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CircleCI is a widely used continuous integration and deployment tool that helps engineering teams streamline their application development …
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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…
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CircleCI Demo Series - Deploy your project to AWS ECS
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How to Build, Test, and Deploy React Native Projects on CircleCI
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CircleCI Webhooks Demo | How to Get Started
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CircleCI Scheduled Pipelines | Getting Started
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Demo | Server Install of CircleCI 2.16 on AWS with Terraform
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CircleCI Demo
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What is CircleCI?
CircleCI is a shared continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, and the central hub where code moves from idea to delivery. It is a DevOps tool that processes more than 1 million builds a day, and has access to data on how engineering teams work, and how their code runs. CircleCI boasts companies like Spotify, Coinbase, Stitch Fix, and BuzzFeed as users.
CircleCI Video
CircleCI Overview
CircleCI Integrations
- Sauce Labs
- blackfire.io
- Checkmarx
- Datadog
- Coralogix
- DBmaestro Database DevOps Platform
- Flutter by Google
- Fortanix Self-Defending Key Management Service
- GitHub
- GitLab
- Katalon TestOps
- LambdaTest
- Logz.io
- New Relic
- Pantheon
- Postman
- Slack
- Snyk
- Spinnaker
- Sumo Logic
- Tricentis Testim
- Mend SCA
- xMatters
- Wallarm
- HashiCorp Terraform
- HashiCorp Vagrant
- Twilio
- TestFairy, from Sauce Labs
- Sysdig Secure
- ACCELQ
- Rapid7 InsightCloudSec
- Tenable Security Center
- Altostra
- Autify
- Honeybadger.io
- Rollbar
- SecretHub
CircleCI Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Linux, Mac, Docker |
| Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android |
| Supported Languages | English, Japanese |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Reviewers rate Performance highest, with a score of 7.8.
The most common users of CircleCI are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
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CircleCI is a widely used continuous integration and deployment tool that helps engineering teams streamline their application development workflows. By integrating tightly with GitHub, CircleCI allows for easy integration into pull request checks, ensuring that tests and linters are automatically run for every pull request and merge. Users have praised CircleCI for its reliability and responsiveness, noting that it has fewer problems compared to other CI tools they have used in the past. The support provided by CircleCI is also highly regarded, as the company continuously works on improving its product.
One of the key use cases of CircleCI is running tests on every commit to GitHub and deploying to development and production environments based on the branch. This allows engineering teams to ensure that bug-free code is shipped and accelerate the development process by automating the building, testing, and deployment of non-production environments. CircleCI also supports the automation of various build and test processes, including running pre-deploy and post-deploy scripts, executing test suites, and sending notifications through platforms like Slack.
Another important use case of CircleCI is its ability to handle the build process for different types of applications, such as Android, iOS, and web applications. By outsourcing the management of build servers to CircleCI, teams can focus more on developing custom applications while relying on a robust continuous integration and delivery solution. Moreover, CircleCI's concurrency feature allows users to split out test suites across multiple slices, significantly improving efficiency and reducing testing time. Additionally, CircleCI has been widely adopted for its cloud integration capabilities, allowing users to run automated tests in parallel containers.
In conclusion, CircleCI is extensively used by engineering teams for continuous integration and deployment pipelines across various software applications and environments. It simplifies the deployment process for Drupal and WordPress websites to platforms like Pantheon and provides a customizable environment for building, testing, and deploying workflows. With its tight integration with GitHub, responsive support team, and reliable performance reported by users from different industries, CircleCI is a popular choice for automating and optimizing the development process.
Constant improvement: Users appreciate the continuous enhancements and additions made to CircleCI, demonstrating the company's commitment to providing a high-quality product. Many users have expressed their satisfaction with the constant improvement of CircleCI.
Responsive support: The highly responsive and helpful support provided by CircleCI is valued by users when they encounter any issues. Numerous users have praised the responsiveness and helpfulness of CircleCI's support team.
Seamless integration with GitHub: Users praise the seamless integration between CircleCI and GitHub, highlighting its reliability and efficiency in not missing any commits. Many reviewers have specifically mentioned the seamless integration between CircleCI and GitHub as one of its standout features.
