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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Continuous Integration
  4. Continuous Integration
  5. CircleCI vs Pants

CircleCI vs Pants

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

CircleCI
CircleCI
Stacks14.5K
Followers7.1K
Votes974
Pants
Pants
Stacks23
Followers86
Votes30
GitHub Stars3.7K
Forks674

CircleCI vs Pants: What are the differences?

CircleCI: Automate your development process quickly, safely, and at scale. 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; Pants: Build system by Twitter, Foursquare, and Square. Pants is a build system for Java, Scala and Python. It works particularly well for a source code repository that contains many distinct projects.

CircleCI and Pants are primarily classified as "Continuous Integration" and "Java Build" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by CircleCI are:

  • Language-Inclusive Support
  • Custom Environments
  • Flexible Resource Allocation

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

  • Builds Java, Scala, and Python.
  • Adding support for new languages is straightforward.
  • Supports code generation: thrift, protocol buffers, custom code generators.

"Github integration" is the primary reason why developers consider CircleCI over the competitors, whereas "Creates deployable packages" was stated as the key factor in picking Pants.

Pants is an open source tool with 1.17K GitHub stars and 333 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Pants's open source repository on GitHub.

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Advice on CircleCI, Pants

Dustin
Dustin

Senior Developer at Elegant Themes

Apr 18, 2019

ReviewonCircleCICircleCI

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.

607k views607k
Comments
Somnath
Somnath

Engineering Leader at Altimetrik Corp.

Jun 25, 2020

Needs adviceonCircleCICircleCIDrone.ioDrone.ioGitHub ActionsGitHub 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
Felipe
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
CircleCI
Pants
Pants

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.

Pants is a build system for Java, Scala and Python. It works particularly well for a source code repository that contains many distinct projects.

Language-Inclusive Support;Custom Environments;Flexible Resource Allocation;SSH Or Local Builds For Easy Debugging;Improved Caching;Unmatched Security;Parallelism;Insights
Builds Java, Scala, and Python.;Adding support for new languages is straightforward.;Supports code generation: thrift, protocol buffers, custom code generators.;Resolves external JVM and Python dependencies.;Runs tests.;Spawns Python and Scala REPLs with appropriate load paths.;Creates deployable packages.;Scales to large repos with many interdependent modules.;Designed for incremental builds.;Support for local and distributed caching.;Especially fast for Scala builds, compared to alternatives.;Builds standalone python executables (PEX files);Has a plugin system to add custom features and override stock behavior.;Runs on Linux and Mac OS X.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
3.7K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
674
Stacks
14.5K
Stacks
23
Followers
7.1K
Followers
86
Votes
974
Votes
30
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
  • 6
    Creates deployable packages
  • 4
    BUILD files
  • 4
    Runs on OS X
  • 4
    Runs on Linux
  • 4
    Scales
Integrations
dotCloud
dotCloud
GitHub
GitHub
Xcode
Xcode
Azure Container Service
Azure Container Service
Slack
Slack
Heroku
Heroku
JavaScript
JavaScript
Node.js
Node.js
Python
Python
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to CircleCI, Pants?

Jenkins

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

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

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.

Apache Maven

Apache Maven

Maven allows a project to build using its project object model (POM) and a set of plugins that are shared by all projects using Maven, providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds you automatically know how all Maven projects build saving you immense amounts of time when trying to navigate many projects.

TeamCity

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.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.

Gradle

Gradle

Gradle is a build tool with a focus on build automation and support for multi-language development. If you are building, testing, publishing, and deploying software on any platform, Gradle offers a flexible model that can support the entire development lifecycle from compiling and packaging code to publishing web sites.

wercker

wercker

Wercker is a CI/CD developer automation platform designed for Microservices & Container Architecture.

GoCD

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.

Bazel

Bazel

Bazel is a build tool that builds code quickly and reliably. It is used to build the majority of Google's software, and thus it has been designed to handle build problems present in Google's development environment.

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