Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review GNU Make is a great tool for simple builds where language-specific options are not available, or to provide shortcuts for common commands (e.g., "make build" as shorthand for "go build ..." with a bunch of flags). However, it is complementary to other build systems. It does not replace them, which is perhaps one of its greatest strengths as well (works with existing ecosystem instead of trying to do everything). GMU Make it simple to get started with, and the philosophy of understanding how sources map to outputs, as well as the dependency graph, are beneficial.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Performance and accuracy of cross-module dependencies. Simple to write and easy to understand. Read full review Cons 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 Read full review No dependency management tools (but there are no cross-platform tools of this type anyway) Tedious to do cross-compilation (Debug & Release builds, 32- and 64-bit builds, x86/ARM builds) Read full review Usability CircleCI interface is awesome in that it is relatively modern and makes it clear exactly which parts of the engineering lifecycle you are in
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review In general, it is fair to say the support is sufficient although we do not deal with support directly. There are a lot of forum people chiming in with suggestions or recommendations of particular usage or issues we run into. Since it is open software, patch and fixes will be available from time to time. A lot of information is available in the web now for knowing GNU Make from learning, example, teaching, etc.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review I'm a full-stack developer that has used various build tools, including Maven,
Gradle , and NPM/yarn. For our C projects, I also investigated CMake and Ninja, but they seemed more difficult to learn and more tedious to work with. GNU Make is a single binary that can be easily downloaded, even for Windows under MingW32, is straightforward to learn, and works pretty well despite its age.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Streamline the build based on a lot of existing component being done, reusable. Commonly understandable, therefore, rampup effort is small. Read full review ScreenShots