CircleCI vs. GitHub

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.

Incentivized

GitHub is well suited for software development, GitHub is particularly well suited for software development projects, where teams need to collaborate on code, track changes, and review code changes. Also for open-source projects, GitHub is an ideal platform for open-source projects, where teams of developers from all over the world can collaborate on code and contribute to projects. For documentation, GitHub provides a platform for creating and sharing documentation, making it an ideal solution for teams that need to create and maintain documentation. On small and medium-sized teams GitHub is well suited as those teams that need to collaborate on software projects and track changes to their code.

• 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.

Incentivized

• As a repository it's great. It houses almost all the open-source applications/code that anyone can fork and play with. A huge collection of sample codes available with problem statements across different domains make Github a one-stop location.
• I use GitHub with Windows and the Git Bash is superb. It [is] a powerful alternative to the Command Prompt and Powershell. Allows me to run shell scripts and UNIX commands inside the terminal [on] a Windows PC.
• GitHub integration with almost all cloud development/deployment platforms is amazing. Deploying a new application in Azure is really smooth. Just link the GitHub repositories and it's good to go. From automatic build to deployment everything is just amazing.

• 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

Incentivized

• When browsing history of a file, GitHub could make it easier to see the file after a particular commit instead of just being able to quickly view the commit. I'd like to be able to see the commit or the file itself in one click.
• I would like to be able to view commits by user.
• I would love to be able to traverse code on GitHub (go to definition, etc) - the good news here is that they are working on these features!

Incentivized

GitHub's ease of use and continued investment into the Developer Experience have made it the de facto tool for our engineers to manage software changes. With new features that continue to come out, we have been able to consolidate several other SaaS solutions and reduce the number of tools required for each engineer to perform their job responsibilities.

CircleCI interface is awesome in that it is relatively modern and makes it clear exactly which parts of the engineering lifecycle you are in

Incentivized

- Easy to use compared to other version control software. UI interface makes it easy to use, as well as protects against making a major mistake by deleting code, etc. - UI looks modern. - Support for multiple platforms, which I assume will only get better with time. - Student benefits are awesome! - The size limitations on their repositories make sense to me. Not too crazy but realistic from a business perspective.

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

It's a testament to how easy it is to use GitHub and how many others use it that you can pretty much find the answer to any problem you have by searching online. Consequently, I've never needed to use their support. It's an incredibly easy tool to set up initially, so it won't require much onboarding expertise to get started.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

At the time to evaluation - Bitbucket was very tightly integrated into Atlassian’s suite of tools. For an organization that is starting out and looking to spend limited funds effectively - the cost/benefit of using that suite of tools usually doesn’t make sense. Granted things may have changed since then (its been over 5 years) - but at the time GitHub was effective - and all prospective engineers knew about it and already had accounts. This made it very easy to add to the organization and not lose time in training, etc. Developers seem to really love GitHub above most other tools out there - so that plays into the decision making as well.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Github has increased our rate of code development, increasing our publishing rate. This helps bring attention to the research we are doing and ultimately brings in more funding for further research.
• Because GitHub makes my team more efficient, we are able to put more hours into code development / report writing rather than agonizing over different versions of code created without version control software.
• We use a paid version of GitHub, because we work through private repositories, but the increase in productivity, efficiency, and research progress is definitely worth the price.

Incentivized