Blue Ocean vs Semaphore: What are the differences?

Developers describe Blue Ocean as "A reboot of the Jenkins CI/CD User Experience". Designed from the ground up for Jenkins Pipeline and compatible with Freestyle jobs, Blue Ocean reduces clutter and increases clarity for every member of your team. On the other hand, Semaphore is detailed as "The continuous integration and delivery platform powering the world’s best engineering teams". Semaphore is the fastest continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) platform on the market, powering the world’s best engineering teams.

Blue Ocean and Semaphore can be primarily classified as "Continuous Integration" tools.

Some of the features offered by Blue Ocean are:

• Sophisticated visualizations of CD pipelines, allowing for fast and intuitive comprehension of software pipeline status.
• Pipeline editor (In Development) that makes automating CD pipelines approachable by guiding the user through an intuitive and visual process to create a pipeline.
• Personalization of the Jenkins UI to suit the role-based needs of each member of the DevOps team.

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

• Docker, Kubernetes, iOS support & 100+ preinstalled Tools
• Customizable Continuous Delivery Pipelines
• Customizable Stages, Parallel Execution and Control Flow Switches

"Beautiful interface" is the top reason why over 4 developers like Blue Ocean, while over 19 developers mention "Easy setup" as the leading cause for choosing Semaphore.

Blue Ocean is an open source tool with 2.49K GitHub stars and 435 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Blue Ocean's open source repository on GitHub.

GrowthHackers, CrowdFlower, and Lost My Name are some of the popular companies that use Semaphore, whereas Blue Ocean is used by CityLiv, Nexus National Security Network, and iCodeBetter. Semaphore has a broader approval, being mentioned in 40 company stacks & 17 developers stacks; compared to Blue Ocean, which is listed in 4 company stacks and 10 developer stacks.