Github Actions vs TeamCity

Overview

TeamCity

Stacks1.2K

Followers1.1K

Votes316

GitHub Actions

Stacks48.2K

Followers3.1K

Votes27

Github Actions vs TeamCity: What are the differences?

GitHub Actions and TeamCity are both powerful continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms used for automating software development workflows and ensuring code quality. Let's explore the key difference between them.

Integration: GitHub Actions is tightly integrated with GitHub and provides native support for repositories hosted on GitHub, allowing developers to easily automate their workflows within the platform itself. On the other hand, TeamCity is a standalone Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) server that can be installed on-premises or in cloud environments, providing a broader range of integration options with different development platforms.
Workflow Definition: GitHub Actions uses a YAML-based configuration file called "workflow" which defines the steps, events, and conditions for automation. It offers a more declarative and intuitive approach to define workflows, making it easier for developers to understand and maintain the automation logic. In contrast, TeamCity uses a visual interface to create build configurations and define the build steps, making it suitable for developers who prefer a more visual approach.
Supported Platforms: GitHub Actions has built-in support for a wide range of platforms, including different operating systems (Windows, Linux, macOS), programming languages (Java, Python, JavaScript, etc.), and cloud providers (Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, etc.). TeamCity, being a standalone server, is more flexible in terms of platform support and can be used with a wide variety of development frameworks, languages, and environments.
Community and Marketplace: GitHub Actions benefits from the strong GitHub community and has a rich ecosystem of actions, workflows, and integrations shared by the community. Developers can leverage these pre-built actions to accelerate their automation efforts. TeamCity also has a vibrant community, but it primarily focuses on plugins and extensions to enhance the functionality of the server rather than predefined automation actions.
Scalability and Deployment: With GitHub Actions, the automation workflows run on GitHub infrastructure, which provides scalability and effortless deployment. It can handle parallel workflows, scale with the number of events, and provide multi-platform support. TeamCity, on the other hand, needs to be configured and managed separately, which requires more manual effort for scalability and deployment in distributed or complex environments.
Pricing Model: GitHub Actions offers a generous free tier for public repositories and provides a certain amount of build minutes and storage for private repositories. Additional capacity can be purchased based on usage. TeamCity follows a different pricing model as it is a separate CI/CD server, which typically involves a license fee based on the number of build agents and features required.

In summary, GitHub Actions offers tight integration with GitHub, uses YAML-based workflows, and supports a wide range of platforms with a vibrant marketplace and community. TeamCity, on the other hand, is a standalone CI/CD server with a visual interface, flexible platform support, and a different pricing model.

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Advice on TeamCity, GitHub Actions

Somnath

Engineering Leader at Altimetrik Corp.

Jun 25, 2020

Needs adviceon

CircleCI

Drone.io

GitHub Actions

I am in the process of evaluating CircleCI, Drone.io, and GitHub Actions to cover my #CI/ #CD needs. I would appreciate your advice on comparative study w.r.t. attributes like language-Inclusive support, code-base integration, performance, cost, maintenance, support, ease of use, ability to deal with big projects, etc. based on actual industry experience.

Thanks in advance!

1.82M views1.82M

Comments

Detailed Comparison

TeamCity	GitHub Actions
TeamCity is a user-friendly continuous integration (CI) server for professional developers, build engineers, and DevOps. It is trivial to setup and absolutely free for small teams and open source projects.	It makes it easy to automate all your software workflows, now with world-class CI/CD. Build, test, and deploy your code right from GitHub. Make code reviews, branch management, and issue triaging work the way you want.
Automate code analyzing, compiling, and testing processes, with having instant feedback on build progress, problems, and test failures, all in a simple, intuitive web-interface; Simplified setup: create projects from just a VCS repository URL;Run multiple builds and tests under different configurations and platforms simultaneously; Make sure your team sustains an uninterrupted workflow with the help of Pretested commits and Personal builds; Have build history insight with customizable statistics on build duration, success rate, code quality, and custom metrics; Enable cost-effective on-demand build infrastructure scaling thanks to tight integration with Amazon EC2; Easily extend TeamCity functionality and add new integrations using Java API; Great visual project representation. Track any changes made by any user in the system, filter projects and choose style of visual change status representation;	Multiple workflow files support; Free and open source; Workflow run interface; Search for actions in GitHub Marketplace; Integrated with Github's Checks API; Logs and artifacts downloading support
Statistics
Stacks 1.2K	Stacks 48.2K
Followers 1.1K	Followers 3.1K
Votes 316	Votes 27
Pros & Cons
Pros 61 Easy to configure 37 Reliable and high-quality 32 On premise 32 Github integration 32 User friendly Cons 3 High costs for more than three build agents 2 User friendly 2 Proprietary 2 User-friendly	Pros 8 Integration with GitHub 5 Free 3 Easy to duplicate a workflow 3 Ready actions in Marketplace 2 Configs stored in .github Cons 5 Lacking [skip ci] 4 Lacking allow failure 3 Lacking job specific badges 2 No ssh login to servers 1 No Deployment Projects
Integrations
Slack	GitHub

