Likelihood to Recommend CircleCI is perfect for a CI/CD pipeline for an app using a standard build process. It'll take more work for a complex build process, but should still be up to the task unless you need a lot of integrations with other tools. If you have a big team and can spare someone to focus full time on just the CI/CD tools, maybe something like Jenkins is better, but if you're just looking to get your app built, tested, and delivered without a huge amount of effort, CircleCI is probably your preferred tool.
Read full review Previously, our team used
Jenkins . However, since it's a shared deployment resource we don't have admin access. We tried GoCD as it's open source and we really like. We set up our deployment pipeline to run whenever codes are merged to master, run the unit test and revert back if it doesn't pass. Once it's deployed to the staging environment, we can simply do 1-click to deploy the appropriate version to production. We use this to deploy to an on-prem server and also AWS. Some deployment pipelines use custom Powershell script for.Net application, some others use Bash script to execute the docker push and cloud formation template to build elastic beanstalk.
Read full review Pros Multiple builds can be run at the same time in parallel. The CircleCI web interface (UI/UX) is very easy to understand and use. Easy Configuration to learn and use. Just a single configuration YAML file. Many integrations. We use the GItHub, Slack, and DataDog integrations. Read full review Pipeline-as-Code works really well. All our pipelines are defined in yml files, which are checked into SCM. The ability to link multiple pipelines together is really cool. Later pipelines can declare a dependency to pick up the build artifacts of earlier ones. Agents definition is really great. We can define multiple different kinds of environments to best suit our diverse build systems. Read full review Cons The "phases" their config file uses to separate out options seem very arbitrary and are not very helpful for organizing your config file No way that I know of to configure which version of MongoDB you use. You have to write your own shell script to download and start MongoDB if you want a specific version. Hard to access build artifacts in the UI Read full review UI can be improved Location for settings can be re-arranged API for setting up pipeline Read full review Usability CircleCI interface is awesome in that it is relatively modern and makes it clear exactly which parts of the engineering lifecycle you are in
Read full review Performance It's pretty snappy, even with using workflows with multiple steps and different docker images. I've seen builds take a long time if it's really involved, but from what I can tell, it's still at least on par if not faster than other build tools.
Read full review Support Rating Unless you have a reasonably large account, you're going to be mainly stuck reading their documentation. Which has improved somewhat over the years but is still extremely limited compared to a platform like Digital Ocean who invested in the documentation and a community to ensure it's kept up to date. If you can't find your answer there, you can be stuck.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Circle was the first CI with simple setup, great documentation, and tight integration with
GitHub . Using Jenkins was too much maintenance and overhead, TeamCity was limited in how we could customize it and run concurrent builds, TravisCI was not available for private repos when we switched.
Read full review GoCD is easier to setup, but harder to customize at runtime. There's no way to trigger a pipeline with custom parameters.
Jenkins is more flexible at runtime. You can define multiple user-provided parameters so when user needs to trigger a build, there's a form for him/her to input the parameters.
Read full review Return on Investment It has eased the burden of standardizing our testing and deployment, making onboarding new developers much faster, and having to fix deployment mistakes much less often. It allows us to focus our process around the GitHub workflow, ignoring the details of whatever environment the thing we're working on is actually hosted in. This saves us time. Read full review ROI has been good since it's open source Settings.xml need to be backed up periodically. It contains all the settings for your pipelines! We accidentally deleted before and we have to restore and re-create several missing pipelines More straight forward use of API and allows filtering e.g., pull all pipelines triggered after this date Read full review ScreenShots