Overview

CircleCI

Stacks13.0K

Followers7.1K

Votes974

Buildkite

Stacks213

Followers231

Votes115

Buildkite vs CircleCI: What are the differences?

Introduction

Buildkite and CircleCI are both continuous integration and delivery platforms that help automate the software development process. While they have similar goals, there are several key differences that set them apart.

Pricing Model: Buildkite offers a flexible pricing model based on the number of agents, with each agent representing a concurrent build. On the other hand, CircleCI offers pricing tiers based on the number of containers, which are billed on a monthly basis. This difference in pricing models can affect the cost for organizations with varying build requirements.
Supported Operating Systems: Buildkite supports a wide range of operating systems including Linux, macOS, and Windows, giving developers the flexibility to choose their preferred environment. In contrast, CircleCI primarily focuses on Linux-based systems, limiting the options available for certain development teams working on macOS or Windows.
On-premise Option: Buildkite offers an on-premise option, allowing organizations to host their own Buildkite infrastructure within their network. This provides greater control and security for sensitive projects that cannot be hosted on third-party cloud platforms. CircleCI, however, does not currently offer an on-premise option, limiting the deployment possibilities for certain organizations.
Workflow Flexibility: Buildkite offers a highly customizable and scriptable pipeline configuration, enabling developers to define complex workflows with detailed control over the build process. CircleCI, while also providing flexibility, has a more declarative configuration approach with predefined abstractions, which may not offer the same level of granularity for advanced workflows.
Parallelism and Scalability: Buildkite allows developers to easily parallelize builds across multiple agents, maximizing the use of available resources and reducing build times. CircleCI also supports parallelism but has limitations on the number of concurrent containers based on the selected pricing tier. This can impact scalability and the ability to speed up build times for larger projects.
Integration Ecosystem: Buildkite has a strong ecosystem of integrations with popular developer tools such as Slack, GitHub, and Jira, allowing seamless integration with existing workflows. CircleCI also provides similar integrations, but Buildkite's ecosystem is more extensive, providing a broader range of options to enhance the development workflow.

In Summary, Buildkite and CircleCI differ in their pricing models, supported operating systems, on-premise options, workflow flexibility, parallelism and scalability, and integration ecosystem. These differences allow organizations to choose a CI/CD platform that aligns with their specific requirements and priorities.

Advice on CircleCI, Buildkite

Somnath

Engineering Leader at Altimetrik Corp.

Jun 25, 2020

Needs adviceon

CircleCI

Drone.io

GitHub Actions

I am in the process of evaluating CircleCI, Drone.io, and Github Actions to cover my #CI/ CD needs. I would appreciate your advice on comparative study w.r.t. attributes like language-Inclusive support, code-base integration, performance, cost, maintenance, support, ease of use, ability to deal with big projects, etc. based on actual industry experience.

Thanks in advance!

1.82M views1.82M

Comments

Phillip

Developer at Coach Align

Mar 18, 2021

Decided

The introduction of Orbs a few years ago has really streamlined CircleCI configuration files and made them really easy to work with. Haven't tried GitHub Actions and decided to go with what was familiar instead of trying something new. Tried to make AWS Codepipeline work a few years back on different projects and found it to be incredibly frustrating, lacking support for some of the most basic features and use cases.

41.1k views41.1k

Comments

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

Detailed Comparison

CircleCI	Buildkite
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.	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.
Language-Inclusive Support;Custom Environments;Flexible Resource Allocation;SSH Or Local Builds For Easy Debugging;Improved Caching;Unmatched Security;Parallelism;Insights	Fast and stable builds; Open source agent runs on almost any machine and architecture; Freedom to use your own internal or pre-release tools and services; Powerful distributed build tools; Key/value targeting of agents; Dynamic job allocation allows adding and removing build machines; Shared key/value and binary artifact stores for easily distributing build jobs regardless of machine or network; Integration with pull requests, deployments and releases; GitHub, Github Enterprise, Bitbucket, Gitlab or your own SCM; Slack, Hipchat, Webhooks, and LIFX notifications; Extensible per-project with agent hooks, webhooks and the rest API; GitHub Enterprise is supported standard; SSO
Statistics
Stacks 13.0K	Stacks 213
Followers 7.1K	Followers 231
Votes 974	Votes 115
Pros & Cons
Pros 226 Github integration 177 Easy setup 153 Fast builds 94 Competitively priced 74 Slack integration Cons 12 Unstable 6 Scammy pricing structure 0 Aggressive Github permissions	Pros 18 Great customer support 17 Github integration 16 Easy to use 16 Easy setup 12 Simplicity
Integrations
dotCloud GitHub Xcode Azure Container Service Slack Heroku JavaScript Node.js Python Amazon EC2	Slack GitHub Docker GitLab Heroku HipChat Bitbucket Git GitHub Enterprise TestFlight

What are some alternatives to CircleCI, Buildkite?

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

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 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.

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.

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.

Appveyor

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.