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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    CircleCI

    Score9.3 out of 10
    N/ACircleCI 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

    Xcode

    Score9 out of 10
    N/AXcode is an IDE used to develop, test, and distribute apps across all Apple platforms, featuring Swift and SwiftUI with a multiplatform app experience, enhanced editor features to help users code faster.N/A
    Pricing
    CircleCIXcode
    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
    CircleCIXcode
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    CircleCIXcode
    Considered Both Products
    CircleCI
    No answer on this topic
    Apple
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    8 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    8 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    8 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    5 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    7 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Best Alternatives
    CircleCIXcode
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    Visual Studio
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    AWS CodePipeline
    Score6.6 out of 10
    PyCharm
    Score9.3 out of 10
    Enterprises
    AWS CodePipeline
    Score6.6 out of 10
    WebStorm
    Score9.6 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    CircleCIXcode
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.0
    (27 ratings)
    9.5
    (3 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    8.5
    (2 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    7.8
    (3 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    6.9
    (6 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    CircleCIXcode
    Likelihood to Recommend
    CircleCI
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Apple
    This is almost not a case of Xcode being the 300-pound gorilla in the space, but of it being essentially the ONLY viable gorilla in the space. There are other text editors, of course, that can be used for coding; and in some cases other IDE's might make sense for a cross-platform development scenario, but since this is Apple's in-house tool, fighting against that flow is just going to be an exercise in frustration. And, if you need help from Developer Support, they are going to be most familiar with Xcode.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    CircleCI
    • 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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Apple
    • Xcode works well for as part of the app releases every time.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    CircleCI
    • While configuration is easy, the config files can get very very long.
    • Price compared to some alternatives that are cheaper / free. Especially so if you are running multiple containers in parallel.
    • Have experienced numerous outages (3-5) in the last few months where CircleCI has been down.
    • Web documentation and tutorials haven't been as good as some of the competitors.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Apple
    • Sometimes it can be really slow
    • There are a lot of features we don't use
    • I use the interface builder tools were better at visualizing what the UI will look like
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    CircleCI
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Apple
    Xcode occasionally exhibits some behaviors that are hard to explain, but are generally cleared by restarting the program. In an application this large and complex, I suppose this is somewhat expected. The sheer vastness of the frameworks collection has to be a huge management issue all by itself. However, those breaks in the flow can have impact on developer productivity.
    Incentivized
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    Reliability and Availability
    CircleCI
    No answers on this topic
    Apple
    Since we don't use the cloud based features of Xcode, it is basically available 24/7 for us. We don't need the extended compilation features that are offered in the cloud as our projects to this point have not been that large or complex. We have never seen a wholesale breakdown of Xcode availability at any point in our use of the product.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    CircleCI
    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
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    Apple
    Every developer wants faster compiles, but that can be achieved by either going to the cloud or by provisioning the local station to a higher powered configuration. My only minor complaint is the amount of local mass storage that Xcode as a system consumes. This makes it interesting to set up a development environment on a midrange laptop, however it is easily managed with external storage at a reasonable price.
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    CircleCI
    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
    Read full review
    Apple
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    CircleCI
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Apple
    It is a dedicated tool for IOS development.
    Incentivized
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    Scalability
    CircleCI
    No answers on this topic
    Apple
    Xcode only loses points due to the occasional situation where it manages to somehow tie itself into a knot and starts to exhibit odd symptoms. This is almost always solved by simply saving progress and restarting the environment. Fortunately, that doesn't happen too frequently and is easily repaired while taking a short break to walk around and stretch.
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    CircleCI
    • 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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Apple
    • It's helped us gain worldwide distribution of our native iOS app
    • It's allowed us to build a high performance experience
    • It has allowed us to build stable software by helping us write unit tests
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots