Octopus Deploy is a deployment automation tool that is based on the concept of running a series of tasks on one or more target machines.

Octopus reaches these machines through a tentacle (an agent) that is installed on these machines. In Octopus Deploy, it is possible to define applications and environments and assign one or more machines to each of those. To do deployments, execution steps can be defined in a graphical editor, comparable to the visual release editor of Azure DevOps.

One of the main differences is that these steps are not defined per environment, only once per pipeline. Next, it is possible to specify which environments each task should run on. This way, it is easier to see where the deployment to different environments varies.

There is an integration between Azure DevOps and Octopus Deploy available, in the form of a build and release task. Using this integration, you can start a deployment using Octopus Deploy from an Azure DevOps build or release pipeline.