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
PyCharm
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
PyCharm is an extensive Integrated
Development Environment (IDE) for Python developers. Its
arsenal includes intelligent code completion, error detection, and rapid
problem-solving features, all of which aim to bolster efficiency. The product supports programmers in composing orderly and maintainable
code by offering PEP8 checks, testing assistance, intelligent refactorings, and
inspections. Moreover, it caters to web development frameworks like Django and
Flask by providing framework…
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.
PyCharm is well suited to developing and deploying Python applications in the cloud using Kubernetes or serverless pipelines. The integration with GitLab is great; merges and rebates are easily done and help the developer move quickly. The search engine that allows you to search inside your code is also great. It is less appropriate for other languages.
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.
Git integration is really essential as it allows anyone to visually see the local and remote changes, compare revisions without the need for complex commands.
Complex debugging tools are basked into the IDE. Controls like break on exception are sometimes very helpful to identify errors quickly.
Multiple runtimes - Python, Flask, Django, Docker are native the to IDE. This makes development and debugging and even more seamless.
Integrates with Jupyter and Markdown files as well. Side by side rendering and editing makes it simple to develop such files.
The biggest complaint I have about PyCharm is that it can use a lot of RAM which slows down the computer / IDE. I use the paid version, and have otherwise found nothing to complain about the interface, utility, and capabilities.
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.
It's pretty easy to use, but if it's your first time using it, you need time to adapt. Nevertheless, it has a lot of options, and everything is pretty easy to find. The console has a lot of advantages and lets you accelerate your development from the first day.
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.
I rate 10/10 because I have never needed a direct customer support from the JetBrains so far. Whenever and for whatever kind of problems I came across, I have been able to resolve it within the internet community, simply by Googling because turns out most of the time, it was me who lacked the proper information to use the IDE or simply make the proper configuration. I have never came across a bug in PyCharm either so it deserves 10/10 for overall support
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.
When it comes to development and debugging PyCharm is better than Spyder as it provides good debugging support and top-quality code completion suggestions. Compared to Jupiter notebook it's easy to install required packages in PyCharm, also PyChram is a good option when we want to write production-grade code because it provides required suggestions.
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.
