TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

CircleCI

Score9.4 out of 10

53 Reviews and Ratings

Get a Demo

What is CircleCI?

CircleCI 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.

Categories & Use Cases

Most Frequent Users

Top 3 industries using CircleCI.
Based on HG Insights installation data
Powered by
View all Reviews
#1 most frequent

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

29.5%

2,293 installations of 7,778

#2 most frequent

Information

25.3%

1,967 installations of 7,778

#3 most frequent

Finance and Insurance

9.6%

748 installations of 7,778

Reviews

What users are saying about CircleCI.
View all reviews

Reliable high-performance CICD for complex Mobile Cloud workflows.

Incentivized
Shivang KarView profile
Technical Engineering Manager in Information Technology at Fasal - Grow More, Grow Better™ (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use CircleCI as our centralised Continuous Delivery engine for our platform. It orchestrates the entire application lifecycle, from code commit to deployment, across our distinct environments and two major platforms (Web and Mobile). It addresses the following Business Problems: 1. CircleCI eliminates our Environment Inconsistency, by automated builds in isolated Docker environments that ensure code behaves identically in production as it does during our development. 2. CircleCI accelerates our Mobile releases by automating the complex build-and-sign process for iOS and Android with Fastlane, and we significantly reduce manual effort and time-to-market for mobile updates. 3. CircleCI enhances our security & compliance by integrating Snyk scans automatically, which allows us to detect vulnerabilities in dependencies and containers before deployment, ensuring every release meets security standards. 4. CircleCI helps us in mitigating our Production risks by implementing manual approval gates, which prevent accidental deployments, giving our team control and confidence in update rollouts.

Pros

  • Specialized macOS infrastructure for iOS builds.
  • Orbs for rapid and flawless AWS integration.
  • Production Safety Valves (approval jobs).
  • Context based security.
  • Multi-Architecture workflow orchestration.

Cons

  • Caching in CircleCI is manual and brittle. We have to craft specific cache keys, where mistyping would lead to stale caches or no cache at all.
  • Job failures could be handled better.
  • It's often hard to know exactly how much a specific job or workflow costs.
  • Secrets management for local builds could be improved.
  • Sometimes the config files becomes huge and repetitive.

Return on Investment

  • Faster Releases - since our deployment is automated, our releases are faster, enabling us to deliver new features or bug fixes to our customers quickly, improving our customer ratings.
  • No need for a large infra team to manage deployments. Since our deployments are automated with CircleCI, we have a leaner infrastructure team, which reduces costs.
  • No need to teach any developers about deployments. Since builds and deployments are automated, developers can focus solely on development without worrying about deploying to the testing or production environments. This allows us to build more features faster.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Jenkins and Azure Pipelines

Other Software Used

Jenkins, LeadSquared, Freshdesk, Slack, Figma, Atlassian Bitbucket, Zoho People Plus

CI/CD for every developer and any organisation

Incentivized
Sagiv FrankelView profile
Senior Software Engineer in Engineering at WeWork (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • Shows a clear workflow diagram and be able to re-run specific steps.
  • Fast set-up integration with GitHub.

Cons

  • Jobs can sometimes take too long.
  • Documentation on how to set up could be improved.

Return on Investment

  • Simple continuous integration for every branch before merging for safety.
  • Simple continuous deployments means better velocity.

Alternatives Considered

Travis CI and Jenkins

Other Software Used

Heroku Platform, Algolia, Node

Continuous Integration for your software

Incentivized
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use CircleCI for continuous integration and delivery of our mobile app. The main users are our DevOps team to help manage code releases. It's helped us push code to production with a standardize process and can now ensure we get a build with each merge. Our codebase is ReactNative and run on AWS CloudFront.

Pros

  • Automated builds and process
  • Simple too use and set up
  • Scales well as we integrated additional projects

Cons

  • Sometimes hard to debug issues with builds and unable to find help
  • Customizations not supported
  • Outages impacted our workflow

Most Important Features

  • scalability
  • github integration
  • easy to use ui

Return on Investment

  • less devOps staff needed to manage builds
  • lower investment to create build process
  • some dev cost in debugging when builds fail but less than if we had a custom solution

Alternatives Considered

GitHub and CloudBees Codeship

Other Software Used

GitHub, HubSpot Academy, Google Analytics

Circle CI the best on-cloud CI/CD system on cloud

Incentivized
Javier CardosoView profile
Architecture Tech Leader in Engineering at MercadoLibre (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Jobs Configuration: I think that the configuration way of Circle CI is very simple and useful. You only have to add an YAML file in your Git repository root and add some tasks inside it.
  • Environment Variables Encryption: The way to encrypt sensible data, for example tokens or credentials, is very simple and secure.
  • The compute credit cost is cheap: You don't need a large amount of money to start using Circle.

Cons

  • Cost per user: The cost per user is very high.
  • UI: The UI is not as intuitive as I need. If you have a lot of applications enabled, it's a bit difficult to find in the home page the build which you're looking for.
  • The billing and usage information: It's a feature that was enabled in 2019 June. But it's not specific to any place, and the information of June is incomplete.

Return on Investment

  • Positive: Circle helped us to make a fast release process of our native based application and reduced our time to market.
  • Positive: Circle helps us avoiding the time and money maintenance cost of a release process system.
  • Negative: The cost per user and billing it per month make it a bit difficult to make the payments on time if you are working in a big company with a lot of payment processes.

Alternatives Considered

Travis CI

Other Software Used

New Relic, Datadog, OpsGenie

Help your developers build/test/deploy code quick!

Incentivized
John GrosjeanView profile
DevOps Engineer in Engineering at Avizia (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • No static IPs. This could cause problems if you want to enable only CircleCI to access your environment. Much of the limitations for us were around this issue, since we're in such a regulated industry.
  • The search feature needs improvement. If you're doing a lot of builds, the history can go on for pages. We didn't find it suited our needs for audits/reports as you can't search by a particular developer who triggered a build, filter for only successful builds, etc.
  • Slightly limited customization, something like Jenkins is more flexible. CircleCI used to have a very defined build process, but now with the introduction of workflows, it's gotten a lot better. I think they hit the right balance between simplicity and flexibility though. If you need a lot of integrations or other things that they don't offer, Jenkins is probably better. CircleCI isn't intended for complex applications, it's really about keeping it simple so you can focus on code development.

Return on Investment

  • Greatly increase the speed of code delivery. We no longer need to go through a long deployment process for every feature. Developers can spin up their dev environments at will, test new features, and verify their code is ready to ship in just minutes.
  • Reduced labor. Again, no more long, manual code deployments. And this means big savings in labor costs.
  • Code quality. Since CircleCI runs various tests after building, we know if a code change broke a feature immediately. It can be fixed before the feature is even scheduled for release to production.

Related Products

Products similar to CircleCI that may also meet your needs.
All comparisons
Jenkins
CompareLearn more
GitHub
CompareLearn more
GitLab
CompareLearn more