Jenkins vs. JFrog Artifactory

Jenkins is a highly customizable CI/CD tool with excellent community support. One can use Jenkins to build and deploy monolith services to microservices with ease. It can handle multiple "builds" per agent simultaneously, but the process can be resource hungry, and you need some impressive specs server for that. With Jenkins, you can automate almost any task. Also, as it is an open source, we can save a load of money by not spending on enterprise CI/CD tools.

Incentivized

It works at scale and a large number of accessible pipelines for searching, repository updates and indexing will become easier. JFrog provides end-to-end solutions for all DevOps needs. With this, Jfrog Artifactory specifically implements the management of highly available repositories, with a smooth interface and integration with all the main CI tools on the market.

Incentivized

• Automated Builds: Jenkins is configured to monitor the version control system for new pull requests. Once a pull request is created, Jenkins automatically triggers a build process. It checks out the code, compiles it, and performs any necessary build steps specified in the configuration.
• Unit Testing: Jenkins runs the suite of unit tests defined for the project. These tests verify the functionality of individual components and catch any regressions or errors. If any unit tests fail, Jenkins marks the build as unsuccessful, and the developer is notified to fix the issues.
• Code Analysis: Jenkins integrates with code analysis tools like SonarQube or Checkstyle. It analyzes the code for quality, adherence to coding standards, and potential bugs or vulnerabilities. The results are reported back to the developer and the product review team for further inspection.

Incentivized

• Artifactory Management acting as a repository manager of docker images, application and component dependencies
• Automate pipelines and thereby releasing changes faster
• Supports high availability and scalability with multi site replication

Incentivized

• The UI could be slightly better, it feels kind of like the 90s, but it works well.
• An easier way to filter jobs other than views on the dashboard.
• An easier way to read the console logs when tests do fail.

Incentivized

• We can always use support for more different types of packages in Artifactory.
• We also would like to see the Artifactory X-Ray produce continue to mature.

Incentivized

While the day to day use is very easy, the configuration and setting up of the system or new projects can be cumbersome.

Incentivized

The main problem that seems intractable is getting the checksum of the artifact. Managing container artifacts is a game changer for us during project execution, as the container artifact type exposes all base image and Docker file steps. This makes debugging or analysis easier. Jfrog Artifactory provides promotion feature and can automated from one environment repo to another environment repo before the deployment occurs.

Incentivized

No, when we integrated this with GitHub, it becomes more easy and smart to manage and control our workforce. Our distributed workforce is now streamlined to a single bucket. All of our codes and production outputs are now automatically synced with all the workers. There are many cases when our in-house team makes changes in the release, our remote workers make another release with other environment variables. So it is better to get all of the work in control.

Incentivized

There is a large development community - but it is shifting as people move towards other tools. A lot of companies still use Jenkins and will build propriety tools, which doesn't help any of the open-source community. Jenkins has a lot of help and support online, but other, more modern, alternatives will have better support for newer tech.

Incentivized

Support tickets take days to respond. The most basic of questions that should be knocked out in a few hours don't get answers for days. Tickets are also closed without resolution.

Overall, Jenkins is the easiest platform for someone who has no experience to come in and use effectively. We can get a junior engineer into Jenkins, give them access, and point them in the right direction with minimal hand-holding. The competing products I have used (TravisCI/GitLab/Azure) provide other options but can obfuscate the process due to the lack of straightforward simplicity. In other areas (capability, power, customization), Jenkins keeps up with the competition and, in some areas, like customization, exceeds others.

Incentivized

JFrog Artifactory has a much more friendly GUI, making package exploration less of a chore to do. Other than that, their features are pretty much comparable to each other. Both support multiple types of packages; both have API that can integrate well with CI/CD pipelines.

Incentivized

• Faster Time-to-Market: Jenkins automate the build, testing, and deployment process, enabling faster feedback and continuous improvement.
• Improved Quality: Jenkins automatically run unit tests and integration tests, ensuring that code changes meet the necessary quality standards.
• Cost Savings: Jenkins is an open-source tool that is free to use

Incentivized

• So many times it happens at the time of dependency resolution some of the servers are down e.g NPM, Maven central, PiPy in that cause our builds starts failing. By proxying these repositories with JFrog this is never happened again.
• It reduced the additional cost of container image registry and management effort.
• Support of integration with Build, Monitoring, and CI tools resulted in smooth automation and management.

Incentivized