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Lack of Communication about Updates: Some users have expressed frustration with the lack of communication regarding updates and breaking changes. They have reported that it takes too long for account representatives to respond to their questions, causing delays in their workflow.
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Confusing Configuration Options: Users have criticized the organization of options in the config file, finding it arbitrary and unhelpful for managing their configurations effectively. This confusion has led to difficulties in setting up and maintaining their projects on CircleCI.
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Limited Customization Options: Several users have mentioned that they find the customization options on CircleCI somewhat limited compared to other tools like Jenkins. They desire more flexibility and control over their build processes and workflows, which they feel is not fully provided by CircleCI's current feature set.
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Many users recommend starting with the free trial of CircleCI to get a solid CI/CD experience. They suggest taking advantage of this opportunity to explore the platform's features and evaluate its suitability for their needs.
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Several reviewers recommend leveraging the full power of CircleCI by using orbs and workflows. These features enable users to streamline their CI/CD processes and improve efficiency in managing complex workflows.
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Users often recommend keeping configurations simple and making use of parallelization to optimize build times. By simplifying configurations and running tasks in parallel, teams can reduce build times and improve overall productivity in their CI/CD pipeline.
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May 30, 2023
Continuous Integration for your software
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.
- Automated builds and process
- Simple too use and set up
- Scales well as we integrated additional projects
- Sometimes hard to debug issues with builds and unable to find help
- Customizations not supported
- Outages impacted our workflow
August 23, 2021
CircleCI Makes Automating Deploys Easy
We use CircleCI to deploy our app to various environments as well as run integration and E2E tests. This allows these processes to run independently from an individual machine.
- Deployment
- Testing
- Uptime can be an Issue
- Better redundancy
- Native apps
February 03, 2020
CircleCI Review
We use CircleCI as an independent part of our continuous integration testing process, which handles both automated building and testing our software projects, as well as with our deployment pipelines to power constant delivery efforts. We use CircleCI because their environment is exceptionally customizable and generally reliable for our needs. There is also a generous free tier.
- The generous free tier will get development teams quite far before money needs to be paid.
- The very customizable platform, with intelligent pricing as you scale.
- UX can be confusing to navigate and see what's happening.
January 27, 2020
CI/CD for every developer and any organisation
We use CircleCI for most of our development workflows. Building, testing and deploying. We use it across most teams and departments.
It integrated nicely with GitHub and we are able to validate every change on every branch before merging and automatically deploying to production. I use it for both Ruby and React projects.
It integrated nicely with GitHub and we are able to validate every change on every branch before merging and automatically deploying to production. I use it for both Ruby and React projects.
- Shows a clear workflow diagram and be able to re-run specific steps.
- Fast set-up integration with GitHub.
- Jobs can sometimes take too long.
- Documentation on how to set up could be improved.
November 25, 2019
Circle CI the best on-cloud CI/CD system on cloud
At the moment, Circle is used across the company to make continuous integration and continuous delivery for the mobile native applications. Circle went to solve us the problem of have a dynamic and easy-to-use cloud-based continuous integration and delivery for mobile, without the maintenance cost of the resources and using only for the computing use.
- 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.
- 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.
November 25, 2019
Software engineering CI/CD pipelines done right!
CircleCI is being used as the main product for continuous integration, continuous delivery software development. It's being used primarily by release management/engineering and software engineering teams. It is solving the problem of needing to build a process around pushing code into production and following a schedule where code is continually deployed.
- Continuous deployment
- Continuous integration
- Process building for engineering deployment
- User interface and experience
- Support for cloud provider integration directly
November 12, 2019
Continuous Integration - Simpler.
We've used CircleCI for the automation of build and test for smaller scale projects, in combination with another set of tools for continual deployment, hosting and visual testing. CircleCI is a great interface for viewing and managing automated jobs and workflows, and has made the process of CI more accessible for the team as a whole.
- Simple integration with the provided YAML template
- Quick setup with Git repos
- Easy to add new jobs
- Quick integration with related visual testing tools
- Limited options on free plan
- Sometimes buggy when modifying jobs
- Jump between new and old UI
CircleCI is being used by my team as a continuous integration / continuous deployment pipeline for code and various other programmatic work. The business problems it addresses is the deployment, testing, and productionization of code supporting our main software engineering functions. Various other teams we work with also go along this pathway and use circle or other tools.
- continuous integration
- test driven development
- continuous deployment
- scope of view
- better pricing model
- better personalized support
We use CircleCI to run our React tests as well as build and deploy our React code to AWS CloudFront on both staging and production.
- Deploy to AWS
- Integrate with GitHub
- Ruby support
- JavaScript support
- YAML files require a lot of configuration for basic setup
- Pricing outside of the free tier is pretty costly for what's offered
- Hard to rebuild a single job in a workflow
- Hard to setup a configuration with multiple dependencies (for example, both node and Python)
February 21, 2019
Help your developers build/test/deploy code quick!
Our SaaS platform has gone to a CI/CD model, and CircleCI is a critical piece in automating the building, testing, and deployment of all non-production environments. Whenever a developer needs to test something, they can trigger a build and either recycle an older dev environment or launch a new dev environment that won't interfere with any other builds. This greatly accelerates the development process, and ensures the code won't have build errors or fail tests when it does get deployed to production.
- 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.
- 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.
February 04, 2019
CircleCI - Solid Continuous Integration Tool
We use CircleCI to allow for continuous integration across all of our software applications and environments. CircleCI allows us to build complex workflows, including steps to run pre-deploy / post-deploy scripts, execute test suites, and send slack notifications. With Circle, we can ensure code that is "broken" doesn't make it's way out, so we can be more confident that we are shipping bug-free code.
- Multiple builds can be run at the same time in parallel.
- The CircleCI web interface (UI/UX) is very easy to understand and use.
- Easy Configuration to learn and use. Just a single configuration YAML file.
- Many integrations. We use the GItHub, Slack, and DataDog integrations.
- While configuration is easy, the config files can get very very long.
- Price compared to some alternatives that are cheaper / free. Especially so if you are running multiple containers in parallel.
- Have experienced numerous outages (3-5) in the last few months where CircleCI has been down.
- Web documentation and tutorials haven't been as good as some of the competitors.
December 10, 2018
CircleCI is awesome
We're using CircleCI to run continuous integration for both front-end and back-end components for a SaaS application. It's linked to a popular source code repository which makes integration quite easy.
Overall, the experience has been fantastic. We're a small firm, and no need for the paid plan yet. But have successfully used the tool to bootstrap for the time being. The communities are quite helpful, even for those who don't have a paid plan for premium support. Would heartily recommend to colleagues.
Overall, the experience has been fantastic. We're a small firm, and no need for the paid plan yet. But have successfully used the tool to bootstrap for the time being. The communities are quite helpful, even for those who don't have a paid plan for premium support. Would heartily recommend to colleagues.
- Git integration with popular providers. Github and Bitbucket for starters. Makes it super simple to get started.
- Straightforward CI tooling. No need to spin up a CI server like Jenkins / TeamCity to get things moving.
- Strong community forums. Ran into a bug once, and as I was on the free tier didn't have access to premium support. Was able to work out the issue via community support.
- Bits of the caching configuration were initially a bit confusing.
- Took a bit of time to get git submodules working properly. But that's to be expected as it's not a common denominator for most Git repositories.
- Running local builds for diagnosing bugs can be a bit cumbersome. The docker image I recall was very much a black box, and was unclear how to interpret why I got the results I did. But again, expected. If it were not a black box, it would be trivial for other vendors to clone their functionality.
April 30, 2018
Automation done right
In our company, we develop our financial product atop the Salesforce platform. We have extensive unit test coverage that is required by Salesforce to be able to list our product in their App store. To manage our software development process we needed a robust continuous integration and delivery solution. We used Atlassian Bamboo for several years before we made a push towards cloud integration using Circle CI. Circle CI is used for testing, building and packaging our code in the Github repo. It is used by our development department for continuous integration needs.
- Circle CI offers lots of integration mechanisms with other products like SLACK which we use extensively in our cross-team communication.
- It has seamless integration with Github which is our main code repo, hence the code commit-and-merge process is very smooth.
