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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

(1-8 of 8)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
February 03, 2020

CircleCI Review

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • 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.
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.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
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).
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.
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.
December 10, 2018

CircleCI is awesome

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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 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.
  • 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.
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.
Dmitry Sadovnychyi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
[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
If you use popular languages and frameworks you definitely should give it a try – it's very easy to set it up.
Micah Hausler | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Again, it's very well suited for teams with many private repositories, and that want to have simple configuration across projects.
Ken Yee | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
CircleCI was used to handle the build process for Raizlabs' Android, iOS, and web applications. It was used by the entire organization except for Xamarin apps which we built on our internal build server using Mac Minis that were unfortunately also used for videoconferencing. Using CircleCI let us outsource the management of the build servers so we didn't have to worry about them running out of space or slowing down videoconferencing.
  • CircleCI let us use someone else's infrastructure.
  • The circle.yml file for configuring a build was liked a lot more by our users because it was easy to use.
  • CircleCI is one of the few companies that can do iOS builds.
  • CircleCI does not support Xamarin builds...that prevented us from moving all our build infrastructure to CircleCI.
  • CircleCI's Android containers didn't always have the most updated SDKs so we frequently had to include updating SDKs as part o the build process.
CircleCI is best suited for smaller companies that don't have time to manage their build infrastructure and their entire source repository is also on a third party provider such as github or bitbucket. For larger companies who want to have more control over their build servers, it may not be as appropriate.
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