Travis CI is an open source continuous integration platform, that enables users to run and test simultaneously on different environments, and automatically catch code failures and bugs.
Jenkins is probably the leading choice for automation and has loads of features and a large community behind it, but it can be overkill for many projects. It also has more of a web 1.0 look and interface. CircleCI is another similar big competitor, but cannot compete with Travis …
There are a few other options out there, CircleCI, Codeship and Wrecker would be a few good ones I can also recommend, each one has its particularity but I believe Travis has the best interface and flexibility of all of them. I'd recommend trying them all and seeing which one …
Jenkins is much more complicated to configure and start using. Although, one you have done that, it's extremely powerful and full of features. Maybe many more than Travis CI. As per TeamCity, I would never go back to using it. It's also complicated to configure but it is not …
There are a number of alternatives to Travis CI, but Travis remains the most popular, since it was one of the first to show up. It has a lot of examples, support for building dozens of languages, and good documentation. Significant portions of the system are open source, so you …
TravisCI is suited for workflows involving typical software development but unfortunately I think the software needs more improvement to be up to date with current development systems and TravisCI hasn't been improving much in that space in terms of integrations.
I think they could have a cheaper personal plan. I'd love to use Travis on personal projects, but I don't want to publish them nor I can pay $69 a month for personal projects that I don't want to be open source.
There is no interface for configuring repos on Travis CI, you have to do it via a file in the repo. This make configuration very flexible, but also makes it harder for simpler projects and for small tweaks in the configuration.
TravisCI hasn't had much changes made to its software and has thus fallen behind compared to many other CI/CD applications out there. I can only give it a 5 because it does what it is supposed to do but lacks product innovation.
After the private equity firm had bought this company the innovation and support has really gone downhill a lot. I am not a fan that they have gutted the software trying to make money from it and put innovation and product development second.
Jenkins is much more complicated to configure and start using. Although, one you have done that, it's extremely powerful and full of features. Maybe many more than Travis CI. As per TeamCity, I would never go back to using it. It's also complicated to configure but it is not worth the trouble. Codeship supports integration with GitHub, GitLab and BitBucket. I've only used it briefly, but it seems to be a nice tool.
It's improved my ability to deliver working code, increasing my development velocity.
It increases confidence that your own work (and those of external contributors) does not have any obvious bugs, provided you have sufficient test coverage.
It helps to ensure consistent standards across a team (you can integrate process elements like "go lint" and other style checks as part of your build).
It's zero-cost for public/open source projects, so the only investment is a few minutes setting up a build configuration file (hence the return is very high).
The .travis.yml file is a great way for onboarding new developers, since it shows how to bootstrap a build environment and run a build "from scratch".