Azure DevOps Services vs. CircleCI

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Azure DevOps Services
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System) is an agile development product that is an extension of the Microsoft Visual Studio architecture. Azure DevOps includes software development, collaboration, and reporting capabilities.
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
CircleCI
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
CircleCI is a software delivery engine from the company of the same name in San Francisco, that helps teams ship software faster, offering their platform for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). Ultimately, the solution helps to map every source of change for software teams, so they can accelerate innovation and growth.
$0
per month
Pricing
Azure DevOps ServicesCircleCI
Editions & Modules
Azure Artifacts
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
Basic Plan
$6
per user per month (first 5 users free)
Azure Pipelines - Self-Hosted
$15
per extra parallel job (1 free parallel job with unlimited minutes)
Azure Pipelines - Microsoft Hosted
$40
per parallel job (1,800 minutes free with 1 free parallel job)
Basic + Test Plan
$52
per user per month
Free
$0
per month
Performance
$30
per month
Server
$35
per month
Scale
Custom Pricing
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure DevOps ServicesCircleCI
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Azure DevOps ServicesCircleCI
Considered Both Products
Azure DevOps Services
Chose Azure DevOps Services
Azure DevOps has a drag and drop editor so that you can quickly drag build steps into a build or release pipeline. This is much faster than looking up the correct yaml syntax. Additionally, its support for Microsoft and Azure is great. If you're on the .net stack or you use …
Chose Azure DevOps Services
Our company is already using a lot of Azure services and it makes more sense to start using Azure DevOps Services (formerly VSTS) when we needed a CI/CD tool. We tested different features of Azure DevOps Services (formerly VSTS) and found out that the build and release …
CircleCI

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Azure DevOps ServicesCircleCI
Small Businesses
Docker
Docker
Score 9.2 out of 10
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Docker
Docker
Score 9.2 out of 10
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises
Docker
Docker
Score 9.2 out of 10
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Azure DevOps ServicesCircleCI
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(66 ratings)
8.0
(26 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(5 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
7.8
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
8.1
(11 ratings)
6.9
(6 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Azure DevOps ServicesCircleCI
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
ADO is well suited for the visibility of day-to-day tasks and responsibilities as well as things such as Features, user stories, etc. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any scenario where it might not be well suited, as you can customize ADO to your liking to a degree.
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CircleCI
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.
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Pros
Microsoft
  • Flexible Requirements Hierarchy Management: AZDO makes it easy to track items such as features or epics as a flat list, or as a hierarchy in which you can track the parent-child relationship.
  • Fast Data Entry: AZDO was designed to facilitate quick data entry to capture work items quickly, while still enabling detailed capture of acceptance criteria and item properties.
  • Excel Integration: AZDO stands out for its integration with MS Excel, which enables quick updates for bulk items.
Read full review
CircleCI
  • 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
Microsoft
  • Column sorting when in filtered states.
  • A way to show cross-team dependencies.
  • A customized "From" field for notifications. Sometimes when a mail comes from Azure DevOps the teams do not realize that I am sending it
  • A way to do online poker that doesn't require a plug-in.
Read full review
CircleCI
  • 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
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Likelihood to Renew
Microsoft
I don't think our organization will stray from using VSTS/TFS as we are now looking to upgrade to the 2012 version. Since our business is software development and we want to meet the requirements of CMMI to deliver consistent and high quality software, this SDLC management tool is here to stay. In addition, our company uses a lot of Microsoft products, such as Office 365, Asp.net, etc, and since VSTS/TFS has proved itself invaluable to our own processes and is within the Microsoft family of products, we will continue to use VSTS/TFS for a long, long time.
Read full review
CircleCI
No answers on this topic
Usability
Microsoft
Azure DevOps is a powerful, complex cloud application. As such there are a number of things it does great and something where there is room for improvement. One of those areas would be in usability. In my opinion it relies too much on search. There is no easy way to view all projects or to group them in a logical way. You need to search for everything.
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CircleCI
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
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
CircleCI
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.
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Support Rating
Microsoft
When we've had issues, both Microsoft support and the user community have been very responsive. DevOps has an active developer community and frankly, you can find most of your questions already asked and answered there. Microsoft also does a better job than most software vendors I've worked with creating detailed and frequently updated documentation.
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CircleCI
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.
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Implementation Rating
Microsoft
Was not part of the process.
Read full review
CircleCI
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
Microsoft Planner is used by project managers and IT service managers across our organization for task tracking and running their team meetings. Azure DevOps works better than Planner for software development teams but might possibly be too complex for non-software teams or more business-focused projects. We also use ServiceNow for IT service management and this tool provides better analysis and tracking of IT incidents, as Azure DevOps is more suited to development and project work for dev teams.
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CircleCI
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.
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Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • It provides a great IDE to make things easier, clear, and compact. It has always been a positive ROI
  • It's worth the money. I don't think any other software could replace the VS. It has helped us a lot to making things ready on time
  • The only thing I dislike is that it takes a lot of memory space when in an idle state
Read full review
CircleCI
  • 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.
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ScreenShots