Assembla vs. Atlassian Bamboo vs. GoCD

Assembla works well when you are working with multiple groups or entities. We dealt with different time zones, different levels of involvement with the projects, etc so this allows for us to have responses back in a quicker fashion. It also helps us clue in the appropriate people and rely less on following multiple email chains

Incentivized

If you value integration over cost, Bamboo is clearly the way to go. It offers tight integration to the rest of the Atlassian suite, and when you need traceability from issue to build, Atlassian is the right way to go. However, if you find yourself needing to save on costs, you may consider taking an approach of rolling your own build system with open source alternatives, such as Jenkins, if you don't [mind] putting in a little extra elbow grease.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Assembla assists in the workload balancing of our programmers.
• We are able to use Assembla to manage sprints and sprint planning in our agile format.

Incentivized

• Levels of granularity. Organization has many projects that have many build plans that have many jobs that have many tasks, etc. And branch builds allow source control branches to be built separately.
• Versatility. I can use bamboo to manage my Java, node, or .NET build plans. I can use it to spin up Windows or Linux build agents, or install it on a Mac to build there as well.
• Bamboo integrates with other Atlassian products like Bitbucket, Stash, JIRA, etc. If a company commits to the entire Atlassian stack then work can be tracked through the whole development lifecycle which is really useful.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The ability to export the tasks or run metrics on them.
• Mobile ability.

Incentivized

• Extremely hard barrier to entry for non-backend developers
• Blackbox makes it hard to customize functionality
• The inability to add features without breaking core functionality
• No cloud solution
• Tasks cannot be put in if/else statements
• No clear right way to form build plans

Incentivized

• UI can be improved
• Location for settings can be re-arranged
• API for setting up pipeline

Incentivized

Bamboo offers solid usability for teams looking for an integrated, scalable CI/CD solution, especially those using Atlassian tools. Its interface is intuitive for existing Atlassian users, and its focus on deployment automation makes it a strong option for continuous delivery. However, its complexity and cost may pose challenges for small teams or those new to CI/CD. Overall, Bamboo’s usability shines in environments where ease of integration and streamlined workflows are prioritized. Still, it may require more effort for teams unfamiliar with its setup or without dedicated resources.

Incentivized

Bamboo is a fairly small product but having said that it was fairly easy to get assistance. Especially for the small to easy things. Anything large or fairly complex was an issue finding detailed answers for. This caused a lot of trial and error on our part to try to find a solution.

We selected Assembla because the ticket functionality worked well with our agile planning format that we use company wide.

Incentivized

We selected Bamboo because its capabilities to integrate with other Atlassian products specially Jira Software, Bitbucket and in some useful scenarios with Confluence. Also, we found these pros important for us: great user interface, easily agent deployment, Docker compability, simply to maintain / manage, and straightforwardly integration with different notification platforms

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• We were able to spend less time tracking down the status of projects.
• We could become more self-sufficient on reviewing prior resolutions to help with current problems.
• Tasks were responded to quickly because we did not have to email one person, wait for an out of office email and then try someone else. Our task got assigned to the next available person.

Incentivized

• It helped us achieve the Continuous Deployment and Continuous Integration goals for our applications, a huge milestone that saved a lot of time for developers in making the builds and deployments and saved time for QA in running the automated tests.
• Helped with DevOps: we moved the formal approval from the email to the system and allowed the approver to actually push the button for the production deployments.
• Biggest positive impact of using Bamboo is that it improved our response time to customers and increased the frequency of our deliveries to them.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized