CircleCI vs. Travis CI

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

TravisCI is suited for workflows involving typical software development but unfortunately I think the software needs more improvement to be up to date with current development systems and TravisCI hasn't been improving much in that space in terms of integrations.

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

• It is very simple to configure a range of environment versions and settings in a simple YAML file.
• It integrates very well with Github, Bitbucket, or a private Git repo.
• The Travis CI portal beautifully shows you your history and console logs. Everything is presented in a very clear and intuitive interface.

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

• I think they could have a cheaper personal plan. I'd love to use Travis on personal projects, but I don't want to publish them nor I can pay $69 a month for personal projects that I don't want to be open source.
• There is no interface for configuring repos on Travis CI, you have to do it via a file in the repo. This make configuration very flexible, but also makes it harder for simpler projects and for small tweaks in the configuration.

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

TravisCI hasn't had much changes made to its software and has thus fallen behind compared to many other CI/CD applications out there. I can only give it a 5 because it does what it is supposed to do but lacks product innovation.

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

After the private equity firm had bought this company the innovation and support has really gone downhill a lot. I am not a fan that they have gutted the software trying to make money from it and put innovation and product development second.

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

Jenkins is much more complicated to configure and start using. Although, one you have done that, it's extremely powerful and full of features. Maybe many more than Travis CI. As per TeamCity, I would never go back to using it. It's also complicated to configure but it is not worth the trouble. Codeship supports integration with GitHub, GitLab and BitBucket. I've only used it briefly, but it seems to be a nice tool.

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

• It's improved my ability to deliver working code, increasing my development velocity.
• It increases confidence that your own work (and those of external contributors) does not have any obvious bugs, provided you have sufficient test coverage.
• It helps to ensure consistent standards across a team (you can integrate process elements like "go lint" and other style checks as part of your build).
• It's zero-cost for public/open source projects, so the only investment is a few minutes setting up a build configuration file (hence the return is very high).
• The .travis.yml file is a great way for onboarding new developers, since it shows how to bootstrap a build environment and run a build "from scratch".

Incentivized