Alternatives to CircleCI logo

Alternatives to CircleCI

Jenkins, Travis CI, Codeship, Azure DevOps, and Concourse are the most popular alternatives and competitors to CircleCI.
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What is CircleCI and what are its top alternatives?

Continuous integration and delivery platform helps software teams rapidly release code with confidence by automating the build, test, and deploy process. Offers a modern software development platform that lets teams ramp.
CircleCI is a tool in the Continuous Integration category of a tech stack.

Top Alternatives to CircleCI

  • Jenkins
    Jenkins

    In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project. ...

  • Travis CI
    Travis CI

    Free for open source projects, our CI environment provides multiple runtimes (e.g. Node.js or PHP versions), data stores and so on. Because of this, hosting your project on travis-ci.com means you can effortlessly test your library or applications against multiple runtimes and data stores without even having all of them installed locally. ...

  • Codeship
    Codeship

    Codeship runs your automated tests and configured deployment when you push to your repository. It takes care of managing and scaling the infrastructure so that you are able to test and release more frequently and get faster feedback for building the product your users need. ...

  • Azure DevOps
    Azure DevOps

    Azure DevOps provides unlimited private Git hosting, cloud build for continuous integration, agile planning, and release management for continuous delivery to the cloud and on-premises. Includes broad IDE support. ...

  • Concourse
    Concourse

    Concourse's principles reduce the risk of switching to and from Concourse, by encouraging practices that decouple your project from your CI's little details, and keeping all configuration in declarative files that can be checked into version control. ...

  • CloudBees
    CloudBees

    Enables organizations to build, test and deploy applications to production, utilizing continuous delivery practices. They are focused solely on Jenkins as a tool for continuous delivery both on-premises and in the cloud. ...

  • Bamboo
    Bamboo

    Focus on coding and count on Bamboo as your CI and build server! Create multi-stage build plans, set up triggers to start builds upon commits, and assign agents to your critical builds and deployments. ...

  • AWS CodeBuild
    AWS CodeBuild

    AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed build service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy. With CodeBuild, you don’t need to provision, manage, and scale your own build servers. ...

CircleCI alternatives & related posts

Jenkins logo

Jenkins

57.6K
48.8K
2.2K
An extendable open source continuous integration server
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PROS OF JENKINS
  • 523
    Hosted internally
  • 469
    Free open source
  • 318
    Great to build, deploy or launch anything async
  • 243
    Tons of integrations
  • 211
    Rich set of plugins with good documentation
  • 111
    Has support for build pipelines
  • 68
    Easy setup
  • 66
    It is open-source
  • 53
    Workflow plugin
  • 13
    Configuration as code
  • 12
    Very powerful tool
  • 11
    Many Plugins
  • 10
    Continuous Integration
  • 10
    Great flexibility
  • 9
    Git and Maven integration is better
  • 8
    100% free and open source
  • 7
    Slack Integration (plugin)
  • 7
    Github integration
  • 6
    Self-hosted GitLab Integration (plugin)
  • 6
    Easy customisation
  • 5
    Pipeline API
  • 5
    Docker support
  • 4
    Fast builds
  • 4
    Hosted Externally
  • 4
    Excellent docker integration
  • 4
    Platform idnependency
  • 3
    AWS Integration
  • 3
    JOBDSL
  • 3
    It's Everywhere
  • 3
    Customizable
  • 3
    Can be run as a Docker container
  • 3
    It`w worked
  • 2
    Loose Coupling
  • 2
    NodeJS Support
  • 2
    Build PR Branch Only
  • 2
    Easily extendable with seamless integration
  • 2
    PHP Support
  • 2
    Ruby/Rails Support
  • 2
    Universal controller
CONS OF JENKINS
  • 13
    Workarounds needed for basic requirements
  • 10
    Groovy with cumbersome syntax
  • 8
    Plugins compatibility issues
  • 7
    Lack of support
  • 7
    Limited abilities with declarative pipelines
  • 5
    No YAML syntax
  • 4
    Too tied to plugins versions

related Jenkins posts

Tymoteusz Paul
Devops guy at X20X Development LTD · | 23 upvotes · 8M views

Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).

It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up or vagrant reload we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.

I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.

We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.

If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.

The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).

Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.

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Thierry Schellenbach

Releasing new versions of our services is done by Travis CI. Travis first runs our test suite. Once it passes, it publishes a new release binary to GitHub.

Common tasks such as installing dependencies for the Go project, or building a binary are automated using plain old Makefiles. (We know, crazy old school, right?) Our binaries are compressed using UPX.

