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
Sonatype Platform
Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Sonatype secures the software supply chain and protects organizations' vital software development lifecycle(SDLC). The platform unites security teams and developers to accelerate digital innovation without sacrificing security or quality across the SDLC. With users among more than 2,000 organizations and 15 million software developers, Sonatype tools and guidance help users to deliver and maintain exceptional and secure software.
$0
for use of the Sonatype Nexus Repository Community Edition
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.
- Guidance on remediation is very good - Vulnerability detection is very good - Support is very good - Ability to ask PMs/POs open questions at Office Hours every month is very good - Support for languages is lacking (TIOBE Index Top20) - Some features are un-neededly hidden and make the usage more complex then it needs to be
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.
Nexus firewall is a great feature enabled for all our proxy repositories which are used to download the third-party opensource packages.
Nexus IQ is integrated with build stage to analyze the component against evaluation policy. This helps to figure out the application security standards.
Nexus IQ is also having a feature to scan container images before it uploads to our private repository. This is great feature for container platforms.
Sonatype supports more than 200 dev(s). It proves with the repository to store the artifacts. Allows for governance of open source software used by the different teams. It is used by security teams to scan for vulnerabilities in software(s) and in the deployed containers. It helps ensure code quality.
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.
Overall experience is great with the Platform; however, I see some opportunity with upgrading the platform as it is missing with data of historical scans to allow reviewer to get view of trend how the application/product development team is considering fixing the issues.
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.
Sonatype products are great value as I said but a few areas like how products use underlying resources in order to make it further lightweight, is something I would like them to consider.
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.
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.
Out of other products we evaluated before choosing Sonatype, the later looked far more user friendly, easy to understand and work with. This was key for us, as the tool needs to be used by many engineers that don't have security as their main focus. Having a tool that is easy to understand and work with, makes the process of evaluating open source dependencies much easier and appealing for developers.
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.
