CircleCI is awesome
December 10, 2018
CircleCI is awesome
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with CircleCI
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.
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.
- Don't have to bother rolling my own CI/CD. Saves time.
- Saves money as I can operate on the free tier without hosting my own CI/CD environment(s).
- Simple configuration compared to other competitors.
Not having to manage / deal with a Jenkins server is fantastic. I don't have much personally against Jenkins. I've set up and run a Jenkins server before. It's just complexity that doesn't really have much to do with the business beyond getting our software to our customers. My time is better spent on our core value, hence why having CI/CD as a service is such a great value.