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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Continuous Integration
  4. Continuous Integration
  5. Azure Pipelines vs Semaphore

Azure Pipelines vs Semaphore

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Semaphore
Semaphore
Stacks190
Followers187
Votes83
Azure Pipelines
Azure Pipelines
Stacks2.3K
Followers457
Votes14

Azure Pipelines vs Semaphore: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this Markdown code, we will compare Azure Pipelines and Semaphore in terms of their key differences.

  1. Deployment Options: Azure Pipelines provides a wide range of deployment options for various platforms like Azure, Kubernetes, and more. It offers seamless integration with Azure services, allowing users to deploy applications effortlessly. On the other hand, Semaphore primarily focuses on Continuous Integration (CI) and limited Continuous Deployment (CD) options. While it supports deploying applications to platforms like Heroku and AWS, it lacks the extensive deployment options offered by Azure Pipelines.

  2. Pricing Model: Azure Pipelines follows a usage-based pricing model. It offers free usage for open-source projects and provides a certain number of free build minutes for private repositories. Additional build minutes can be purchased as per the user's requirements. In contrast, Semaphore offers fixed pricing plans based on team size and provides unlimited build minutes, regardless of the usage. This makes Semaphore more cost-effective for teams requiring significant build time.

  3. Pipeline Configuration: Azure Pipelines uses YAML-based pipeline configuration, making it easier to version-control and maintain pipelines as code. Developers can define and manage their CI/CD pipelines seamlessly within their source code repository. On the other hand, Semaphore relies on a declarative web-based UI for configuring pipelines. Although it offers a user-friendly interface, managing and versioning pipeline configurations can be more challenging compared to Azure Pipelines.

  4. Integration Ecosystem: Azure Pipelines integrates seamlessly with other Azure services, enabling users to incorporate various Azure resources into their CI/CD processes. It provides pre-built tasks and extensions for Azure-specific actions, such as deploying to Azure App Service or Azure Kubernetes Service. In contrast, Semaphore does not have the same level of integration with specific cloud providers or services. While it supports integration with some external services, the range and depth of integrations are relatively limited when compared to Azure Pipelines.

  5. Parallelism and Scalability: Azure Pipelines offers built-in parallelism, enabling users to execute multiple tasks simultaneously within their pipelines. This significantly reduces build time and improves efficiency, especially for large projects with complex build processes. Semaphore also supports parallelism, but its parallel execution capabilities are not as advanced as those offered by Azure Pipelines. Azure Pipelines also provides auto-scaling agents to handle varying workloads, ensuring optimal resource utilization.

  6. Community and Support: Azure Pipelines has a vast and active community, supported by Microsoft, that provides extensive documentation, tutorials, and resources. Users can rely on the community for assistance and troubleshooting, ensuring quick resolution of issues. Semaphore's community, although active, is relatively smaller compared to Azure Pipelines. It might be more challenging to find specific solutions or resources for Semaphore-related queries.

In summary, Azure Pipelines offers extensive deployment options, YAML-based pipeline configuration, a rich integration ecosystem, superior parallelism and scalability, a larger supportive community, while Semaphore focuses on CI/CD with limited deployment options, a declarative web-based UI for pipeline configuration, fixed pricing plans, a smaller integration ecosystem, and less advanced parallelism.

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Advice on Semaphore, Azure Pipelines

Balaramesh
Balaramesh

Apr 20, 2020

Needs adviceonAzure PipelinesAzure Pipelines.NET.NETJenkinsJenkins

We are currently using Azure Pipelines for continous integration. Our applications are developed witn .NET framework. But when we look at the online Jenkins is the most widely used tool for continous integration. Can you please give me the advice which one is best to use for my case Azure pipeline or jenkins.

663k views663k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Semaphore
Semaphore
Azure Pipelines
Azure Pipelines

Semaphore is the fastest continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) platform on the market, powering the world’s best engineering teams.

Fast builds with parallel jobs and test execution. Use container jobs to create consistent and reliable builds with the exact tools you need. Create new containers with ease and push them to any registry.

Docker, Kubernetes, iOS support & 100+ preinstalled Tools;Customizable Continuous Delivery Pipelines;Customizable Stages, Parallel Execution and Control Flow Switches;Secrets and Dependency Management;Powerful Command Line Interface;Autoscale and Pay Only What you Use;Project Timeline Shows All Development Activities at a Glance;Dashboard Shows You All Projects That You Participate in;Seamless GitHub Integration - One Click To Add a Project;Automatically Test Your App After Every Change;New Branches are Added & Removed Automatically;Know If a Pull Request Is Good To Merge;Review Every Version in Branch History;Easily Run Your Tests in Parallel Threads;Projects are Autoconfigured for Testing;
Any language, any platform; Containers and Kubernetes; Extensible; Deploy to any cloud; Open source; Advanced workflows and features
Statistics
Stacks
190
Stacks
2.3K
Followers
187
Followers
457
Votes
83
Votes
14
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 20
    Easy setup
  • 15
    Fast builds
  • 14
    Free for private github repos
  • 8
    Great customer support
  • 6
    Free for open source
Pros
  • 4
    Easy to get started
  • 3
    Built by Microsoft
  • 3
    Unlimited CI/CD minutes
  • 2
    Docker support
  • 2
    Yaml support
Integrations
GitHub
GitHub
Slack
Slack
Heroku
Heroku
Docker
Docker
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
.NET Core
.NET Core
Slack
Slack
Python
Python
Ruby
Ruby
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
.NET
.NET
Node.js
Node.js
Linux
Linux
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
RxJava
RxJava

What are some alternatives to Semaphore, Azure Pipelines?

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.

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.

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.

Drone.io

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

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

GoCD

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

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

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.

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