Likelihood to Recommend Maven is great if you have an application with a lot of third-party dependencies and don’t want each developer to keep track of where the dependency can be downloaded. It’s also a great way to make it easy for a new developer to be able to build the application. It’s less suitable for simple projects without any third-party dependencies.
Read full review 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 Pros If you are building in the Java ecosystem, then Maven definitely has the biggest repository of artifacts needed for such projects. It has a very simple to use extendable architecture. Everything is configurable through the Pom.xml file which is very simple to follow. Read full review 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 Cons Maven provides a very rigid model that makes customization tedious and sometimes impossible. While this can make it easier to understand any given Maven build, as long as you don’t have any special requirements, it also makes it unsuitable for many automation problems. Maven has few, built-in dependency scopes, which forces awkward module architectures in common scenarios like using test fixtures or code generation. There is no separation between unit and integration tests Read full review 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 Usability The overall usability of Apache Maven is very good to us. We were able to incorporate it into our company's build process pretty quickly. We deployed it to multiple teams throughout the entire enterprise. We got good feedback from our developers stating that Apache Maven has simplified their build process. It also allowed to to standardize the build process for the entire enterprise, thus ensure that each development team is using the same, consistent process to build code.
Read full review 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 I can't speak to the support, as I've never had issues. Apache Maven "just works," and errors were user errors or local nexus errors. Apache Maven is a great build/dependency management tool. I give it a 9/10 because occasionally the error message don't immediately indicate a solution...but again, those errors were always user or configuration errors, and the Maven documentation is extensive, so I don't find fault in Maven, but in its users.
Read full review 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 Ant, Maven's opposing framework, is often a point of comparison. Although Ant does not require formal conventions, it is procedural in the sense that you must tell Ant exactly what to do and when. It also lacks a lifecycle, along with goal definition and dependencies. Maven, on the other hand, requires less work as it knows exactly where your source code is as long as the pom.xml file is generated.
Read full review 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 Return on Investment Apache Maven is an open source product from the Apache Software Foundation. Being free to use without any licensing constraints, we've been very happy with this product thus far. The software build and packaging times for our applications have improved greatly since our use of this tool. Read full review 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 ScreenShots