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CircleCI

CircleCI

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Overview

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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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

CircleCI is a widely used continuous integration and deployment tool that helps engineering teams streamline their application development …
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CircleCI Review

7 out of 10
February 03, 2020
Incentivized
We use CircleCI as an independent part of our continuous integration testing process, which handles both automated building and testing …
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CircleCI is awesome

9 out of 10
December 10, 2018
Incentivized
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 …
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Automation done right

8 out of 10
April 30, 2018
Incentivized
In our company, we develop our financial product atop the Salesforce platform. We have extensive unit test coverage that is required by …
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Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Pricing

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Free

$0

Cloud
per month

Performance

$30

Cloud
per month

Server

$35

Cloud
per month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

CircleCI Demo Series - Deploy your project to AWS ECS

YouTube

How to Build, Test, and Deploy React Native Projects on CircleCI

YouTube

CircleCI Webhooks Demo | How to Get Started

YouTube

CircleCI Scheduled Pipelines | Getting Started

YouTube

Demo | Server Install of CircleCI 2.16 on AWS with Terraform

YouTube

CircleCI Demo

YouTube
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Product Details

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 Competitors

CircleCI Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux, Mac, Docker
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android
Supported LanguagesEnglish, 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.

GitHub, Jenkins, and GitLab are common alternatives for CircleCI.

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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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(49)

Community Insights

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!

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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 26)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
February 03, 2020

CircleCI Review

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Sagiv Frankel | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Javier Cardoso | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Dillon Welch | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
John Grosjean | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Gabriel Samaroo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
CircleCI is well suited if you, your developer, or team of developers have already worked with it in the past. They don't need to go through the learning curve of yet another Continuous Integration tool. Circle handles Continuous Integration workflows very well, including pretty complex workflows. With that said, Circle can get expensive if you need to run multiple containers in parallel and might not be as easy to setup as some alternatives, such as Jenkins.
December 10, 2018

CircleCI is awesome

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
For basic CI/CD, CircleCI is the way to go. Especially for smaller projects where not a tremendous amount of complexity or build time is required.

Strongly recommend for simple projects. And will likely become a paying customer when the complexity/build time is merited.

Haven't come across scenarios where its not well suited. Perhaps for very large organizations who want full control over their CI/CD environments.
April 30, 2018

Automation done right

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Circle CI is important for any serious software development business that requires adequate test coverage of their code. The software offers very simple configuration mechanism via Circle.YML and is easily customizable to suit any sort of development needs. Automated testing becomes a breeze using Circle CI.

September 28, 2017

A great CI/CD alternative

Yasmany Cubela Medina | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Automated tasks - handling and scheduling are two of the main features that CircleCI provides. Scenarios from testing to continuous integration and continuous delivery are fit just fine. You can generate artifacts like documentation or analytics over code and [see] how a developer performs. Integration with modern tools like docker allow you to test real-world scenarios.
Valeri Karpov | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
CircleCI is an excellent tool for generic CI/CD. It integrates well with GitHub, runs your tests, and gives you the ability to deploy when your tests succeed on a certain branch. It doesn't really offer anything more sophisticated than that, I've seen CI tools that will actually try to bisect test failures for you, CircleCI will definitely not do anything that sophisticated. But it executes well on the relatively simple (at least from a customer perspective) use case of running tests on every commit and executing special hooks when they succeed.
Jason Crawford | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
CircleCI is a good fit for any software development organization with a large or complicated set of automated tests, especially one that uses cloud services for most of their development process (such as GitHub). It might be less appropriate if you already have a strong in-house ability to set up and manage automated test environments.
Gregory Ratner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
For complicated builds that take a really long time and require specific performance considerations, CircleCI might not be the best choice. Right now there is one size fits all VM that does that build and the only performance upgrade that it offers is an ability to run parts of the build in parallel. This is not always possible, depending on your build system.
Paul Hepworth | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I wonder if we are growing out of Circle. Can we increase concurrency beyond 15? While circle is helpful when things go wrong we sometimes have problems for several days in a row (recently) and each time there is some different reason that sounds like a one-off. Makes me wonder if there is something more going on.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
For relatively advanced users comfortable with YAML configuration and the GitHub workflow, I wholeheartedly recommend CircleCI and think it's perfectly suited. For people who prefer to work completely in a user interface and not edit text files, there are other solutions more suited to that scenario.
January 18, 2017

Testing FTW!

Jake Mercurio | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
CircleCI is well suited to any project where you have:
  • A quick provisioning process or can use a pre-configured CircleCi container
  • Have lots of unit tests and only a few integration tests
  • Use standard testing libraries like PhpUnit, Mocha, Jasmine, JUnit, etc.
  • Have a small-medium budget
  • Your test suite takes more than 5 minutes to run
Andrew Shell | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The main use I have for CircleCI is triggering deployments automatically and running the tests prior to that and making sure that work is required. I could see implementing other checks down the road or even running JavaScript build scripts before deploying. It's also nice to automatically run tests when someone submits a pull request on GitHub, the integration shows right away if the PR is going to break anything.
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