Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
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.
We are a mid-size startup running Scala apps. Moving from Jenkins/EC2 to Spinnaker/EKS and looking for a tool to cover our CI/CD needs. Our code lives on GitHub, artifacts in nexus, images in ECR.
Drone is out, GitHub actions are being considered along with Circle CI and GitLab CI.
We primarily need:
- Fast SBT builds (caching)
- Low maintenance overhead (ideally serverless)
- Everything as code
- Ease of use
I think I've tried most of the CI tools out there at some point. It took me a while to get around to Buildkite because at first I didn't see much point given it seemed like you had to run the agent yourself. Eventually it dawned on me why this approach was more ingenious than I realised:
Running my app in a production (or production-like) environment was already a solved problem, because everything was already in some form of "everything as code". Having a test environment where the only difference was adding the Buildkite agent was a trivial addition.
It means that dev/test/prod parity is simple to achieve and maintain. It's also proven to be much easier to support than trying to deal with the problems that come with trying to force an app to fit into the nuances and constraints that are imposed by the containers/runtime of a CI service. When you completely control all of the environment the tests are running in you define those constraints too. It's been a great balance between a managed service and the flexibility of running it yourself.
And while none of my needs have hit the scale of Shopify (I saw one of their engineers speak about it at a conference once, I can't find the video now though 馃槥) it's good to know I can scale out my worker nodes to hundreds of thousands of workers to reduce the time it takes for my tests to run.
I would recommend you to consider the JFrog Platform that includes JFrog Pipelines - it will allow you to manage the full artifact life cycle for your sbt, docker and other technologies, and automate all of your CI and CD using cloud native declarative yaml pipelines. Will integrate smoothly with all your other toolset.
more configurable to setup ci/cd: * It can provide caching when build sbt, just add this section to yml file * Easy to use, many documentation
Weakness: * Need use gitlab as repository to bring more powerful configuration
From a StackShare Community member: "Currently we use Travis CI and have optimized it as much as we can so our builds are fairly quick. Our boss is all about redundancy so we are looking for another solution to fall back on in case Travis goes down and/or jacks prices way up (they were recently acquired). Could someone recommend which CI we should go with and if they have time, an explanation of how they're different?"
We use CircleCI because of the better value it provides in its plans. I'm sure we could have used Travis just as easily but we found CircleCI's pricing to be more reasonable. In the two years since we signed up, the service has improved. CircleCI is always innovating and iterating on their platform. We have been very satisfied.
As the maintainer of the Karate DSL open-source project - I found Travis CI very easy to integrate into the GitHub workflow and it has been steady sailing for more than 2 years now ! It works well for Java / Apache Maven projects and we were able to configure it to use the latest Oracle JDK as per our needs. Thanks to the Travis CI team for this service to the open-source community !
I use Google Cloud Build because it's my first foray into the CICD world(loving it so far), and I wanted to work with something GCP native to avoid giving permissions to other SaaS tools like CircleCI and Travis CI.
I really like it because it's free for the first 120 minutes, and it's one of the few CICD tools that enterprises are open to using since it's contained within GCP.
One of the unique things is that it has the Kaniko cache, which speeds up builds by creating intermediate layers within the docker image vs. pushing the full thing from the start. Helpful when you're installing just a few additional dependencies.
Feel free to checkout an example: Cloudbuild Example
I use Travis CI because of various reasons - 1. Cloud based system so no dedicated server required, and you do not need to administrate it. 2. Easy YAML configuration. 3. Supports Major Programming Languages. 4. Support of build matrix 6. Supports AWS, Azure, Docker, Heroku, Google Cloud, Github Pages, PyPi and lot more. 7. Slack Notifications.
You are probably looking at another hosted solution: Jenkins is a good tool but it way too work intensive to be used as just a backup solution.
I have good experience with Circle-CI, Codeship, Drone.io and Travis (as well as problematic experiences with all of them), but my go-to tool is Gitlab CI: simple, powerful and if you have problems with their limitations or pricing, you can always install runners somewhere and use Gitlab just for scheduling and management. Even if you don't host your git repository at Gitlab, you can have Gitlab pull changes automatically from wherever you repo lives.
If you are considering Jenkins I would recommend at least checking out Buildkite. The agents are self-hosted (like Jenkins) but the interface is hosted for you. It meshes up some of the things I like about hosted services (pipeline definitions in YAML, managed interface and authentication) with things I like about Jenkins (local customizable agent images, secrets only on own instances, custom agent level scripts, sizing instances to your needs).
We chose github + github actions in order to manage the code versioning and the CI on the same software. Furthermore, while it is not that much, I believe that for a large team it is considerably cheaper to have one github subscription instead of a git subscription and a CI/CD software subscription.
We migrated all our CI/CD pipelines to CircleCI back in 2017 and are particularly happy about it since!
Our top loved feature is unlimited parallelism. We can run as many builds concurrently as we want.
We also use orbs, pipeline parameters, reusable commands, build cache, test insights.
For some of the heavier repos, we use a larger resource class and mount RAMdisk to a file system to speed up builds.
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.
Jenkins is a friend of mine. 馃榾
There are not much space for Jenkins competitors for now from my point of view. With declarative pipelines now in place, its super easy to maintain them and create new ones(altho I prefer scripted still). Self-hosted, free, huge community makes it the top choice so honestly for me it was an easy pick.
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.
Buddy is one of the most easy-to-use tools for CI I ever met. When I needed to set up the pipeline I was really impressed with how easy it is to create it with Buddy with only a few moments. It's literally like: 1. Add repo 2. Click - Click - Click 3. You're done and your app is on prod :D The top feature that I've found is a simple integration with different notification channels - not only Slack (which is the one by default), but Telegram and Discord. The support is also neat - guys respond pretty quickly on even a small issue.
We were long time users of TravisCI, but switched to CircleCI because of the better user interface and pricing. Version 2.0 has had a couple of trips and hiccups; but overall we've been very happy with the continuous integration it provides. Continuous Integration is a must-have for building software, and CircleCI continues to surprise as they roll out ideas and features. It's leading the industry in terms of innovation and new ideas, and it's exciting to see what new things they keep rolling out.
Jenkins is a pretty flexible, complete tool. Especially I love the possibility to configure jobs as a code with Jenkins pipelines.
CircleCI is well suited for small projects where the main task is to run continuous integration as quickly as possible. Travis CI is recommended primarily for open-source projects that need to be tested in different environments.
And for something a bit larger I prefer to use Jenkins because it is possible to make serious system configuration thereby different plugins. In Jenkins, I can change almost anything. But if you want to start the CI chain as soon as possible, Jenkins may not be the right choice.