CircleCI

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
CircleCI
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
per month
Performance
$30
per month
Server
$35
per month
Scale
Custom Pricing
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CircleCI
Free Trial
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup fee
Additional Details—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
CircleCI
Considered Both Products
CircleCI
Chose CircleCI
Based on the cost for feature set that we needed we went with CircleCI. There were also more people on our team that knew how to use CircleCI already compared to other products which made it a preferred choice for ramp up. Other products were not as robust and quick to …
Chose CircleCI
CircleCI is the only product we've used.
Chose CircleCI
We use CircleCI when we need a good, independent CI/CD provider in an existing workflow. That said, we've begun investing more heavily in GitHub actions as it's closer to where our code is stored. CircleCI is a feature of a workflow, and can be filled by many different service …
Chose CircleCI
CircleCI is a sass product which means you don't need to maintain your own servers. This can also be a negative as you are dependent on their service. This also means you can't ssh into a machine to see what went wrong like you can with Jenkins. However for most users this …
Chose CircleCI
Because the Travis CI features are not very good, it has a lot of problems with concurrency and the uptime of the on-cloud solution was the worst we have ever tried.
Chose CircleCI
CircleCI is still being developed and worked on continually while TravisCI is not.
Chose CircleCI
CircleCI seemed to have a quicker setup than other similar products, with a good integration with GitHub repos. Projects are quick and easy to set up within the UI, and workflows can then be created off the back of those fairly intuitively. Clever interpretation of commit …
Chose CircleCI
CircleCI is the company that is innovating compared to the other ones. I think it's a great piece of software compared to other open source options that don't have as much functionality and improved capability over time.
Chose CircleCI
While the UI on CircleCI is not my favorite, it's leagues better than Travis CI. I really like Heroku CI much better, but the functionality is much more limited there. If Heroku CI had the same functionality as CircleCI, I probably wouldn't use CircleCI.
Chose CircleCI
Jenkins and Teamcity both have additional features that maybe you require, but they are also a lot more work to get set up and working. There's a much longer learning curve to getting these configured for a simple build. They're not hosted, so you have to maintain the …
Chose CircleCI
CircleCI does a lot of what we need it to do; however, I believe Jenkins is a better Continuous Integration tool. Jenkins has more capabilities and integrations. In addition, Jenkins is a much more widely used tool, which means more developers are familiar with it and have …
Chose CircleCI
Not having to manage / deal with a Jenkins server is fantastic. I don't have much personally against Jenkins. I've set up and run a Jenkins server before. It's just complexity that doesn't really have much to do with the business beyond getting our software to our customers. My …
Chose CircleCI
Since CircleCI gave us its infrastructure we don't have to worry about servers, provisioning and maintenance. Also CircleCI provides us great features to increase speed of builds by adding more containers to the build. Jenkins is the best open source alternative but it requires …
Chose CircleCI
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 …
Chose CircleCI
It was our CTO who did the evaluation, not me, but as I recall other services weren't as parallelizable. We knew we wanted to run on many containers simultaneously for fast test results.
Chose CircleCI
For us it really came down to CricleCI being the fastest and simples tool to get started with. The GitHub integration is slick and seamless and the scripting config file allowed us to configure our entire build system, including tests, in less than a day. It's very light weight …
Chose 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 …
Chose CircleCI
Travis has full YML configuration in areas where CircleCI is slightly lacking still, which is great, but CircleCI offers more features, settings, and potential performance.

Codeship is simpler to use, you can use it entirely from their UI without modifying your Git repository at …
Chose CircleCI
Travis CI is great for open source projects – it's completely free, but CircleCI offers some support for closed projects as well. CircleCI has cheaper pricing plans, and you are able to customize them as much as you want. At Travis CI you can select only a predefined amount of …
Chose CircleCI
The biggest downside to CircleCI is that it doesn't support parameterized builds, that is testing your code against language version X and Y, or framework version A and B. Beyond that, it is really a great product.
Chose CircleCI
I had used Travis CI in some of my open source projects. However, it was too expensive for us so I looked for an alternative that was in our budget. Scrutinizer is also very useful, but also out of our budget. When we get larger I could see myself using Scrutinizer for quality …
Chose CircleCI
I think these three tools are just as good as the other except that Travis CI supports mobile a lot better but price wise, CircleCI is the best that I have found and is supports the need for a startup. For a long while, CircleCI had Docker support before Codeship but now, Codesh…
Chose CircleCI
We looked at various others, but the clincher for us was really iOS build support and CircleCi was one of the few that had it.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
CircleCI
Small Businesses
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
CircleCI
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(26 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
7.8
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
6.9
(6 ratings)
User Testimonials
CircleCI
Likelihood to Recommend
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
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.
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Cons
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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Usability
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
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Performance
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
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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Alternatives Considered
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
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