Travis has come a long way over the past years. I used to prefer Jenkins in some cases since it was easier to debug broken builds. With the addition of the aptly named “debug build” button, Travis is now the clear winner. It’s easy to use and free for open source, with no need to maintain anything.

#ContinuousIntegration #CodeCollaborationVersionControl

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Travis CI logo

Travis CI

27.5K
6.6K
1.7K
A hosted continuous integration service for open source and private projects
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PROS OF TRAVIS CI
  • 506
    Github integration
  • 388
    Free for open source
  • 271
    Easy to get started
  • 191
    Nice interface
  • 162
    Automatic deployment
  • 72
    Tutorials for each programming language
  • 40
    Friendly folks
  • 29
    Support for multiple ruby versions
  • 28
    Osx support
  • 24
    Easy handling of secret keys
  • 6
    Fast builds
  • 4
    Support for students
  • 3
    The best tool for Open Source CI
  • 3
    Hosted
  • 3
    Build Matrices
  • 2
    Github Pull Request build
  • 2
    Straightforward Github/Coveralls integration
  • 2
    Easy of Usage
  • 2
    Integrates with everything
  • 1
    Caching resolved artifacts
  • 1
    Docker support
  • 1
    Great Documentation
  • 1
    Build matrix
  • 1
    No-brainer for CI
  • 1
    Debug build workflow
  • 1
    Ubuntu trusty is not supported
  • 1
    Free for students
  • 1
    Configuration saved with project repository
  • 1
    Multi-threaded run
  • 1
    Hipchat Integration
  • 0
    Perfect
CONS OF TRAVIS CI
  • 8
    Can't be hosted insternally
  • 3
    Feature lacking
  • 3
    Unstable
  • 2
    Incomplete documentation for all platforms

related Travis CI posts

Thierry Schellenbach

Releasing new versions of our services is done by Travis CI. Travis first runs our test suite. Once it passes, it publishes a new release binary to GitHub.

Common tasks such as installing dependencies for the Go project, or building a binary are automated using plain old Makefiles. (We know, crazy old school, right?) Our binaries are compressed using UPX.

Travis has come a long way over the past years. I used to prefer Jenkins in some cases since it was easier to debug broken builds. With the addition of the aptly named “debug build” button, Travis is now the clear winner. It’s easy to use and free for open source, with no need to maintain anything.

#ContinuousIntegration #CodeCollaborationVersionControl

See more
Tim Abbott
Shared insights
on
Travis CITravis CICircleCICircleCI
at

We actually started out on Travis CI, but we've migrated our main builds to CircleCI, and it's been a huge improvement.

The reason it's been a huge improvement is that Travis CI has a fundamentally bad design for their images, where they start with a standard base Linux image containing tons of packages (several versions of postgres, every programming language environment, etc). This is potentially nice for the "get builds for a small project running quickly" use case, but it's a total disaster for a larger project that needs a decent number of dependencies and cares about the performance and reliability of their build.

This issue is exacerbated by their networking infrastructure being unreliable; we usually saw over 1% of builds failing due to transient networking errors in Travis CI, even after we added retries to the most frequently failing operations like apt update or pip install. And they never install Ubuntu's point release updates to their images. So doing an apt update, apt install, or especially apt upgrade would take forever. We ended up writing code to actually uninstall many of their base packages and pin the versions of hundreds of others to get a semi-fast, semi-reliable build. It was infuriating.

The CircleCI v2.0 system has the right design for a CI system: we can customize the base image to start with any expensive-to-install packages we need for our build, and we can update that image if and when we want to. The end result is that when migrating, we were able to delete all the hacky optimizations mentioned above, while still ending up with a 50% faster build latency. And we've also had 5-10x fewer issues with networking-related flakes, which means one doesn't have to constantly check whether a build failure is actually due to an issue with the code under test or "just another networking flake".

