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TeamCity vs Travis CI: What are the differences?
Key Differences between TeamCity and Travis CI
TeamCity and Travis CI are both popular continuous integration (CI) tools that are used by software development teams to automate the build, test, and deployment processes of their applications. While there are some similarities between the two tools, there are also key differences that set them apart. Below are the six main differences between TeamCity and Travis CI:
Hosting Options: TeamCity is a self-hosted solution, which means that it needs to be installed and maintained on the team's own infrastructure. On the other hand, Travis CI is a cloud-based solution, which means that it is hosted and managed by a third-party provider. This difference allows teams using Travis CI to avoid the hassle of setting up and maintaining their own CI server.
Pricing Structure: TeamCity offers a commercial licensing model, where teams need to purchase a license based on the number of build agents and users. In contrast, Travis CI offers a usage-based pricing model, where teams are billed based on the number of build minutes consumed. This difference makes Travis CI a more cost-effective option for smaller teams or teams with fluctuating build workload.
Platform Support: TeamCity provides support for a wide range of platforms, including Windows, macOS, and Linux. In contrast, Travis CI primarily focuses on providing support for open-source projects and is heavily integrated with GitHub. While Travis CI can be used with other platforms such as Bitbucket and GitLab, it may not have the same level of integration and features as it does with GitHub.
Ease of Setup: TeamCity offers a comprehensive web-based administration interface that allows teams to easily configure and manage their CI pipelines. It provides a rich set of features including build configuration templates, build history, and test result analysis. Travis CI, on the other hand, follows a more declarative approach where configuration is defined in a YAML file in the repository. While this approach can provide more flexibility and version control for the configuration, it may require more manual setup and configuration compared to TeamCity.
Customizability: TeamCity provides a highly customizable CI environment with a plugin ecosystem that allows teams to extend and enhance the functionality of the tool. It also supports extensive scripting capabilities, which can be useful for advanced build and deployment scenarios. In contrast, Travis CI has a more limited set of customization options and relies more on convention over configuration. While this can make it easier to get started with, it may not provide the same level of flexibility and customization options as TeamCity.
Community and Support: TeamCity has been around since 2006 and has a large and active community of users and contributors. It has a mature and stable codebase with regular updates and bug fixes. Travis CI, on the other hand, is a relatively newer tool that gained popularity among open-source projects. While it has a growing community, it may not have the same depth of resources and support available as TeamCity.
In summary, TeamCity and Travis CI differ in terms of hosting options, pricing structure, platform support, ease of setup, customizability, and community support. The choice between the two tools ultimately depends on the specific needs and requirements of the software development team.
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).
Jenkins is a friend of mine. 😀
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.
When choosing a tool to help automate our CI/CD, the decision came down to GitHub Actions (GA) or TravisCI. Both are great, but the team has more experience with GA. Given GAs broad support of languages and workflows, it's hard to go wrong with this decision. We will also be using GitHub for version control and project management, so having everything in one place is convenient.
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.
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.