VersionPress Co-Founder Shares His Thoughts on Mergebot

Mergebot is a new SaaS solution by Delicious Brains Inc., that simplifies the database merging process making it somewhat similar to VersionPress. Although he hasn’t used the service as it’s still in early beta, Bernard compares the two and provides insight into how Mergebot possibly accomplishes database merging at a technical level.

“On the outside, VersionPress and Mergebot are vastly different”, Bernard said. “One is an open source project that you run locally on your site, has no dependency on an external service, but has a local dependency on Git which makes it hard to run on shared hosts, you never send the data anywhere, pay nothing etc.

“Mergebot is practically the opposite in all the points above, being a paid SaaS app, partly proprietary, etc. There’s no good or bad here and I’m sure Mergebot’s approach and the strong and reputable company behind it will attract many professional WordPress users.”

Because both solutions work with a similar schema that describes relations in the WordPress database, it’s possible that in the future, both companies could merge their efforts into one.

“I’ve actually reached out to the Mergebot guys back in May to discuss this,” Bernard said. “Both sides felt that the unification could or should happen one day but it’s too early for that. The formats are still developing. For example, we’re still refining the format for VersionPress and I’m sure they’re doing the same with the JSON.”

If you’re interested in learning more about the challenges of database merging, I encourage you to read Bernard’s post. It’s also refreshing to see competitors acknowledge and support each others products in a way that benefits users.