Azure Pipelines vs. CircleCI vs. LaunchDarkly

It is good tool if you are doing continuous improvements in your code and you wish it goes live whenever you push code to GitHub. So integrating Azure Pipeline, it automatically does CI/CD in the background once you push code/merge code and it is live in few minutes. It also does some automated tests if you have wrote scripts

Incentivized

Based on our experience, CircleCI is well-suited for automating mobile app release cycles. For example, to release an iOS app, you would need to build, sign, and upload it to TestFlight, which requires a dedicated Mac in the office. But with CircleCI, you can have macOS executors, so you don't have to manage a physical build machine. Another benefit is that CircleCI's certified AWS Orbs abstract away complex authentication and deployment logic, allowing us to build, push, and deploy Docker containers to Amazon ECS with minimal configuration and high reliability. CircleCI is less suited for smaller projects where the development and deployment are not that extensive, for example, a static site. Once you have built a static site, you probably won't make any further changes, so there's no point in paying for it.

Incentivized

If a new feature should be added but unsure of how it will actually work or how users will accept the new enhancement or change, this tool allows you test and measure initial results. This saves so much time and energy knowing the results before it is deployed and might have low user adoption or acceptance.

Incentivized

• Integration with SonarQube
• Integration with Azure DevOps
• Integration with GitHub

Incentivized

• Automated builds! This is really why you get CircleCI, to automate the build process. This makes building your application far more reliable and repeatable. It can also run tests and verify your application is working as expected.
• Simple. Unlike Jenkins, Teamcity, or other platforms, CircleCI doesn't need a lot of setup. It's completely hosted, so there's no infrastructure to set up. The config file does take a bit to understand, but if you follow their example and start with something small and add to it, you can get it up and going quicker than it first looks.
• Scales easily. Again, since it's all cloud-based, you don't have to manage or scale infrastructure. Simply subscribe to the number of containers you want, and scaling up just means buying more containers.

Incentivized

• A/B or Multi Variant Testing as a methodology to gather insight from customer usage. Experimentation as a feature within LaunchDarkly offers information around the success of one variant over another and whether the experiment has reached statistical significance.
• Being able to decouple deployment of code from the release of a feature is hugely valuable.
• Development teams are empowered to manage features within their production applications for reliability or testing purposes.

Incentivized

• The errors which we got sometimes are not clearly enough.
• There are some let's say hidden options, they could be more visible
• When the process is running we have to remember about manually refreshing to see the current status because it doesn't work automatically

Incentivized

• While configuration is easy, the config files can get very very long.
• Price compared to some alternatives that are cheaper / free. Especially so if you are running multiple containers in parallel.
• Have experienced numerous outages (3-5) in the last few months where CircleCI has been down.
• Web documentation and tutorials haven't been as good as some of the competitors.

Incentivized

• Limited number of users on cheaper plans that is limiting our ability to audit log who is making changes.
• Some of our engineers are confused between flags and segments and have set up items incorrectly.
• Better documented support for React with Typescript.

Incentivized

It fits out business case

Incentivized

The reliability & speed, it just works. The ability to spin up macOS runners and Docker containers on demand without managing hardware is a huge win. The Orbs system makes integrating with AWS and Slack incredibly easy, saving us weeks of custom scripting and providing real-time updates in our Slack channel. This makes it easy for us to track and ensures that everyone involved knows the status. Of course, it has drawbacks related to configuration complexity and, in some cases, cost transparency, but overall, it is an industry-standard, robust tool that solves our core infrastructure problems well.

Incentivized

It's very easy to create new feature flags and set them properly. It is more difficult to get LaunchDarkly integrated within a distributed system so that flags can be used. Especially on stateless servers where gating features by user is not easy. Overall though, it is very easy to get started and I like how simple it is to use.

Incentivized

No issue with availability at all

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

From what I have seen, LaunchDarkly integrates well with your code and also services you might have in your tech ecosystem. We use Jenkins for automation and we were able to use it to build pipelines to automate the control of LaunchDarkly toggles in our code.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The overall support is very responsive

Incentivized

Yes I do.

Incentivized

We have used the GitHub CI/CD. Earlier we were using the Azure Pipelines but after GitHub had their actions, we integrated that for CI/CD. It runs the tests and makes a production build which can be live. GitHub CI/CD is more useful because we have to make script only once then just by few changes we can deploy it onto Azure, AWS, Google anywhere so we found it more convenient

Incentivized

Jenkins is usually self-hosted, Travis CI's infrastructure is largely unreliable (lots of tests time out for no discernable reason), and Semaphore encourages you to configure your CI/CD from a web UI. We like CircleCI because its hosted, our tests run largely as expected on their infrastructure, and we can configure it from a config file that we track in GitHub.

Incentivized

LaunchDarkly stood out to us because it put control of the application within the hands of our engineers. We didn't want to allow business users to manipulate the production site via a third-party tool. Instead, our focus was on delivering faster as an engineering team.

Incentivized

The platform didn't go down since we implemented it

Incentivized

• we have had outages from Azure in the past

Incentivized

• We pay over $5K/ month and we have high expectations for service. Sometimes I feel that we don't get the value, but only sometimes.
• We have had to build our own application to keep state and broker releases and deployments. We call our app deployer. I feel that CircleCI could do more to understand our needs and possibly build additional features that would enable us to invest less in build and deployment infrastructure and justify paying more for Circle.

Incentivized

• Improved developer experience with some teams moving to Trunk-based Development.
• Increased deployment frequency due to smaller code releases.
• Validation of the technical and business value of work is achieved more quickly through smaller pieces of work and through experimenting with a small group of users before a feature gets to 100% of customers.

Incentivized