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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Continuous Integration
  4. Continuous Integration
  5. GitLab CI vs Visual Studio App Center

GitLab CI vs Visual Studio App Center

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

GitLab CI
GitLab CI
Stacks2.3K
Followers1.6K
Votes75
GitHub Stars0
Forks0
Visual Studio App Center
Visual Studio App Center
Stacks113
Followers232
Votes4

GitLab CI vs Visual Studio App Center: What are the differences?

Introduction

GitLab CI and Visual Studio App Center are both popular platforms used for continuous integration and delivery in software development. However, there are some key differences between these two platforms that set them apart. Let's explore these differences in more detail.

  1. Deployment Targets: GitLab CI primarily focuses on deploying applications to various platforms, such as Kubernetes clusters or cloud providers, using infrastructure-as-code strategies. In contrast, Visual Studio App Center is more specialized in deploying mobile applications, supporting both iOS and Android platforms.

  2. Development Environment: GitLab CI provides a flexible development environment, allowing developers to use any tools and languages they prefer. It supports build scripts written in YAML, enabling easy configuration and customization. On the other hand, Visual Studio App Center is specifically designed for developers using Visual Studio and Xamarin, providing a seamless integration with these tools.

  3. Testing Capabilities: GitLab CI offers a wide range of built-in testing capabilities, such as unit tests, integration tests, and code coverage analysis. It also supports various testing frameworks and tools. In contrast, Visual Studio App Center focuses on mobile app testing, providing comprehensive capabilities for automated testing on both real devices and simulators/emulators.

  4. Integrated Pipelines: GitLab CI allows users to define custom pipelines using its native CI/CD configuration file, making it easy to create complex, multi-stage pipelines and automate the entire development and deployment process. Visual Studio App Center, on the other hand, provides a more guided and simplified approach to pipeline creation, with predefined stages for building, testing, and distributing mobile apps.

  5. Built-in Analytics: Visual Studio App Center offers powerful analytics and crash reporting features specifically tailored for mobile app development. Developers can easily track app usage, monitor crashes and errors, and gain insights into user behavior. GitLab CI does not provide native analytics capabilities, but it can integrate with third-party tools for this purpose.

  6. Community and Support: GitLab CI has a large and active developer community, with extensive documentation and support resources available. It also has an open-source edition, allowing users to self-host their CI/CD infrastructure if desired. Visual Studio App Center, being a Microsoft product, benefits from the resources and support of the wider Microsoft ecosystem, including dedicated support channels and integration with other Microsoft services.

In summary, GitLab CI and Visual Studio App Center differ in their deployment targets, development environments, testing capabilities, pipeline creation approaches, analytics features, and community/support resources. Choosing between these two platforms depends on specific project requirements and the focus of the development team.

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Advice on GitLab CI, Visual Studio App Center

Stratos
Stratos

Jan 13, 2020

Needs advice

We are a mid-size startup running Scala apps. Moving from Jenkins/EC2 to Spinnaker/EKS and looking for a tool to cover our CI/CD needs. Our code lives on GitHub, artifacts in nexus, images in ECR.

Drone is out, GitHub actions are being considered along with Circle CI and GitLab CI.

We primarily need:

  • Fast SBT builds (caching)
  • Low maintenance overhead (ideally serverless)
  • Everything as code
  • Ease of use
181k views181k
Comments
Anonymous
Anonymous

Feb 14, 2020

Decided

Buddy is one of the most easy-to-use tools for CI I ever met. When I needed to set up the pipeline I was really impressed with how easy it is to create it with Buddy with only a few moments. It's literally like:

  1. Add repo
  2. Click - Click - Click
  3. You're done and your app is on prod :D The top feature that I've found is a simple integration with different notification channels - not only Slack (which is the one by default), but Telegram and Discord. The support is also neat - guys respond pretty quickly on even a small issue.
157k views157k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

GitLab CI
GitLab CI
Visual Studio App Center
Visual Studio App Center

GitLab offers a continuous integration service. If you add a .gitlab-ci.yml file to the root directory of your repository, and configure your GitLab project to use a Runner, then each merge request or push triggers your CI pipeline.

Automate the lifecycle of your iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS apps. Connect your repo and within minutes build in the cloud, test on thousands of real devices, distribute to beta testers and app stores, and monitor real-world usage with crash and analytics data. All in one place.

-
Build; Test; Distribute; Crashes; Diagnostics; Analytics; Push; CD/CI;
Statistics
GitHub Stars
0
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
0
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
2.3K
Stacks
113
Followers
1.6K
Followers
232
Votes
75
Votes
4
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 22
    Robust CI with awesome Docker support
  • 13
    Simple configuration
  • 9
    All in one solution
  • 7
    Source Control and CI in one place
  • 5
    Integrated with VCS on commit
Cons
  • 2
    Works best with GitLab repositories
Pros
  • 1
    For Mobile apps diagnostics and tracking
  • 1
    Bug tracking integration
  • 1
    Slack integration
  • 1
    Show error issues for mobile devices
Integrations
GitLab
GitLab
GitHub
GitHub
Bitbucket
Bitbucket
Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps
Slack
Slack

What are some alternatives to GitLab CI, Visual Studio App Center?

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.

Ionic

Ionic

Free and open source, Ionic offers a library of mobile and desktop-optimized HTML, CSS and JS components for building highly interactive apps. Use with Angular, React, Vue, or plain JavaScript.

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.

Flutter

Flutter

Flutter is a mobile app SDK to help developers and designers build modern mobile apps for iOS and Android.

React Native

React Native

React Native enables you to build world-class application experiences on native platforms using a consistent developer experience based on JavaScript and React. The focus of React Native is on developer efficiency across all the platforms you care about - learn once, write anywhere. Facebook uses React Native in multiple production apps and will continue investing in React Native.

CircleCI

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.

Xamarin

Xamarin

Xamarin’s Mono-based products enable .NET developers to use their existing code, libraries and tools (including Visual Studio*), as well as skills in .NET and the C# programming language, to create mobile applications for the industry’s most widely-used mobile devices, including Android-based smartphones and tablets, iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

NativeScript

NativeScript

NativeScript enables developers to build native apps for iOS, Android and Windows Universal while sharing the application code across the platforms. When building the application UI, developers use our libraries, which abstract the differences between the native platforms.

TeamCity

TeamCity

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.

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