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
JFrog Artifactory
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
JFrog Artifactory is a software repository management solution for enterprises available on-premise or from the cloud, presented as a single solution for housing and managing all the artifacts, binaries, packages, files, containers, and components for use throughout the software supply chain. JFrog Artifactory serves as a central hub for DevOps, integrating with tools and processes to improve automation, increase integrity, and incorporate best practices along the way.
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.
It works at scale and a large number of accessible pipelines for searching, repository updates and indexing will become easier. JFrog provides end-to-end solutions for all DevOps needs. With this, Jfrog Artifactory specifically implements the management of highly available repositories, with a smooth interface and integration with all the main CI tools on the market.
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.
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.
The main problem that seems intractable is getting the checksum of the artifact. Managing container artifacts is a game changer for us during project execution, as the container artifact type exposes all base image and Docker file steps. This makes debugging or analysis easier. Jfrog Artifactory provides promotion feature and can automated from one environment repo to another environment repo before the deployment occurs.
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.
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.
Support tickets take days to respond. The most basic of questions that should be knocked out in a few hours don't get answers for days. Tickets are also closed without resolution.
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.
JFrog Artifactory has a much more friendly GUI, making package exploration less of a chore to do. Other than that, their features are pretty much comparable to each other. Both support multiple types of packages; both have API that can integrate well with CI/CD pipelines.
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.
So many times it happens at the time of dependency resolution some of the servers are down e.g NPM, Maven central, PiPy in that cause our builds starts failing. By proxying these repositories with JFrog this is never happened again.
It reduced the additional cost of container image registry and management effort.
Support of integration with Build, Monitoring, and CI tools resulted in smooth automation and management.
