Contrasting to Github PR its a better process but really only a marginal impact on developer productivity.
When i was there - Codeflow had the following feature
- Multiple reviewer states ... accepted/reviewing/awaiting changes/decline to review/reject change.
- Multiple comment states ... pending, won't fix, fixed etc.
- Iterations based code review flow - after you review - you come back easily view the next iteration (relative diff) - you can really compare back and forth and track comments through iterations - github tends to loose comments through commits
- Support for bots to comment like stylecop etc
Codeflow workflow felt like an MS-Office application like Word or Outlook compared to Github
- Heavy UI based workflow with no API/commandline counterpart sometimes
- Desktop app - not website
- Lots of knobs/states
- Very easy to work back and forth in the UX
I agree with an earlier comment however - the UX was pretty ugly - the workflow account for lots of states Github doesn't but there is a nice linear flow to the progression of a github conversion that (at least at the time i was there) . IIRC it was a managed .NET - WPF application which are kindy clunky - not as nice as a website with clear links etc.
At least as of November 2018 (when I left), everything you said was still true. However!
CodeFlow was also integrated into VSTS, whose review tooling is very much inspired by CodeFlow. Reviewers could use their web browser or the client app, and it all fed into the same system.
Most of the features that set it apart from Github initially have been copied by now - comment threads with resolutions, individual reviewer states, etc, have all been recently introduced; the gap between CF and GH has shrunk substantially.
That said, CF still does a better job of retaining comment threads and associating them with lines of code. Maybe it's just different UX decisions by the product teams, but it makes a difference when reviewing complicated patches.
