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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

(1-3 of 3)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Dillon Welch | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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)
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.
  • Allows us to have CI
  • Allows us to have CD
  • Lots of time spent debugging configuration vs writing app code
While the UI on CircleCI is not my favorite, it's leagues better than Travis CI. I really like Heroku CI much better, but the functionality is much more limited there. If Heroku CI had the same functionality as CircleCI, I probably wouldn't use CircleCI.
Pages can be somewhat slow to load. There are a lot of issues with their integrations with third party tools in the background that cause outages or slowdowns on CircleCI.
John Grosjean | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
  • 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.
Jenkins and Teamcity both have additional features that maybe you require, but they are also a lot more work to get set up and working. There's a much longer learning curve to getting these configured for a simple build. They're not hosted, so you have to maintain the infrastructure and scale yourself. They're both good products if you require more than CircleCI, but if not, skip the extra headache and go with something simple like CircleCI.
It's pretty snappy, even with using workflows with multiple steps and different docker images. I've seen builds take a long time if it's really involved, but from what I can tell, it's still at least on par if not faster than other build tools.
Gabriel Samaroo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
  • Continuous Integration saves time for developers to manually handle deploying code.
  • Ability to build complex workflows with test suites catches bugs before they get to production - saving a lot of headache.
  • The integrations with Slack and DataDog keep the entire company informed of builds and deploys, increasing our awareness and efficiency.
CircleCI does a lot of what we need it to do; however, I believe Jenkins is a better Continuous Integration tool. Jenkins has more capabilities and integrations. In addition, Jenkins is a much more widely used tool, which means more developers are familiar with it and have experience using it. This translates to quicker development and a faster/better ROI.
CircleCI performs quickly. The web interface looks great and is very easy to understand/use. We have experienced 3-5 CIrcleCI outages in the last few months where Circle was unresponsive for a few hours, but other than that it has proven to be reliable. The integrations with Circle (GitHub, Slack, DataDog) have all worked pretty seamlessly for us.
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