Bitrise vs. CircleCI vs. Espresso

Bitrise is only suitable for Mobile app development. Bitrise supports source code repositories such as GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket, and also you can connect with your SSO (Single Sign-On) with your private repositories with GitHub Enterprise. It gives a subscription model where it is free for one-time users and increases it fare as the usage grows up. It supports only a set of platforms. It would be good if there were more platforms supported as the user base of a variety of platforms is wide.

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

• It is very easy to verify Images with drawable resources
• Color Verification we can do this by referring to the same hex code as the developer team used so that it is reused.
• Opening a desired activity without performing End-to-end flow which eventually saves time.
• If the application is built on Android we can go testing activity with Espresso as it provides all the necessary APIs
• Espresso is not appropriate to iOS app automation, from a business point of view we need to hire new resources for iOS testing.

Incentivized

• Easy Configuration of CI/CD pipelines.
• Integration Capabilities in Slack, JIRA, Bitbucket.
• Extensive Documentation and Community Support.

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

• Automatic Waiting logic before failing any test
• Black box and Grey box testing
• Easy to Understand and Very Flexible
• Supported Java And Kotlin
• Fewer Efforts compare to other Mobile Automation Frameworks
• Execution is very Fast

Incentivized

• Documentation on the underlying systems like VMs could be more extensive to help with debugging.

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

• As Espresso works on the ideal thread if the threads are not handled properly by the developing team it can lead to challenges in the execution of your tests.
• Depends more on the developer's code
• we cannot develop tests as individual frameworks, we share the repository with developers.
• We need to be cautious while making changes in the tests, as we share same repository

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 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

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

Bitrise requires significantly lower effort needs to be put in order to start using it. It's easy to set up and maintain.

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

As our app is complete on Android Espresso is the best choice over Appium Fewer efforts in Espresso over Appium, as Espresso provides some built-in library to perform the operation. Easy to use, Espresso is very easy to understand and we can perform operations with very little code. Developers can contribute, as they have good command over Java and Kotin languages and also use Espresso for unit testing.

Incentivized

• Builds apps in very less time.
• Efficient CI/CD pipeline.
• Security

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

• As it is an Open Source tool it cost-effective
• East to use, so that you can train many new Joiners to start delivering the tasks
• Maintainance is very low, as we depend on the developer's layout files we can reuse their elements
• We can cover most of the scenarios which helps in the coverage of the tests

Incentivized