Overview

Travis CI

Stacks26.5K

Followers6.7K

Votes1.7K

Appveyor

Stacks124

Followers131

Votes94

Appveyor vs Travis CI: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Appveyor and Travis CI

Introduction: Appveyor and Travis CI are both continuous integration (CI) platforms that help automate the process of building, testing, and deploying software projects. While they share similar goals, there are key differences between the two that make each platform unique and suitable for different use cases.

Environment Support: Appveyor mainly targets Windows-based platforms, providing a wide range of Windows operating systems, Visual Studio versions, and .NET frameworks for testing and deployment. On the other hand, Travis CI is primarily designed for Linux and macOS environments, and while it does support Windows, it has more limited capabilities for Windows-based projects.
Configuration: Appveyor uses a declarative approach for configuration where the build and testing settings are defined in a YAML file. This makes it straightforward to set up and configure projects without the need for complex scripting. In contrast, Travis CI relies on a scripting language (typically YAML or Bash) for configuring build steps and running tests, allowing for more customization and flexibility.
Parallelization: Appveyor has built-in support for parallel builds, allowing users to split their tests across multiple machines or stages to speed up the overall build process. This can be particularly useful for large projects with extensive test suites. Travis CI, on the other hand, does not have native support for parallelization and relies on third-party tools or custom scripting to achieve similar functionality.
Pricing Structure: Appveyor offers a variety of pricing plans including a free tier for open-source projects, as well as paid plans for additional features and increased build capacity. They also provide custom enterprise plans for organizations that require dedicated resources. In comparison, Travis CI offers a free tier for open-source projects, but for private repositories or additional features like parallelization and increased concurrency, users need to upgrade to one of their paid plans.
Integration Ecosystem: Travis CI has strong integration with GitHub, making it seamless to set up and run builds for projects hosted on the platform. It also has extensive support for popular programming languages and frameworks, with pre-configured build environments for widely used technologies. Appveyor, on the other hand, offers integration with various version control systems including GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket, catering to a broader range of developers and development workflows.
Windows-specific Features: As a Windows-centric CI platform, Appveyor provides features that are specific to the Windows ecosystem. This includes support for running tests on different versions of Internet Explorer, Windows Server, and SQL Server. It also offers compatibility with various Windows-specific tools and libraries. In contrast, Travis CI's focus on Linux and macOS limits its support for Windows-specific technologies and features.

In summary, Appveyor and Travis CI differ in terms of their supported environments, configuration approaches, parallelization capabilities, pricing structures, integration ecosystems, and Windows-specific features. Understanding these differences is crucial in choosing the right CI platform that aligns with the specific needs of a software development project.

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Advice on Travis CI, Appveyor

Felipe

May 24, 2020

Needs advice

My website is brand new and one of the few requirements of testings I had to implement was code coverage. Never though it was so hard to implement using a #docker container.
Given my lack of experience, every attempt I tried on making a simple code coverage test using the 4 combinations of #TravisCI, #CircleCi with #Coveralls, #Codecov I failed. The main problem was I was generating the .coverage file within the docker container and couldn't access it with #TravisCi or #CircleCi, every attempt to solve this problem seems to be very hacky and this was not the kind of complexity I want to introduce to my newborn website.
This problem was solved using a specific action for #GitHubActions, it was a 3 line solution I had to put in my github workflow file and I was able to access the .coverage file from my docker container and get the coverage report with #Codecov.

198k views198k

Comments

StackShare

Apr 17, 2019

Needs advice

From a StackShare Community member: "Currently we use Travis CI and have optimized it as much as we can so our builds are fairly quick. Our boss is all about redundancy so we are looking for another solution to fall back on in case Travis goes down and/or jacks prices way up (they were recently acquired). Could someone recommend which CI we should go with and if they have time, an explanation of how they're different?"

529k views529k

Comments

Tatiana

Nov 16, 2019

Decided

Jenkins is a pretty flexible, complete tool. Especially I love the possibility to configure jobs as a code with Jenkins pipelines.

CircleCI is well suited for small projects where the main task is to run continuous integration as quickly as possible. Travis CI is recommended primarily for open-source projects that need to be tested in different environments.

And for something a bit larger I prefer to use Jenkins because it is possible to make serious system configuration thereby different plugins. In Jenkins, I can change almost anything. But if you want to start the CI chain as soon as possible, Jenkins may not be the right choice.

734k views734k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Travis CI	Appveyor
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.	AppVeyor aims to give powerful Continuous Integration and Deployment tools to every .NET developer without the hassle of setting up and maintaining their own build server.
Easy Setup- Getting started with Travis CI is as easy as enabling a project, adding basic build instructions to your project and committing code.;Supports Your Platform- Lots of databases and services are pre-installed and can simply be enabled in your build configuration, we'll launch them for you automatically. MySQL, PostgreSQL, ElasticSearch, Redis, Riak, RabbitMQ, Memcached are available by default.;Deploy With Confidence- Deploying to production after a successful build is as easy as setting up a bit of configuration, and we'll deploy your code to Heroku, Engine Yard Cloud, Nodejitsu, cloudControl, OpenShift, and CloudFoundry.	Scriptless, repetitive, one-click deployment of build artifacts to multiple environments;YAML configuration;Backed by Windows Azure platform;Built-in NuGet feeds with project artifacts;Build artifacts are stored in a highly-durable Geo-redundant cloud storage;
Statistics
Stacks 26.5K	Stacks 124
Followers 6.7K	Followers 131
Votes 1.7K	Votes 94
Pros & Cons
Pros 506 Github integration 388 Free for open source 271 Easy to get started 191 Nice interface 162 Automatic deployment Cons 8 Can't be hosted insternally 3 Unstable 3 Feature lacking 2 Incomplete documentation for all platforms	Pros 20 Github integration 18 Simple, reliable & powerful 12 Hosted 11 YML-based configuration 10 Nuget support Cons 1 Poor documentation 1 Complex user interface
Integrations
Amazon S3 Heroku AWS CodeDeploy MySQL Red Hat OpenShift Nodejitsu npm GitHub Engine Yard Cloud cloudControl	GitHub Bitbucket .NET

What are some alternatives to Travis CI, Appveyor?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Snap CI

Snap CI is a cloud-based continuous integration & continuous deployment tool with powerful deployment pipelines. Integrates seamlessly with GitHub and provides fast feedback so you can deploy with ease.