StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Continuous Integration
  4. Continuous Integration
  5. Jenkins vs Tower

Jenkins vs Tower

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Jenkins
Jenkins
Stacks59.2K
Followers50.4K
Votes2.2K
GitHub Stars24.6K
Forks9.2K
Tower
Tower
Stacks214
Followers360
Votes80

Jenkins vs Tower: What are the differences?

Jenkins: An extendable open source continuous integration server. 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; Tower: The most powerful Git client for Mac & Windows. Use all of Git's powerful feature set - in a GUI that makes you more productive.

Jenkins can be classified as a tool in the "Continuous Integration" category, while Tower is grouped under "Source Code Management Desktop Apps".

Some of the features offered by Jenkins are:

  • Easy installation
  • Easy configuration
  • Change set support

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

  • Clone & create repos with a click - Manage your GitHub, Bitbucket & Beanstalk accounts from within Tower
  • Open repos quickly - Tower's "Quick Open" dialog finds and opens repositories in no time
  • Automate the boring stuff - Fetching and stashing are automatically done for you, if you wish

"Hosted internally" is the primary reason why developers consider Jenkins over the competitors, whereas "Git" was stated as the key factor in picking Tower.

Jenkins is an open source tool with 13.3K GitHub stars and 5.48K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Jenkins's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, Jenkins has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1774 company stacks & 1526 developers stacks; compared to Tower, which is listed in 31 company stacks and 16 developer stacks.

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)
or
Manual

Advice on Jenkins, Tower

Balaramesh
Balaramesh

Apr 20, 2020

Needs adviceonAzure PipelinesAzure Pipelines.NET.NETJenkinsJenkins

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
StackShare
StackShare

Apr 17, 2019

Needs advice

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?"

530k views530k
Comments
Tatiana
Tatiana

Nov 16, 2019

Decided

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.

734k views734k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Jenkins
Jenkins
Tower
Tower

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.

Use all of Git's powerful feature set - in a GUI that makes you more productive.

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
Clone & create repos with a click - Manage your GitHub, Bitbucket & Beanstalk accounts from within Tower;Open repos quickly - Tower's "Quick Open" dialog finds and opens repositories in no time;Automate the boring stuff - Fetching and stashing are automatically done for you, if you wish;Clone in the background- Downloading large projects happens in the background, while you work;Multiple windows - Have multiple projects open side-by-side
Statistics
GitHub Stars
24.6K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
9.2K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
59.2K
Stacks
214
Followers
50.4K
Followers
360
Votes
2.2K
Votes
80
Pros & Cons
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
    Lack of support
  • 7
    Limited abilities with declarative pipelines
Pros
  • 19
    Git
  • 16
    Just works
  • 10
    Version control
  • 6
    Simple layout
  • 6
    Awesome
Cons
  • 5
    Expensive
  • 4
    Subscription based
  • 1
    No side by side diff
  • 0
    Merge conflict resolution impossible/unclear
Integrations
No integrations available
Bitbucket
Bitbucket
TextMate
TextMate
Visual Studio
Visual Studio
GitHub
GitHub
GitLab
GitLab
Git
Git
Xcode
Xcode
Gerrit Code Review
Gerrit Code Review
Beanstalk
Beanstalk

What are some alternatives to Jenkins, Tower?

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.

CircleCI

CircleCI

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.

SourceTree

SourceTree

Use the full capability of Git and Mercurial in the SourceTree desktop app. Manage all your repositories, hosted or local, through SourceTree's simple interface.

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.

GitKraken

GitKraken

The downright luxurious Git client for Windows, Mac and Linux. Cross-platform, 100% standalone, and free.

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.

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.

Shippable

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.

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana