TrustRadius Insights for CircleCI are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
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.
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
Likelihood to Recommend
It's one of the stronger options when we considered CI/CD solutions. It's commonly used in the industry so when we have new team members join it's easy for them to pick up. Generally it's been reliable aside from a few outages. I would recommend this for any software teams that also run automated tests.
VU
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)
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.
Pros
Deployment
Testing
Cons
Uptime can be an Issue
Better redundancy
Native apps
Likelihood to Recommend
CircleCI is perfect for our needs. It allows us to merge a release branch into an environment branch and the deploy workflow kicks off automatically. It further allows us to add integration testing and E2E testing right into the build workflow.
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.
Pros
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.
Cons
CircleCI mostly getting built into both upstream platforms (Github/Gitlab) and downstream platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), in which cases it's often a better fit or can be used as a part of existing tooling
UX can be confusing to navigate and see what's happening.
Likelihood to Recommend
CircleCI has been an excellent option for us for several years. Still, we're beginning to invest in Github Actions and other platforms where CricleCI runs closer to our existing test and deployment pipelines. Because so many different integrations exist, it's easily adaptable to many kinds of applications. At this point, though, it's worth looking at the CircleCI embedded in other parts of the deployment pipeline before concluding that CircleCI is the best direction to go in.
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.
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
We have many developers that push to production every day. Every branch runs continuous integration on CircleCI and clearly links to GitHub with an indication on whether it failed or passed.
Things work fine when you work against the GitHub links but searching on the CircleCI site is not intuitive.
Configuration with YAML files can also be hard to do and some UI tools for scaffolding them would be nice.
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.
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
Circle suits if you're looking for a cloud-based continuous integration and continuous delivery system for web and native-based applications. The uptime is very good and the features included in the platform are very useful.
On the other hand, it's a little difficult to combine Circle with your on-premise stuff, such as registry dependencies (npm, Maven Nexus, etc) ... because the only way is to give Circle access to your on-premise network and it could be a little insecure.
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.
Pros
Continuous deployment
Continuous integration
Process building for engineering deployment
User interface and experience
Cons
Support for cloud provider integration directly
Likelihood to Recommend
CircleCI is one of the best CI/CD pipeline tools available. I'm not sure I can advise anything else besides this because it's still the most used and continually developed tools.
VU
Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology (51-200 employees)
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.
Pros
Simple integration with the provided YAML template
Quick setup with Git repos
Easy to add new jobs
Quick integration with related visual testing tools
Cons
Limited options on free plan
Sometimes buggy when modifying jobs
Jump between new and old UI
Likelihood to Recommend
Great for quick setup of new projects, but may not be the most suitable to large scale production apps (not from experience, but the level of detail may not be sufficient - at least on the free tier).
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.
Pros
continuous integration
test driven development
continuous deployment
Cons
scope of view
better pricing model
better personalized support
Likelihood to Recommend
CircleCI is great when you have software engineering processes that you need to take out and drastically scale and test before deployment. It works with regular code structures where there's a procedural lifecycle and where there is a need to methodically test and deploy code in an automated manner so deployments no longer need to be done by hand.
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.
Pros
Deploy to AWS
Integrate with GitHub
Ruby support
JavaScript support
Cons
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)
Likelihood to Recommend
CircleCI is well suited for a small team that needs to run tests on web app codes like Ruby on Rails, React, Python, etc. It's not as well suited for larger teams as the cost quickly scales up. It's also not well suited for more complicated builds because the configuration process is pretty arcane.
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.
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
CircleCI is perfect for a CI/CD pipeline for an app using a standard build process. It'll take more work for a complex build process, but should still be up to the task unless you need a lot of integrations with other tools. If you have a big team and can spare someone to focus full time on just the CI/CD tools, maybe something like Jenkins is better, but if you're just looking to get your app built, tested, and delivered without a huge amount of effort, CircleCI is probably your preferred tool.
