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
Vercel
Score 9.7 out of 10
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Vercel (made by the creators of Next.js) is a cloud platform for static sites and Serverless Functions for a workflow. It enables developers to host websites and web services that deploy instantly, scale automatically, and requires no supervision, all with no configuration.
The platform aims to enable frontend teams to work while combining the best developer experience with a focus on end-user performance.
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Pricing
CircleCI
Vercel
Editions & Modules
Server
Contact Sales
Performance
starting at $15
per month
Scale
starting at $2000
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CircleCI
Vercel
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
CircleCI
Vercel
Features
CircleCI
Vercel
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
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.
I've had nothing but positive experiences with Vercel, and while their business offering is great, it's also worth touching on their free plan. Their free plan allows me to tinker with web development in my free time without having to worry about paying for a costly linux box. I just link a GitHub repository and it's done!
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.
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.
Vercel's good usability and developer experience make me happy to visit their website when I need to configure my deployments. It's very easy to navigate, configure, and manage my projects, and the developer experience is so seamless that I don't have to think much when I push changes to git.
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.
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.
Vercel beats Heroku and DigitalOcean by a mile with pricing. Since Vercel uses serverless infrastructure, we don't pay for servers that don't get used, which is great for smaller platforms. Vercel Support is also very quick to respond, unlike DigitalOcean who took a while to get back to me after they didn't honor platform credits they sent me.
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.
