CircleCI Review
February 03, 2020

CircleCI Review

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with CircleCI

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.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • 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.
  • Ensures that code we're merging into existing projects passes our test suite.
  • Key part of our CI/CD workflow.
We use CircleCI when we need a good, independent CI/CD provider in an existing workflow. That said, we've begun investing more heavily in GitHub actions as it's closer to where our code is stored. CircleCI is a feature of a workflow, and can be filled by many different service providers; it's much more important to use one that fits well in your workflow than to choose one specifically before understanding the problem.
Unless you have a reasonably large account, you're going to be mainly stuck reading their documentation. Which has improved somewhat over the years but is still extremely limited compared to a platform like Digital Ocean who invested in the documentation and a community to ensure it's kept up to date. If you can't find your answer there, you can be stuck.

Do you think CircleCI delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with CircleCI's feature set?

Yes

Did CircleCI live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of CircleCI go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy CircleCI again?

Yes

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.

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