Bitrise vs fastlane: What are the differences?

Developers describe Bitrise as "Automate your mobile app development from building through testing to deployment". In short Bitrise is a Continous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) Platform as a Service (PaaS) with a main focus on mobile app development (iOS, Android). You can automate the testing and deployment of your apps with just a few clicks. When you trigger a build a Virtual Machine is assigned to host your build and your defined Workflow (series of Steps scripts) will be executed, step by step. On the other hand, fastlane is detailed as "Connect all iOS deployment tools into one streamlined workflow". fastlane lets you define and run your deployment pipelines for different environments. It helps you unify your app’s release process and automate the whole process. fastlane connects all fastlane tools and third party tools, like CocoaPods.

Bitrise and fastlane can be categorized as "Mobile Continuous Integration" tools.

Some of the features offered by Bitrise are:

• Continuous Delivery
• Hosted Environment
• Customizable Workflows

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

• Connect all build tools together
• Define multiple lanes for different needs
• Jenkins Integration

"Easy setup" is the primary reason why developers consider Bitrise over the competitors, whereas "Easy to use" was stated as the key factor in picking fastlane.

fastlane is an open source tool with 26K GitHub stars and 3.96K GitHub forks. Here's a link to fastlane's open source repository on GitHub.

Intuit, Wongnai, and Zola are some of the popular companies that use fastlane, whereas Bitrise is used by Bitrise, ZeeMee, and Multunus. fastlane has a broader approval, being mentioned in 93 company stacks & 22 developers stacks; compared to Bitrise, which is listed in 29 company stacks and 14 developer stacks.