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Codeship logo

Codeship

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730
1.5K
A Continuous Integration Platform in the cloud
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730
+ 1
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PROS OF CODESHIP
  • 215
    Simple deployments
  • 179
    Easy setup
  • 159
    Github integration
  • 147
    Continuous deployment
  • 110
    Bitbucket integration
  • 97
    Easy ui
  • 84
    Slack integration
  • 66
    Fast builds
  • 61
    Great ui
  • 61
    Great customer support
  • 28
    SSH debug access
  • 27
    Free plan for 5 private repositories
  • 27
    Easy to get started
  • 23
    Competitively priced
  • 20
    Notifications
  • 20
    Hipchat, Campfire integrations
  • 16
    Awesome UI
  • 15
    Fast
  • 14
    Great documentation
  • 13
    Great experience
  • 12
    Free for open source
  • 10
    Great Tutorials
  • 4
    GitLab integration
  • 4
    Free
  • 4
    Easy to use, above all and its free for basic use
  • 3
    Easy for CI first timers
  • 3
    BitBucket Support
  • 3
    Very easy to get started
  • 3
    Build private Github repos on the free plan
  • 3
    Awesome
  • 2
    Super easy setup, works great with py.test/tox
  • 2
    Openshift integration
  • 2
    Great support, even on free tier
  • 2
    AppEngine integration
  • 2
    Easy debugging with ssh
  • 2
    Integrates with other free software
  • 2
    Superfast team work integration
  • 2
    Grepping Codeship = 1 day. Grepping Bamboo = 1 month
  • 2
    Easy to set up, very nice GitHub integration
  • 2
    Up and running in few minutes, and above all UI
CONS OF CODESHIP
  • 3
    Ui could use some polishing
  • 0
    Antiquated ui
  • 0
    Difficult to answer build questions

related Codeship posts

Sebastian Dellwig
Solution Architect at Porsche Digital GmbH · | 6 upvotes · 197K views
Shared insights
on
GitLab CIGitLab CICircleCICircleCICodeshipCodeship

We are using GitLab CI and were very happy with it. The integration of all tools like CI/CD, tickets, etc makes it very easy to stay on top of things. But be aware, Gitlab currently does not have iOS build support. So if you want to exchange that for CircleCI / Codeship to have to invest some effort. We are using a managed Mac OS device and installed the Gitlab runner there, to have iOS builds.

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Azure DevOps logo

Azure DevOps

2.7K
2.8K
248
Services for teams to share code, track work, and ship software
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PROS OF AZURE DEVOPS
  • 56
    Complete and powerful
  • 32
    Huge extension ecosystem
  • 27
    Azure integration
  • 26
    Flexible and powerful
  • 26
    One Stop Shop For Build server, Project Mgt, CDCI
  • 15
    Everything I need. Simple and intuitive UI
  • 13
    Support Open Source
  • 8
    Integrations
  • 7
    GitHub Integration
  • 6
    One 4 all
  • 6
    Cost free for Stakeholders
  • 6
    Project Mgmt Features
  • 5
    Crap
  • 5
    Runs in the cloud
  • 3
    Agent On-Premise(Linux - Windows)
  • 2
    Aws integration
  • 2
    Link Test Cases to Stories
  • 2
    Jenkins Integration
  • 1
    GCP Integration
CONS OF AZURE DEVOPS
  • 8
    Still dependant on C# for agents
  • 5
    Many in devops disregard MS altogether
  • 4
    Capacity across cross functional teams not visibile
  • 4
    Not a requirements management tool
  • 4
    Half Baked
  • 3
    Jack of all trades, master of none
  • 3
    Poor Jenkins integration
  • 2
    Tedious for test plan/case creation

related Azure DevOps posts

Farzad Jalali
Senior Software Architect at BerryWorld · | 8 upvotes · 250.4K views

Visual Studio Azure DevOps Azure Functions Azure Websites #Azure #AzureKeyVault #AzureAD #AzureApps

#Azure Cloud Since Amazon is potentially our competitor then we need a different cloud vendor, also our programmers are microsoft oriented so the choose were obviously #Azure for us.

Azure DevOps Because we need to be able to develop a neww pipeline into Azure environment ina few minutes.

Azure Kubernetes Service We already in #Azure , also need to use K8s , so let's use AKS as it's a manged Kubernetes in the #Azure

See more
Nicholas Rogoff

Secure Membership Web API backed by SQL Server. This is the backing API to store additional profile and complex membership metadata outside of an Azure AD B2C provider. The front-end using the Azure AD B2C to allow 3rd party trusted identity providers to authenticate. This API provides a way to add and manage more complex permission structures than can easily be maintained in Azure AD.

We have .Net developers and an Azure infrastructure environment using server-less functions, logic apps and SaaS where ever possible. For this service I opted to keep it as a classic WebAPI project and deployed to AppService.

