Bazel vs TeamCity: What are the differences?

Developers describe Bazel as "Correct, reproducible, fast builds for everyone". Bazel is a build tool that builds code quickly and reliably. It is used to build the majority of Google's software, and thus it has been designed to handle build problems present in Google's development environment. On the other hand, TeamCity is detailed as "TeamCity is an ultimate Continuous Integration tool for professionals". 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.

Bazel can be classified as a tool in the "Java Build Tools" category, while TeamCity is grouped under "Continuous Integration".

Some of the features offered by Bazel are:

• Multi-language support: Bazel supports Java, Objective-C and C++ out of the box, and can be extended to support arbitrary programming languages.
• High-level build language: Projects are described in the BUILD language, a concise text format that describes a project as sets of small interconnected libraries, binaries and tests. By contrast, with tools like Make you have to describe individual files and compiler invocations.
• Multi-platform support: The same tool and the same BUILD files can be used to build software for different architectures, and even different platforms. At Google, we use Bazel to build both server applications running on systems in our data centers and client apps running on mobile phones.

On the other hand, TeamCity provides the following key features:

• 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

"Fast" is the top reason why over 18 developers like Bazel, while over 52 developers mention "Easy to configure" as the leading cause for choosing TeamCity.

Bazel is an open source tool with 12.4K GitHub stars and 2.02K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Bazel's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, TeamCity has a broader approval, being mentioned in 171 company stacks & 51 developers stacks; compared to Bazel, which is listed in 11 company stacks and 7 developer stacks.