I brought in Axosoft because we needed a HelpDesk tool, a Customer Portal to report issues and a way to manage the software projects. We had some issues with it at times as it had some strange quirks especially around the web portal early on, but over time 95% of them worked out.
Likes: - Developers never left Visual Studio as it has a nice plugin. Notes and picking up tasks was super easy. Made everyone more compliant with comments on issues and tracking customer tickets. - HelpDesk tickets turned into development tasks without loosing any fidelity or communication. - Training videos were really good, webinars and support was also good. - Pretty fast resolution to issues - Flexible project management methodologies. - Burndown charts and other reporting was very flexible and pretty simple to use. - A lot of customization is possible.
Dislikes: - Wasn't opinionated enough at times, leaving too many options for people to choose from - Customer portal was, at the time, difficult to setup. This was about 3 years ago - Takes some setup to get it right, the out of the box ruleset and details just aren't enough. At least when I used it. - The upgrades were either painless or extremely painful. Not sure how that has changed recently.
I would use it again, especially if in a Microsoft shop, as it really integrated nice with the workflow and made things simple. We actually had set it up for a year using their service offering, and had client projects in it, but it doesn't work well for that use case. It is more designed for a software shop producing software. Not really good for a consulting use case, outside of helpdesk tickets.
I am interested to hear about Axosoft vs Visual Studio Online.