  • Trusted Authentication Provider: @AzureActiveDirectoryB2C
  • Frameworks: .NET Core
  • Language: C# , Microsoft SQL Server , JavaScript
  • IDEs: Visual Studio Code , Visual Studio
  • Libraries: jQuery @EntityFramework, @AutoMapper, @FeatureToggle , @Swashbuckle
  • Database: @SqlAzure
  • Source Control: Git
  • Build and Release Pipelines: Azure DevOps
  • Test tools: Postman , Newman
  • Test framework: @nUnit, @moq
  • Infrastructure: @AzureAppService, @AzureAPIManagement
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Concourse logo

Concourse

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390
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Pipeline-based CI system written in Go
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390
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PROS OF CONCOURSE
  • 16
    Real pipelines
  • 10
    Containerised builds
  • 9
    Flexible engine
  • 6
    Fast
  • 4
    Open source
  • 3
    No Snowflakes
  • 3
    Simple configuration management
  • 2
    You have to do everything
  • 1
    Fancy Visualization
CONS OF CONCOURSE
  • 2
    Fail forward instead of rollback pattern

related Concourse posts

We use Docker for our #DeploymentWorkflow along with Concourse for build pipelines and Ansible for deployment together with Vault to manage secrets.

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CloudBees logo

CloudBees

107
164
5
Enterprise Jenkins and DevOps
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+ 1
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PROS OF CLOUDBEES
  • 5
    Jenkins
CONS OF CLOUDBEES
    Be the first to leave a con

    related CloudBees posts

    Bamboo logo

    Bamboo

    511
    546
    17
    Tie automated builds, tests, and releases together in a single workflow
    511
    546
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    PROS OF BAMBOO
    • 10
      Integrates with other Atlassian tools
    • 4
      Great notification scheme
    • 2
      Great UI
    • 1
      Has Deployment Projects
    CONS OF BAMBOO
    • 6
      Expensive
    • 1
      Low community support
    • 1
      Bad UI
    • 1
      Bad integration with docker

    related Bamboo posts

    xie zhifeng
    Shared insights
    on
    BambooBambooJenkinsJenkinsGitLabGitLab
    at

    I am choosing a DevOps toolset for my team. GitLab is open source and quite cloud-native. Jenkins has a very popular environment system but old-style technicals. Bamboo is very nice but integrated only with Atlassian products.

    See more
    AWS CodeBuild logo

    AWS CodeBuild

    475
    477
    43
    Build and test code with continuous scaling
    475
    477
    + 1
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    PROS OF AWS CODEBUILD
    • 7
      Pay per minute
    • 5
      Parameter Store integration for passing secrets
    • 4
      Integrated with AWS
    • 3
      Streaming logs to Amazon CloudWatch
    • 3
      Bit bucket integration
    • 2
      GitHub Webhooks support
    • 2
      AWS Config and Config rule integration for compliance
    • 2
      VPC PrivateLinks to invoke service without internet
    • 1
      Windows/.NET support
    • 1
      Jenkins plugin integration
    • 1
      Ondemand scaling of build jobs
    • 1
      Scheduled builds with CloudWatch Events integration
    • 1
      Local build debug support
    • 1
      Native support for accessing Amazon VPC resources
    • 1
      Docker based build environment
    • 1
      Support for bringing custom Docker images
    • 1
      Fully managed (no installation/updates, servers to mai
    • 1
      PCI, SOC, ISO, HIPAA compliant
    • 1
      Full API/SDKs/CLI support
    • 1
      YAML based configuration
    • 1
      Great support (forums, premium support, SO, GitHub)
    • 1
      Perpetual free tier option (100 mins/month)
    • 1
      GitHub Enterprise support
    CONS OF AWS CODEBUILD
    • 2
      Poor branch support

    related AWS CodeBuild posts

    Chris McFadden
    VP, Engineering at SparkPost · | 9 upvotes · 156.1K views

    The recent move of our CI/CD tooling to AWS CodeBuild / AWS CodeDeploy (with GitHub ) as well as moving to Amazon EC2 Container Service / AWS Lambda for our deployment architecture for most of our services has helped us significantly reduce our deployment times while improving both feature velocity and overall reliability. In one extreme case, we got one service down from 90 minutes to a very reasonable 15 minutes. Container-based build and deployments have made so many things simpler and easier and the integration between the tools has been helpful. There is still some work to do on our service mesh & API proxy approach to further simplify our environment.

    See more

    Hi, I need advice. In my project, we are using Bitbucket hosted on-prem, Jenkins, and Jira. Also, we have restrictions not to use any plugins for code review, code quality, code security, etc., with bitbucket. Now we want to migrate to AWS CodeCommit, which would mean that we can use, let's say, Amazon CodeGuru for code reviews and move to AWS CodeBuild and AWS CodePipeline for build automation in the future rather than using Jenkins.

    Now I want advice on below.

    1. Is it a good idea to migrate from Bitbucket to AWS Codecommit?
    2. If we want to integrate Jira with AWS Codecommit, then how can we do this? If a developer makes any changes in Jira, then a build should be triggered automatically in AWS and create a Jira ticket if the build fails. So, how can we achieve this?
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