unito is a 2-way sync solution for Azure DevOps and over 60 other tools that keeps all your work items up to date no matter where your teams work. With some of the deepest two-way integrations on the market, you’ll have all the data your workflows need right in Azure DevOps.

Curious to see how Unito’s Azure DevOps integration works? Here’s a look at Unito’s Azure DevOps-ServiceNow integration.

FAQ: Azure DevOps integrations

What are Azure DevOps integrations?

Azure DevOps integrations bridge the gap between this and other tools, like Jira, Salesforce, Asana, or GitHub. These integrations allow data to flow automatically between tools, eliminating the need for manual status updates, constant tool-switching, and constant status meetings.

What’s the difference between a native Azure DevOps integration and a third-party tool?

Being a Microsoft product, Azure DevOps integrates natively with Microsoft tools like Teams, Excel, and Power BI. But it also has native integrations for GitHub, Slack, ServiceNow, and more.

The main difference between these integrations and third-party tools is in the amount of fields supported, the availability of two-way syncing, and the ease of implementation. Third-party tools can be more difficult to set up, but typically have more depth than built-in integrations.

Does Azure DevOps support two-way sync with project management tools?

Azure DevOps doesn’t have built-in two-way sync functionality, so you’ll need a third-party tool to achieve this. A tool like Unito creates persistent, bidirectional relationships between work items in Azure DevOps and items in other tools, supporting historical data and field-level control.

Which tools can Azure DevOps integrate with?

Depending on the integration solution used, you can integrate Azure DevOps with hundreds of tools, from project management platforms to other software development tools. Unito, for example, offers two-way integrations between Azure DevOps and tools like Jira, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Smartsheet, and more.

What Azure DevOps work item types can be synced with other tools?

Integration platforms support a variety of Azure DevOps work item types. Unito, for example, supports all native and custom Azure DevOps work item types, including epics, user stories, tasks, bugs, features, product backlog items, test plans, test cases, and impediments.

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