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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    CircleCI

    Score9.3 out of 10
    N/ACircleCI 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

    DigitalOcean App Platform

    Score8 out of 10
    N/AThe DigitalOcean App Platform enables developers to build, deploy, and scale apps on what they describe as a simple, fully managed PaaS. Users of the former Nanobox, acquired by DigitalOcean in 2019, have been migrated to the App Platform upon Nanobox's end of life in March 2021.

    $5

    per month

    Pricing
    CircleCIDigitalOcean App Platform
    Editions & Modules
    Server
    Contact Sales
    Performance
    starting at $15
    per month
    Scale
    starting at $2000
    per month
    Basic
    $5
    per month
    Professional
    $12
    per month
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    CircleCIDigitalOcean App Platform
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    CircleCIDigitalOcean App Platform
    Considered Both Products
    CircleCI
    No answer on this topic
    DigitalOcean
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    8 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    8 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    8 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    5 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    7 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    CircleCIDigitalOcean App Platform
    Platform-as-a-Service
    Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of CircleCI and DigitalOcean App Platform
    Feature
    CircleCI
    -
    Ratings
    DigitalOcean App Platform
    6.8
    2 Ratings
    13% below category average
    Ease of building user interfaces00 Ratings7.01 Ratings
    Scalability00 Ratings4.02 Ratings
    Platform management overhead00 Ratings4.02 Ratings
    Platform access control00 Ratings4.02 Ratings
    Services-enabled integration00 Ratings9.01 Ratings
    Development environment creation00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
    Development environment replication00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
    Issue monitoring and notification00 Ratings6.01 Ratings
    Issue recovery00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
    Upgrades and platform fixes00 Ratings6.02 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    CircleCIDigitalOcean App Platform
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    IBM Cloud Foundry
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    AWS CodePipeline
    Score6.6 out of 10
    IBM Cloud Private
    Score9.6 out of 10
    Enterprises
    AWS CodePipeline
    Score6.6 out of 10
    AWS Elastic Beanstalk
    Score8.6 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    CircleCIDigitalOcean App Platform
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.0
    (27 ratings)
    7.0
    (2 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    7.8
    (3 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    6.9
    (6 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    CircleCIDigitalOcean App Platform
    Likelihood to Recommend
    CircleCI
    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
    Read full review
    DigitalOcean
    I would only get into it if I where willing to pay for the support plan and getting some assurances from the team as to where they are headed. The platform itself is great and can save you a ton of hard work and money. but it's hard to be confidant in it's sustainability.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    CircleCI
    • 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
    Read full review
    DigitalOcean
    • Hosting of serverless application
    • Hosting of load balancer
    • Hosting of virtual appliances
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    CircleCI
    • 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
    Read full review
    DigitalOcean
    • The company has not been very communicative as of lately. Not much news, no apparent work on missing features.
    • Some components are incomplete as far as some critical features. For example, I use RethinkDB as my database and it's missing critical features like backup and clustering, so It is unusable and they should have made that clear from the get go.
    • The pricing on the support plan is vague. I do have the feeling it is actually well worth the money, but it's hard to form a decisions based without more predictable specific.
    • Seems to me like the platform's future is unclear.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    CircleCI
    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
    Read full review
    DigitalOcean
    No answers on this topic
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    DigitalOcean
    No answers on this topic
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    DigitalOcean
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    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 their infrastructure, and we can configure it from a config file that we track in GitHub.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    DigitalOcean
    It can help you to host your virtual appliance or serverless application at very low cost. DigitalOcean marketplace also helps you to deploy the serverless app or virtual appliance effortlessly. It is suitable for small scale deployment and the process to setup an account and roll out your app via marketplace is easy and cheap.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    CircleCI
    • 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
    Read full review
    DigitalOcean
    • The platform is saving me a lot of time I would have been wasting on operations instead of development.
    • The platform is saving me a lot of money as I can easily switch between cloud providers to find the best price.
    • I am worried though for the price I might have to pay in case of an unexpected system issue.
    • Hopefully I will be able to pay the support plan before that.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots