Team City - An Easy to Use Continuous Integration Platform
May 17, 2018
Team City - An Easy to Use Continuous Integration Platform
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with TeamCity
We used TeamCity as our Core Continuous Integration solution for four years. I love TeamCity's easy to use interface, and the way builds and releases are linked together in dependency Chains. I found it particularly helpful that Builds can be run separately, or in advance of Releases - and then when Releases are run the Builds only run again if the code has changed. TeamCity's Templates, Variables, and Parameterization capabilities also made it very easy to establish a flexible template for common solutions such as deploying MVC applications to IIS. Once templates were configured I could create a "build and release" for a new project in less than 10 minutes.
While TeamCity has a simple to use and understand chaining mechanism, allowing builds to call "builds and releases" to rely on multiple dependency chains - TeamCity's PipeLine visualization capabilities are one of its weakest points. I had a complex build across five different environments consisting of eight different solutions and over 20 deployment targets. During a major update, it would have been nice to visualize the deployment pipeline and "watch" the deployment process for issues - but that really isn't possible with TeamCity. Outside of that, TeamCity worked great, integrated well with all of our platforms: Git, Azure, AWS, Visual Studio Team Services.
Great Product.
While TeamCity has a simple to use and understand chaining mechanism, allowing builds to call "builds and releases" to rely on multiple dependency chains - TeamCity's PipeLine visualization capabilities are one of its weakest points. I had a complex build across five different environments consisting of eight different solutions and over 20 deployment targets. During a major update, it would have been nice to visualize the deployment pipeline and "watch" the deployment process for issues - but that really isn't possible with TeamCity. Outside of that, TeamCity worked great, integrated well with all of our platforms: Git, Azure, AWS, Visual Studio Team Services.
Great Product.
- Build: Parameterization, Chaining from multiple sources, Templates, and general ease of use.
- Release: Works extremely well with "Build" process.
- Updates and Upgrades are simple, effective, and reliable.
- Pipeline Visualization: TeamCity's weakest area
- TeamCity was a key contributor to our organization's adoption of Agile.
- TeamCity made it possible to KILL "It works on my laptop" conversations with Developers. If it does not compile in TeamCity - the project is not deployable. TeamCity's easy to use interface made it possible to quickly adopt a "Deploy Only from TeamCity" policy, further ensuring TeamCity Builds were the gold-standard for well-configured source code.
TeamCity is a great on-premise Continuous Integration tool.
Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) is a hosted SAAS application in Microsoft's Cloud.
VSTS is a Source Code Repository, Build and Release System, and Agile Project Management Platform - whereas TeamCity is a Build and Release System only.
TeamCity's interface is easier to use than VSTS, and neither have a great deployment pipeline solution. But VSTS's natural integration with Microsoft products, Microsoft's Cloud, Integration with Azure Active Directory, and free, private, Source Code repository - offer additional features and capabilities not available with Team City alone.
Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) is a hosted SAAS application in Microsoft's Cloud.
VSTS is a Source Code Repository, Build and Release System, and Agile Project Management Platform - whereas TeamCity is a Build and Release System only.
TeamCity's interface is easier to use than VSTS, and neither have a great deployment pipeline solution. But VSTS's natural integration with Microsoft products, Microsoft's Cloud, Integration with Azure Active Directory, and free, private, Source Code repository - offer additional features and capabilities not available with Team City alone.