CircleCI vs. IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery

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

It provides a cloud-based integrated development environment that integrates with other IBM Cloud services to provide a streamlined development workflow. This includes real-time collaboration and code sharing capabilities, making it easy for teams to work together on projects. This feature is very useful for our app to maintain the code

Incentivized

• 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

• It contains the deployment templates which are much more time saving and is of great use.
• This has the integration of the Cloud applications which makes the work much more convenient.
• This is flexible when it comes to development, deployment, and delivery.
• [It] also has a much more reasonable pricing.
• Provides space for the data storage.
• [IBM Cloud Developer Tools] also can support many useful tools.

Incentivized

• 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

• Its price is quite high and this made it unsuitable for us as we cannot afford such high rates.
• Its Setup takes much longer time and this is frustrating.
• Its interface needs to be improved and easy even for the Newbies.

Incentivized

It's a great platform to develop, run, test and deploy the applications easily. And it makes very easier and secure the implementation of continuous delivery process. For first time and experts also can use this service so easily. Great service provided by the IBM Cloud Continuous Service. There are more services that helps a lot to work on it. Thanks a lot.

Incentivized

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

Nothing special to say : the UX is clear and simple.

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

In more than a year using the IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery tool, I haven't had any major complaints or problems. However, in the last month, IBM suffered from a couple of problems through several of its services, and for a short period of time, I couldn't deploy successfully my projects. The problem was brief and was quickly fixed.

Incentivized

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

We chose IBM Cloud Developer Tools for multiple reasons. Cost, current infrastructure vendor list, and Cloud Operations team experience were key driving factors for us. Palo Alto's Prisma Cloud product was slick for sure but we found it more difficult to deploy and integrate with our current environment and applications

Incentivized

• 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

• This has made the configuration files much easier to access.
• Has made the commands more logical as well as easy for use and learning.
• Contains great AI capabilities
• The documentation needs improvement.
• Error received from commands are pretty hard to understand.

Incentivized