- With their newer 2.0 release, Circle CI offers build concurrency helping improve parallel execution of tests.
- There are fewer minor kinks in the latest release of their product. The workflow feature which is supposed to spin up concurrent docker images for text execution does not report back the result statistics correctly.
- We have often run into limits for the total number of docker images that can be spun off during an entire day.
April 10, 2018
CI done right
In our Marketing firm when we started developing custom applications for our clients, we needed a robust continuous integration and delivery solution. We used Apache Jenkins for several years before we made a push towards cloud infrastructure. For that purpose we decided to use Circle CI for testing, building and packaging our code in the Github repository. It is used by our Software development department for continuous integration.
- Easy configuration via the Circle.yml file
- Build concurrency helps improve parallel execution of tests.
- CircleCI offers seamless integration with Github, hence the code commits and merges process is very smooth.
- With their new Workflow feature rolled out, we are having issues with test result statistics not being reported correctly.
- Recently we have experienced some major outages with CircleCI and a few performance degradations because of the AWS infrastructure that hosts the services. They had an issue with application authentication failing with Github that resulted in several problems.
September 28, 2017
A great CI/CD alternative
Continuous integration and continuous delivery are two of our main pillars to deliver a successful experience to our end users. So CircleCI is a key piece in this chain for automating this process and flows from earlier development stages to QA, staging and production environments. [It is also used for] Maintaining our infrastructure and cluster health with cleaning and scale tasks.
- Pipeline
- Docker integration
- Innovation
- Docker integration
- Cloud deployment and connection integrations
- UI
August 16, 2017
Great CI Tool for Small Companies
Our Engineering team uses CircleCI to run tests on every commit to GitHub, and deploy to development and production environments depending on which branch the tests were run on. Standard use case for CI/CD. CircleCI integrates tightly with GitHub to run our tests, linter, etc. automatically for every pull request and every time we merge to development and master branches.
- 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.
- The "phases" their config file uses to separate out options seem very arbitrary and are not very helpful for organizing your config file
- No way that I know of to configure which version of MongoDB you use. You have to write your own shell script to download and start MongoDB if you want a specific version.
- Hard to access build artifacts in the UI
August 07, 2017
Frustrating UI but overall indispensable
We're an early-stage startup, and we use CircleCI to run automated tests in the cloud. In the early days, developers ran tests locally on their own development machines, but as the test suite grew, it simply took too much time. Running tests in the cloud lets us parallelize, so an hour's long test suite can run in minutes.
- High degree of parallelization, ability to run on many containers at once.
- Ability to customize the whole process through setup scripts.
- Collecting of detailed test artifacts such as screenshots.
- Really needs per-minute pricing. The static container model doesn't let us scale up/down easily.
- The web UI is finicky and constantly frustrating.
We use CircleCI for continuous integration and deployment at Troops. It builds all of our feature branches (PRs) as well as our major branches and automatically triggers deployments to both QA and production environments. We also run unit and integration tests as well as code coverage in CircleCI. It is primarily used by the Engineering team.
- It's easy to get started
- It's very quick to automate builds regardless of dependencies or technology
- It integrates well with GitHub as well as other tools
- Speed of builds - I wish you could upgrade to a larger VMs
We use CircleCi as an integral to our continuous delivery pipeline across engineering. Using Circle allows us to focus on our application development. The concurrency of builds helps us split out our test suite across 15 different slices. Tight integration with GitHub allows us to easily integrate into pull request checks. While there are occasional hiccups there are way fewer problems than any other CI tool we've used in the past and we've used several different ones. Support is also pretty responsive and it's apparent that Circle is continuing to improve their product.
- Concurrency of builds (we use 15)
- Constant improvement to service by adding features and optimizations
- When things go wrong their support is responsive and helpful.
- Proactive communication about updates and breaking changes
- Questions to account rep can sometimes take too long (for us -- > 1 day) to respond
CircleCI is being used by our organization for continual integration and automated deployment of Drupal and WordPress websites to Pantheon, among many other smaller CI jobs. It is used entirely by our Development and DevOps team members. It allows us to commit a simple config file to Git that controls the way that our software gets deployed, making the tedious job of deploying changes for hundreds of websites regularly much simpler.
