Frustrating UI but overall indispensable
August 07, 2017

Frustrating UI but overall indispensable

Jason Crawford | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with CircleCI

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.
  • It lets us run tests constantly in the cloud, giving us confidence in software quality.
  • This has allowed us to not hire any QA or SDET staff.
  • It helps developers be more productive.
It was our CTO who did the evaluation, not me, but as I recall other services weren't as parallelizable. We knew we wanted to run on many containers simultaneously for fast test results.
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.