CircleCI vs. CloudBees Codeship

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

Codeship is very well suited to teams that have specialized devops members along with other specialized developers. It lets the other developers focus on what they do best, without having to learn another technology stack. This has cut down on a lot of headaches at our company with developers needing to deploy code to various different hosting services across different content management systems. The experience to push code is essentially the same for a developer no matter what the underlying technology is

Incentivized

• GitHub integration is seamless. Never had a problem with it missing commits.
• Robust test environment. I used Travis in the past but tests would sporadically time out for no clear reason, haven't had that happen with CircleCI
• Poweful YAML-based configuration in the GitHub repo itself. I don't like CI tools like Semaphore that push you into managing your CI/CD through a web UI, I prefer managing a config file and never having to log in to the CI tool.

Incentivized

• Easy and fast deployment
• A lot of tool integrations (Slack, GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab)
• Getting tests to run is fast and easy

Incentivized

• It would be nice if you could configure everything via the YML file. Some things are only available via YML, and some things are actually only available in the UI, and many other things have full overlap between the two. I'm sure there are good reasons for this, but this is a pretty confusing situation. For example, certain PHP versions are only available on certain Ubuntu releases. Configuring the PHP version is done via the .yml file, but configuring the Ubuntu release being used for the build has to be done in the UI. This can easily lead to things not building properly.

Incentivized

• UX: The overall UX is not bad, but it still needs a lot of improvement.
• It took me quite a while to realize that in order to switch projects I needed to press my current project name so a dropdown would appear.
• Integration with bitbucket is somewhat hidden from the users's hands. Got to make some improvements there.

Incentivized

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

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

CircleCI shines with its specialized infrastructure. Its dedicated macOS runners ensure blazing-fast iOS builds, while intelligent Docker layer caching significantly reduces backend build times and costs. The ability to SSH directly into failed builds dramatically accelerates debugging. Furthermore, its certified Orbs provide standardized, secure integrations with AWS and Slack, reducing the stability and security risks often associated with unverified community plugins on competing platforms such as GitHub Actions.

Incentivized

Codeship is easier to use than Jenkins because it does not require you to set up your own server, and it provides a large amount of out-of-the-box integrations for version control systems and cloud environments. AWS CodePipeline is native to AWS and cannot deploy applications reliably to other cloud environments such as GCP or Azure.

Incentivized

• Continuous Integration saves time for developers to manually handle deploying code.
• Ability to build complex workflows with test suites catches bugs before they get to production - saving a lot of headache.
• The integrations with Slack and DataDog keep the entire company informed of builds and deploys, increasing our awareness and efficiency.

Incentivized

• We have a few small projects with different developers and Codeship shows everyone clearly, if something work, or if it doesn't.
• In one small project with a team of three developers, we have configured two builds and it takes 2-5 minutes for everyone on the team to push changes to an infrastructure handling a little over 3M users.