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
Vultr
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Vultr is an independent cloud computing platform on a mission to provide businesses and developers around the world with unrivaled ease of use, price-to-performance, and global reach.
$2.50
per month
Pricing
CircleCI
Vultr
Editions & Modules
Server
Contact Sales
Performance
starting at $15
per month
Scale
starting at $2000
per month
Block Storage
$1
per month
Cloud Compute
$2.50
per month
Object Storage
$5
per month
Kubernetes Engine
$10
per month
Load Balancers
$10
per month
Managed Databases
$15
per month
Optimized Cloud Compute
$28
per month
Cloud GPU
$90
per month
Bare Metal
$120
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CircleCI
Vultr
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Pricing is based on specifications chosen in each product category. Bandwidth is also included up to a certain amount per month.
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 been with Vultr over 5 years hosting multiple businesses and email related services. I never experienced a significant outage or data loss. Migration has always been successful as well. Support is top tier and IP reputation is clean. I like the choices of OS, ease of platform use and multiple hosting/ region options.
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.
We’ve been extremely satisfied with the service for many years. After trying other providers, we’ve found nothing that matches the reliability and performance—so we’re not likely to switch anytime soon.
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.
easy to use and configure. great bang for the buck. I need an affordable solution to host in the cloud data from systems installed at our client's site with the ability to drill down and change the configuration remotely. Vultr enabled us to do that in an efficient and affordable way.
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.
Linode is a more old-school offering. Linode pricing model and infrastructure rely on classic Virtual Machines. What we like about Vultr is that they offer the same at the front, but in the back, the machines are much more flexible and can be tailor-made to our needs, which of course also impacts the costs of running the infrastructure.
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.
