CircleCI vs. IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
CircleCI
Score 9.4 out of 10
N/A
CircleCI 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
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Score 7.9 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service is a managed Kubernetes offering, delivering user tools and built-in security for rapid delivery of applications that users can bind to cloud services related to IBM Watson®, IoT, DevOps and data analytics. As a certified K8s provider, IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service provides intelligent scheduling, self-healing, horizontal scaling, service discovery and load balancing, automated rollouts and rollbacks, and secret and configuration management. The Kubernetes…N/A
Pricing
CircleCIIBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Editions & Modules
Server
Contact Sales
Performance
starting at $15
per month
Scale
starting at $2000
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CircleCIIBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
CircleCIIBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Features
CircleCIIBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Container Management
Comparison of Container Management features of Product A and Product B
CircleCI
-
Ratings
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
8.0
20 Ratings
2% below category average
Security and Isolation00 Ratings7.920 Ratings
Container Orchestration00 Ratings8.420 Ratings
Cluster Management00 Ratings7.820 Ratings
Storage Management00 Ratings7.920 Ratings
Resource Allocation and Optimization00 Ratings8.120 Ratings
Discovery Tools00 Ratings7.819 Ratings
Update Rollouts and Rollbacks00 Ratings7.820 Ratings
Self-Healing and Recovery00 Ratings8.318 Ratings
Analytics, Monitoring, and Logging00 Ratings8.220 Ratings
Best Alternatives
CircleCIIBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Small Businesses
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.7 out of 10
Portainer
Portainer
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.7 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.7 out of 10
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
CircleCIIBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(26 ratings)
7.8
(85 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.9
(16 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.7
(16 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Performance
7.8
(3 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
6.9
(6 ratings)
7.7
(4 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(15 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.6
(3 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
1.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
CircleCIIBM Cloud Kubernetes Service
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.
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IBM
IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service also stands out in environments where the workloads vary continuously and require befitting scale. The product excels particularly in microservices structures, wherein the companies would harness the capacity for container orchestration and automated scaling. Still, it may face the challenges due to monolith applications that have not been originally developed for using container technology.
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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.
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IBM
  • IBM has a strong focus on serverless and Kubernetes. This shows in the platform. Deploying containers to Kubernetes was very easy.
  • Deploying a Kubernetes cluster through the GUI is very easy and quick. On top of that, IBM Cloud offers a single node cluster for Free.
  • Container Registry is a very good product for managing container images. Integration with Kubernetes was seemless.
  • Portability. To transition from Google Cloud Kubernetes to IBM Cloud Kubernetes took almost no effort. We mostly use the CLI and the standard tools such as kubectl were present.
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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.
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IBM
  • I constantly get this error even when everything is well configured prefect.exceptions.AuthorizationError: [{'path': ['auth_info'], 'message': 'AuthenticationError: Forbidden', 'extensions': {'code': 'UNAUTHENTICATED'}}]
  • Then sometimes the error disapear without changine anything, happened twice to me. Should there be an issue with the authentication service? Please let's improve or let users know why this may be happening.
  • Improve the UX in the browse console when removing many images at once
  • UX on the process of installing KeyCloack operator
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Likelihood to Renew
CircleCI
No answers on this topic
IBM
We have our application running on a CentOS compartment on IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. We have been utilizing the help since IBM Cloud initially dispatched. We liked the adaptability and versatility that IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service give us. Since we are tiny, the Kubernetes administration is just utilized at present inside my venture bunch.
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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.
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IBM
We actually haven't had any real problems in our clusters recently and the results we have gotten from adopting IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service have been beyond even our greatest expectations. The community has helped optimize the use of the system and make it relatively simpler to use.
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Reliability and Availability
CircleCI
No answers on this topic
IBM
IBM's cloud is almost infallible.
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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.
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IBM
IBM's cloud has a site in my conuntry (MEXICO) so the network latency was almost 0
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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.
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IBM
The self-guided support was solid, and there are plenty of online videos to guide first time users, but I think one area of improvement is a faster way to transfer a large quantity of files from our local machine to the cloud for storage (Aspera)
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Online Training
CircleCI
No answers on this topic
IBM
Online training is really an important resource for using these tools. IBM's help center is rich in useful information and tips. Also, external guides and tutorials are available (e.g. on youtube), but I followed only IBM ones and I had no difficulties.
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Implementation Rating
CircleCI
No answers on this topic
IBM
Ease of use. Very intuitive. We have been looking for a product that allows us to orchestrate our docker containers in a way where it allows us to effectively scale our applications to production. It also provides us a way of monitoring all our infrastructure in a very clear concise way.
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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.
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IBM
We mainly selected [IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service] because IBM fabric blockchain service is mostly compatible with it. To have all the infrastructure in a single cloud to get the best output we selected the [IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service].
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Scalability
CircleCI
No answers on this topic
IBM
IBM's CKS does not offers automatic autoscaling nor vertical scaling (automatic). Other services like Google Kubernetes Engine scales up and down very well
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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.
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IBM
  • Increased development speed and agility allows to build features faster and more economically.
  • Improved resource utilization helps keep applications running very efficiently, which saves on cloud service expenses.
  • Scalability and resilience allows for scaling up or down based on demand, which keeps applications running efficiently and more economically.
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ScreenShots