- Full customization and scripting abilities. Using tools like bash scripts, SSH, and Node, running almost anything upon committing some code to GitHub becomes possible.
- Integration with all of our favorite services. GitHub and Slack in particular are crucial to our business and CircleCI's integration is seamless and full-featured.
- Great config file syntax. Many CI services require you to perform advanced configuration in a UI. This is fine at first (and CircleCI offers this for many options available), but when you start needing to manage a large number of projects, committing configuration changes to a Git repository is more consistent and maintainable than making the change many different times manually in a UI.
- 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.
January 18, 2017
Testing FTW!
We're using CircleCI to run our suite of unit tests for a few projects (we handle end-to-end testing separately). We love that it auto-runs tests on git commits, runs our tests in parallel containers, and is configured with a simple YAML file. The UX is super clean and easy to debug when things go wrong. We're part of their beta program and they have some great features coming down the product pipeline that addresses our few headaches like their lack of support for "docker exec" (you have to use lxc-attach) and old Ubuntu containers.
We use this product every day and we're pretty happy with it.
We use this product every day and we're pretty happy with it.
- Parallel testing - run your unit tests in parallel containers shared across all branches.
- UX - When your tests fail CircleCI makes it easy to see what failed and why.
- Configuration - whether your project runs NodeJS, PHP, Docker, Java, or whatever else you can control just about every step of the provisioning process.
- Price - You pay by concurrent containers. We're currently using 10 to run unit test across dozens of branches for a completely reasonable price. No caches.
- Incomplete Docker support - currently CircleCi doesn't support docker exec (although they have a workaround), which is a little frustrating for our team.
- Old Ubuntu versions - the containers used to use Ubuntu Precise which made provisioning more difficult, but they are currently moving to Trusty Tahr.
January 13, 2017
One of the best CI tools available
[It is being used for] running the test suite on each commit and deploying different versions.
- Really easy to set it up, supports most of the languages out of the box
- Free to use with some limitations
- Easier key management
January 13, 2017
A fantastic CI solution for agile teams
We initially implemented it for automated testing of all our private repositories, and have been overall very happy with it. We looked at using it for our open source projects, but due to the fact that it doesn't support build matrices, we ended up going with Travis CI for public projects.
- It is very easy to set up, you can even set it up without a configuration file and it will try to infer your test runner and language.
- It is easy to configure with a straight-forward YAML configuration.
- It has great integration with services like Github and Slack.
- You can easily debug broken builds by SSH-ing into the test container and quickly figure out what is going wrong.
- There is no configuration difference for public or private repositories, CircleCi appropriately mirrors Github.
- The pricing allows for unlimited repositories, the tiers are based on parallel builds. This is great if you have a lot of private repos.
- I really wish CircleCI had the ability to have a build matrix (like Travis CI), for example, run my python tests against all four combinations of Python 2 and 3, and say Django 1.8 and 1.9.
- Support is generally pretty good, but can be hit or miss on timing. I've had quick responses, and other times waited multiple days for a response.
January 12, 2017
CircleCI makes our deployments easy
We're a software as a service (SaaS) business. We're using CircleCI in our development team. Every time we push a change to GitHub it runs our unit tests and if the push was to our staging or production branches, CircleCI triggers a deployment to that environment. If the tests fail I'm sent an e-mail and the deployments only get triggered if the tests pass.
- Easy to configure via a YAML file
- Sends email notifications without the use of external services
- Not only runs our tests, but also triggers our deployments
- It would be great to be able to specify different versions of PHP to test with and configure options for each. So we could test with our current production version which needs to pass before we deploy, but also test with a newer version of PHP if we're planning on migrating to it. This way we'd know if someone pushed code that isn't future compatible.
January 12, 2017
Fast and Easy CI
I use Circle CI for continuous integration and delivery. It runs all of the tests and builds before our code ever sees production. It also notifies GitHub before we merge the code. I also utilize the use of Docker which Circle CI supports fully and makes running clean builds easier.
- Clean user experience
- Docker support
- Fast and easy
- Clean documentation
- Faster builds
- Non-GitHub support