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 We use packer to generate new machine images for multiple platforms on every change to our Configuration Management tools like Chef/Puppet/
Ansible It's act single tool for Image building for Multi-provider like AWS/Azure/GCP Helps to achieve Dev/Prod Parity Packer itself doesn't have a state like
Terraform . You can't do packer output AMI ID. If you have a scenario where you want to maintain the state for images it would be tough to manage via Packer.
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 Multi-provider portability Greater testability Super fast infrastructure deployment 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 Manageability Manageability Manageability Read full review Likelihood to Renew We are happy with the use of Packer in our organization. Apart from manageability, I don't find any other drawback with Packer.
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 It's best for building Image with many features and benefits.
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 I only once required support and it was very smooth.
Read full review Implementation Rating I haven't found any issue in Implementation that itself describes how well this tool is built.
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 There are lot of tools in market which does the job for Image creation but all of them are not complete Machine/Image as a code. All other alternatives can create Image partially. Main reason for selecting Packer are Packer is lightweight, portable, and command-line driven Packer helps keep development, staging, and production as similar as possible. Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image Multi-provider portability is the feature to die for
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 Super fast infrastructure deployment Quick turnaround of infrastructure in multiple cloud using single tool. Increase productivity by reducing time in infrastructure building. Read full review ScreenShots