GoCD vs. Octopus Deploy vs. Spinnaker

Previously, our team used Jenkins. However, since it's a shared deployment resource we don't have admin access. We tried GoCD as it's open source and we really like. We set up our deployment pipeline to run whenever codes are merged to master, run the unit test and revert back if it doesn't pass. Once it's deployed to the staging environment, we can simply do 1-click to deploy the appropriate version to production. We use this to deploy to an on-prem server and also AWS. Some deployment pipelines use custom Powershell script for.Net application, some others use Bash script to execute the docker push and cloud formation template to build elastic beanstalk.

Incentivized

Octopus Deploy is well suited for our requirements of deploying across multiple environments with one consistent release. We are saving a lot of time by not having to package and move release files around. Our release process is more efficient and consistent with automation. There are some parts that we could probably perform with existing tools such as DevOps and there are one or two features we have to workaround to fit for our setup such as the step templates to install websites. These are minor in our opinion.

Incentivized

Spinnaker suits well for applications which are stateless and can adapt to an immutable architecture of deployment. But for applications which are stateful and cannot afford to spin up new servers for every deployment doesn't go well with Spinnaker. It can handle only deployments which are VM based and cannot support deployments to serverless architecture like AWS Lambda etc.

Incentivized

• Pipeline-as-Code works really well. All our pipelines are defined in yml files, which are checked into SCM.
• The ability to link multiple pipelines together is really cool. Later pipelines can declare a dependency to pick up the build artifacts of earlier ones.
• Agents definition is really great. We can define multiple different kinds of environments to best suit our diverse build systems.

Incentivized

• Octopus integrates nicely with TeamCity, our build server.
• Octopus uses the same deployment packages across environments and makes it easy to track their progress across those environments.
• Octopus makes it easy to handle configuration across environments which is usually a particularly difficult task.

Incentivized

• Fast deployments.
• Can be integrated with a good variety of other products.
• Also provides some insights from your environment.

Incentivized

• UI can be improved
• Location for settings can be re-arranged
• API for setting up pipeline

Incentivized

• In the past has been somewhat .net focused but that has been changing in recent times
• Would be great if community licenses for NFP organizations were perpetual - but in saying that I appreciate that Octopus does provide my organization with a community [license]. Not all organisations do
• I can’t think of any other

Incentivized

• It does NOT support CFN based deployments
• Windows based systems finds it difficult to onboard to Spinnaker.
• Pipeline level access authorisation is not there.
• Support for EBS volume encryption is probably missing.
• Attach/detach EBS volumes during deployments is difficult.
• No support to deploy the artifacts without re-creating the servers. Only pure immutable deployment are allowed.
• Open-source - so good and bad!
• Spinnaker on its own has 10 underlying micro services. Managing Spinnaker needs a focussed platform approach.
• User authentication is easy but authorisation management is not straight forward.

Incentivized

Would be a 10 except for the retirement of the free Community Edition.

Incentivized

Octopus Deploy has greatly helped us to improve our reliability and frequency of our deployments and given us the confidence to deploy much more often, with a direct benefit to customers. Cross-platform support and release to Cloud require more focus on the product side.

Incentivized

Octopus Deploy is a software that runs very effectively, is easy to use, does not require such a high learning curve, provides the necessary tools to carry out the functions it offers, making it a very flexible software, it also allows that can be configured according to the needs of the user and provides integrations with other very advantageous tools since they are carried out in a very favorable way.

Incentivized

Octopus Deploy support has always been there for us, even when using the free tier, we get responsive hands-on help. We haven't needed to use that level of support since the documentation is clearly written, and help is readily available within the interface itself. Using Octopus Deploy is a truly joyful experience.

Incentivized

GoCD is easier to setup, but harder to customize at runtime. There's no way to trigger a pipeline with custom parameters.

Jenkins is more flexible at runtime. You can define multiple user-provided parameters so when user needs to trigger a build, there's a form for him/her to input the parameters.

Incentivized

There aren't really any competitors in the land of ASP.NET. Deployment is too ad-hoc. Other tools exist that have massive downsides, like Web Deploy. Most aren't even supported anymore. You could argue that containers (Docker) are a competitor, but containers cannot be used for everything and solve a somewhat different problem. Octopus Deploy is even able to help with containers. To us, Octopus Deploy was really the only really polished solution.

Incentivized

• Pipeline Expressiveness • Self-Service/Override • Visibility of Client Teams • Operability of Client Teams - • High-Quality Integrations (AWS, IHP, Google) • Extensibility – (Ability to add code) • The maturity of Deployment Process • Speed/Ease of Onboarding

Incentivized

Great support from professional services.

Incentivized

• ROI has been good since it's open source
• Settings.xml need to be backed up periodically. It contains all the settings for your pipelines! We accidentally deleted before and we have to restore and re-create several missing pipelines
• More straight forward use of API and allows filtering e.g., pull all pipelines triggered after this date

Incentivized

• Allows us to deploy to our fleet quickly and without interruption to service
• Can roll back to previous releases quickly, allowing us to back out of breaking changes in the worst-case scenarios.
• Integration with several targets has allowed us to explore new platforms for our products, such as Docker in AWS ECS.

Incentivized

• By using Spinnaker we are able to deploy new versions of our product quickly.
• A deployment takes in average 2 minutes.
• Our investment on Spinnaker was just time learning it.

Incentivized