What are some alternatives to TeamCity, GitHub Actions?

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

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 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.

CircleCI

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.

Drone.io

Drone is a hosted continuous integration service. It enables you to conveniently set up projects to automatically build, test, and deploy as you make changes to your code. Drone integrates seamlessly with Github, Bitbucket and Google Code as well as third party services such as Heroku, Dotcloud, Google AppEngine and more.

wercker

Wercker is a CI/CD developer automation platform designed for Microservices & Container Architecture.

GoCD

GoCD is an open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks. GoCD offers business a first-class build and deployment engine for complete control and visibility.

Airflow

Use Airflow to author workflows as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of tasks. The Airflow scheduler executes your tasks on an array of workers while following the specified dependencies. Rich command lines utilities makes performing complex surgeries on DAGs a snap. The rich user interface makes it easy to visualize pipelines running in production, monitor progress and troubleshoot issues when needed.

Shippable

Shippable is a SaaS platform that lets you easily add Continuous Integration/Deployment to your Github and BitBucket repositories. It is lightweight, super simple to setup, and runs your builds and tests faster than any other service.

Buildkite

CI and build automation tool that combines the power of your own build infrastructure with the convenience of a managed, centralized web UI. Used by Shopify, Basecamp, Digital Ocean, Venmo, Cochlear, Bugsnag and more.

Related Comparisons

Github Actions vs TeamCity: What are the differences?

Integration: GitHub Actions is tightly integrated with GitHub and provides native support for repositories hosted on GitHub, allowing developers to easily automate their workflows within the platform itself. On the other hand, TeamCity is a standalone Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) server that can be installed on-premises or in cloud environments, providing a broader range of integration options with different development platforms.
Workflow Definition: GitHub Actions uses a YAML-based configuration file called "workflow" which defines the steps, events, and conditions for automation. It offers a more declarative and intuitive approach to define workflows, making it easier for developers to understand and maintain the automation logic. In contrast, TeamCity uses a visual interface to create build configurations and define the build steps, making it suitable for developers who prefer a more visual approach.
Supported Platforms: GitHub Actions has built-in support for a wide range of platforms, including different operating systems (Windows, Linux, macOS), programming languages (Java, Python, JavaScript, etc.), and cloud providers (Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, etc.). TeamCity, being a standalone server, is more flexible in terms of platform support and can be used with a wide variety of development frameworks, languages, and environments.
Community and Marketplace: GitHub Actions benefits from the strong GitHub community and has a rich ecosystem of actions, workflows, and integrations shared by the community. Developers can leverage these pre-built actions to accelerate their automation efforts. TeamCity also has a vibrant community, but it primarily focuses on plugins and extensions to enhance the functionality of the server rather than predefined automation actions.
Scalability and Deployment: With GitHub Actions, the automation workflows run on GitHub infrastructure, which provides scalability and effortless deployment. It can handle parallel workflows, scale with the number of events, and provide multi-platform support. TeamCity, on the other hand, needs to be configured and managed separately, which requires more manual effort for scalability and deployment in distributed or complex environments.
Pricing Model: GitHub Actions offers a generous free tier for public repositories and provides a certain amount of build minutes and storage for private repositories. Additional capacity can be purchased based on usage. TeamCity follows a different pricing model as it is a separate CI/CD server, which typically involves a license fee based on the number of build agents and features required.

Github Actions vs TeamCity

Overview