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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    CircleCI

    Score9.3 out of 10
    N/ACircleCI 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

    Ansible

    Score9.1 out of 10
    N/AThe Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (acquired by Red Hat in 2015) is a foundation for building and operating automation across an organization. The platform includes tools needed to implement enterprise-wide automation, and can automate resource provisioning, and IT environments and configuration of systems and devices. It can be used in a CI/CD process to provision the target environment and to then deploy the application on it.

    $5,000

    per year

    Pricing
    CircleCIAnsible
    Editions & Modules
    Server
    Contact Sales
    Performance
    starting at $15
    per month
    Scale
    starting at $2000
    per month
    Basic Tower
    5,000
    per year
    Enterprise Tower
    10,000
    per year
    Premium Tower
    14,000
    per year
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    CircleCIAnsible
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    CircleCIAnsible
    Considered Both Products
    CircleCI
    No answer on this topic
    Red Hat
    Chose Ansible
    We looked at Puppet and Chef, but Ansible won because it's agentless. You trade some features, for example, someone could manually make a change on the server, and Ansible wouldn't know. But that's not a problem for us, and we needed something that we could run immediately on …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    8 Answers
    99%
    Would buy again
    265 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    8 Answers
    96%
    Delivers good value for the price
    210 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    8 Answers
    98%
    Happy with the feature set
    263 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    5 Answers
    97%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    166 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    7 Answers
    89%
    Implementation went as expected
    201 Answers
    Best Alternatives
    CircleCIAnsible
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    Salt
    Score6.2 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    AWS CodePipeline
    Score6.6 out of 10
    Perforce Puppet
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Enterprises
    AWS CodePipeline
    Score6.6 out of 10
    Salt
    Score6.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    CircleCIAnsible
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.0
    (27 ratings)
    8.8
    (292 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.2
    (8 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    8.3
    (184 ratings)
    Performance
    7.8
    (3 ratings)
    8.7
    (5 ratings)
    Support Rating
    6.9
    (6 ratings)
    8.0
    (5 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.6
    (5 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    CircleCIAnsible
    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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    Red Hat
    I think it's the best defacto orchestrator for automation because it's so easy to integrate in other tools to it (dynatrace, cyberark, terraform, etc). It is a lot for a new or smaller team to use so I wouldn't recommend it to a new team using Ansible, in that case using Ansible navigator is a better start to understanding playbooks/inventories before diving into the complexity of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. EDA also takes a lot of connectivity between Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and target systems to get working which can be difficult in very locked down envs unless you have approval from many other teams like networking and security.
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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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    Red Hat
    • Standardize controls and visibility for automation.
    • Provide RBAC and Vault for improved automation security and support.
    • Job Scheduling is much more effective than Cron or other home-grown solutions.
    • The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform API is one of the best features as it makes automation accessible from any other platform.
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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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    Red Hat
    • Ansible is still not truly declarative like Terraform.
    • Simple automation is fine, but creating complex, scalable automation scripts is very difficult to learn.
    • For a higher number of nodes, Ansible consumes a lot of resources. It needs the paid version of AAP, which requires a cost.
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    CircleCI
    No answers on this topic
    Red Hat
    We are extremely happy with the use of AAP. It's better than expected, There is almost no limit when thinking of automation. The only problem is that the day to day is consuming a big part of our time. Patching and checking vulnerabilities are virtually killing us. But we can only improve with AAP.
    Incentivized
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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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    Red Hat
    Everything has room for improvement, but Ansible is the best tool out there for what it does and what it can do. There are plenty of features and capabilities that can be added, but it's just a matter of time before it happens.
    Incentivized
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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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    Red Hat
    Great in almost every way compared to any other configuration management software. The only thing I wish for is python3 support. Other than that, YAML is much improved compared to the Ruby of Chef. The agentless nature is incredibly convenient for managing systems quickly, and if a member of your term has no terminal experience whatsoever they can still use the UI.
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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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    Red Hat
    There is a lot of good documentation that Ansible and Red Hat provide which should help get someone started with making Ansible useful. But once you get to more complicated scenarios, you will benefit from learning from others. I have not used Red Hat support for work with Ansible, but many of the online resources are helpful.
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    Implementation Rating
    CircleCI
    No answers on this topic
    Red Hat
    I spoke on this topic today!
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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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    Red Hat
    AAP compares favorably with Terraform and Power Automate. I don't have much experience with Terraform, but I find AAP and Ansible easier to use as well as having more capabilities. Power Platform is also an excellent automation tool that is user friendly but I feel that Ansible has more compatibility with a variety of technologies.
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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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    Red Hat
    • First, it keeps our entire server infrastructure aligned with our standards and reduces the time and effort needed to maintain our systems.
    • Automate routine IT tasks to save time, reduce errors, and ensure every server is configured and updated consistently.
    • Tasks that used to take our teams weeks to complete manually now run automatically and reliably, with full visibility, making our infrastructure management more effective and our compliance tracking much easier.
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