CircleCI, a great service for serious continuous delivery
March 30, 2017

CircleCI, a great service for serious continuous delivery

Paul Hepworth | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with CircleCI

We use CircleCi as an integral to our continuous delivery pipeline across engineering. Using Circle allows us to focus on our application development. The concurrency of builds helps us split out our test suite across 15 different slices. Tight integration with GitHub allows us to easily integrate into pull request checks. While there are occasional hiccups there are way fewer problems than any other CI tool we've used in the past and we've used several different ones. Support is also pretty responsive and it's apparent that Circle is continuing to improve their product.
  • Concurrency of builds (we use 15)
  • Constant improvement to service by adding features and optimizations
  • When things go wrong their support is responsive and helpful.
  • Proactive communication about updates and breaking changes
  • Questions to account rep can sometimes take too long (for us -- > 1 day) to respond
  • We pay over $5K/ month and we have high expectations for service. Sometimes I feel that we don't get the value, but only sometimes.
  • We have had to build our own application to keep state and broker releases and deployments. We call our app deployer. I feel that CircleCI could do more to understand our needs and possibly build additional features that would enable us to invest less in build and deployment infrastructure and justify paying more for Circle.
Circle was the first CI with simple setup, great documentation, and tight integration with GitHub. Using Jenkins was too much maintenance and overhead, TeamCity was limited in how we could customize it and run concurrent builds, TravisCI was not available for private repos when we switched.
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.