Buildkite vs CircleCI vs Jenkins

Overview

CircleCI

Stacks14.5K

Followers7.1K

Votes974

Buildkite

Stacks210

Followers231

Votes115

Jenkins

Stacks59.2K

Followers50.4K

Votes2.2K

GitHub Stars24.6K

Forks9.2K

Buildkite vs CircleCI vs Jenkins: What are the differences?

Integration with Version Control Systems (VCS): Buildkite supports integration with VCS such as Github, GitLab, and Bitbucket, allowing easy access to repositories for building and testing code. CircleCI also supports integration with these VCS platforms along with additional support for SVN and Mercurial. On the other hand, Jenkins offers extensive support for various VCS including Git, SVN, Mercurial, and Perforce, making it versatile in accommodating different developer preferences.
Architecture and Scalability: Buildkite is known for its simple, lightweight architecture which allows for easy setup and scalability. CircleCI also offers a scalable architecture with the ability to handle complex workflows and large projects efficiently. Jenkins, while versatile, can be more challenging to scale for larger organizations due to its legacy architecture.
Pipeline Configuration and Ease of Use: Buildkite provides a simple and intuitive pipeline configuration using YAML files, making it easy for developers to set up and manage build pipelines. CircleCI offers a similar straightforward configuration process through YAML or a visual editor. Jenkins, on the other hand, requires more manual configuration and setup, potentially being more cumbersome for beginners.
Extensibility and Plugin Ecosystem: Buildkite has a growing list of integrations and plugins to extend its functionality, providing developers with a wide range of options for customization. CircleCI also offers an extensive plugin ecosystem, allowing users to add various tools and services to their CI/CD pipelines. Jenkins, being open-source, boasts a vast collection of plugins that cover almost every aspect of the software development lifecycle.
Pricing and Support: Buildkite offers a free tier for small teams with affordable pricing for larger organizations, along with responsive support. CircleCI provides a free tier as well and competitive pricing plans, with comprehensive documentation and prompt support. Jenkins is open-source and free to use, but organizations may need to invest more in infrastructure and maintenance, with community support available.
Community and Adoption: Buildkite has a rapidly growing community and is gaining popularity among modern development teams for its simplicity and flexibility. CircleCI has a strong user base and is widely adopted by organizations of all sizes for its robust features and ease of use. Jenkins, being one of the oldest CI/CD tools, has a massive community and user base, particularly in large enterprises with complex requirements.

In Summary, the key differences between Buildkite, CircleCI, and Jenkins lie in their integration capabilities, architecture, ease of use, extensibility, pricing, and community adoption.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on CircleCI, Buildkite, Jenkins

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

Balaramesh

Apr 20, 2020

Needs adviceon

Azure Pipelines

.NET

Jenkins

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

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	Jenkins
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.	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.
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	Easy installation;Easy configuration;Change set support;Permanent links;RSS/E-mail/IM Integration;After-the-fact tagging;JUnit/TestNG test reporting;Distributed builds;File fingerprinting;Plugin Support
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 24.6K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 9.2K
Stacks 14.5K	Stacks 210	Stacks 59.2K
Followers 7.1K	Followers 231	Followers 50.4K
Votes 974	Votes 115	Votes 2.2K
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 setup 16 Easy to use 12 Simplicity	Pros 523 Hosted internally 469 Free open source 318 Great to build, deploy or launch anything async 243 Tons of integrations 211 Rich set of plugins with good documentation Cons 13 Workarounds needed for basic requirements 10 Groovy with cumbersome syntax 8 Plugins compatibility issues 7 Limited abilities with declarative pipelines 7 Lack of support
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	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to CircleCI, Buildkite, Jenkins?

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.

Semaphore

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

Related Comparisons

Buildkite vs CircleCI vs Jenkins: What are the differences?

Integration with Version Control Systems (VCS): Buildkite supports integration with VCS such as Github, GitLab, and Bitbucket, allowing easy access to repositories for building and testing code. CircleCI also supports integration with these VCS platforms along with additional support for SVN and Mercurial. On the other hand, Jenkins offers extensive support for various VCS including Git, SVN, Mercurial, and Perforce, making it versatile in accommodating different developer preferences.
Architecture and Scalability: Buildkite is known for its simple, lightweight architecture which allows for easy setup and scalability. CircleCI also offers a scalable architecture with the ability to handle complex workflows and large projects efficiently. Jenkins, while versatile, can be more challenging to scale for larger organizations due to its legacy architecture.
Pipeline Configuration and Ease of Use: Buildkite provides a simple and intuitive pipeline configuration using YAML files, making it easy for developers to set up and manage build pipelines. CircleCI offers a similar straightforward configuration process through YAML or a visual editor. Jenkins, on the other hand, requires more manual configuration and setup, potentially being more cumbersome for beginners.
Extensibility and Plugin Ecosystem: Buildkite has a growing list of integrations and plugins to extend its functionality, providing developers with a wide range of options for customization. CircleCI also offers an extensive plugin ecosystem, allowing users to add various tools and services to their CI/CD pipelines. Jenkins, being open-source, boasts a vast collection of plugins that cover almost every aspect of the software development lifecycle.
Pricing and Support: Buildkite offers a free tier for small teams with affordable pricing for larger organizations, along with responsive support. CircleCI provides a free tier as well and competitive pricing plans, with comprehensive documentation and prompt support. Jenkins is open-source and free to use, but organizations may need to invest more in infrastructure and maintenance, with community support available.
Community and Adoption: Buildkite has a rapidly growing community and is gaining popularity among modern development teams for its simplicity and flexibility. CircleCI has a strong user base and is widely adopted by organizations of all sizes for its robust features and ease of use. Jenkins, being one of the oldest CI/CD tools, has a massive community and user base, particularly in large enterprises with complex requirements.

In Summary, the key differences between Buildkite, CircleCI, and Jenkins lie in their integration capabilities, architecture, ease of use, extensibility, pricing, and community adoption.

Buildkite vs CircleCI vs Jenkins

Overview