CircleCI vs. Jellyfish

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

Jellyfish allows us to understand the allocation of our efforts without time tracking. We are also able to integrate this platform with our existing ticket tracking system and can see analytics instantly! Jellyfish works well for our teams because it has an opinionated view. Jellyfish understands that the metrics for an engineering team should help you understand what your organization values and is actively working on. We can use Jellyfish in a strategic way compared to other tools like this.

Incentivized

• 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

• Integration with JIRA.
• Integration with GitHub.
• Friendly UI.
• Easy to read.

Incentivized

• 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

• UI and navigation aren't very intuitive and require additional research before being able to use.
• The individual developer metrics are not very useful and make the interface feel cluttered.
• Overall, it takes time for the end-user to truly learn how to use the platform and navigate. There is so much information/data available that although the above is a con, we felt it still made sense, despite the learning curve.

Incentivized

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

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

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

The really cool thing about Jellyfish is the integrations that it has with the other tools, which are also very common within the software development industry. Consolidating all this data and being able to see graphs, numbers, and percentages in one place gives you a better way to analyze and define better solutions to improve your software development processes.

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

• Easy setup and takes time to learn, but overall easy to use one you get the hang of it.
• Strategic roadmapping.
• Return on Investment increased.

Incentivized