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
Trustpilot
Score 6.2 out of 10
N/A
Trustpilot, headquartered in Copenhagen, offers their customer review platform to help businesses gather more online reviews and merge their online profile with feedback from their top customers and bring customer reviews to other high visibility platforms (e.g. Google).
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.
Unfortunately, Trustpilot's disingenuous pricing habits and communication methods are the reason we ultimately ended our 3 year relationship with the company. In 2023, we signed a 1 year agreement for their basic plan (product reviews, Q&A, etc) at $3,800/year... Fair enough. In 2024, the price jumps to $5,040/year... Okay, steep - but we're still seeing good use of the tools, sort of justified? For 2025 it skyrockets to $8,976/year (+78% from prior)... But, after a month of haggling and threats to cancel, they 'graciously' drop it to $7,569/year. Now for 2026, Trustpilot is demanding $9,576/year for the EXACT SAME PLAN. That's a 152% increase since we started, with zero added value.
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.
Completing the review for the customer is a simple process which enables us to receive more feedback.
The Trustpilot account management team is a true partner working with each department to help with adoption across the company.
The Trustpilot development team is a trusted partner with our own internal development team, assisting them with implementation as well as integration with their API.
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.
Simple user interface - easy to understand with high level overviews, but also getting into the detail with questions for those who want it. The only issue I have is the connection with LinkedIn - sometimes it fails and makes you re-enter details again which can be a bit frustrating!
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've rarely had issues and needed support. During the implementation phase we relied on their support heavily and they were very knowledgeable, responsive and helpful. Any questions I've had have been answered promptly by my account manager. They also have a great knowledgebase for self-service 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.
Selected Trustpilot because of superior integration with the website and Google SERPS. Again, my only complaint would be Trustpilot was relatively more expensive than the other technologies.
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.
