Buddy (formerly Springloops) is a SVN/Git source code management tool focused on web development teams. It allows users to code in parallel and share code safely concentrating on results, not on lost changes or overwritten files. With quick deployments, users get rapid collaboration in protected space.
$75
per month
CircleCI
Score 9.5 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
for up to 6,000 build minutes and up to 5 active users per month
Springloops is the best tool for deployment to any environment. Especially, the auto-deployment feature on development servers is essential for the early stages of development. The built-in source control mechanisms are a perfect combination of ease of use and a rich feature set that allows the development team to have an easier and more complete view of each part of the project. A section that is lacking is time tracking - but then this is not the main usage of the service.
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.
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.
Apart from being a great versioning control system Springloops offers the options to automatically deploy code to multiple systems. This feature alone is a determining factor to renew Springloops over and over again. Another important factor is that it offers a full set of tools that help the team during the development cycle. No switching between time-tracking to project management. This is a real time-saver.
Easy to use, automatic deployments, comments on projects are only a few factors. Multiple servers per project is another must-have feature. User permissions and rights offer granular control on access to the system
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.
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.
I rarely use it but when I need it the team is there. During the initial steps of Springloops, I had close contact with one of the founders. He provided support to me over Skype! He didn't have to but he did. We had a couple of long talks about some issues I was facing. He has there regardless of time. It was a great experience
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.
Springloops has a built-in feature that is lacking from Bitbucket (at least on the out-of-the-box functionality). Deployment of projects to various servers/development stages. The process is so easy and painless that even remote servers can act as local environments. This is a feature that differentiates Springloops from other solutions that require other tools to perform the same task.
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.
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.
