CircleCI vs. CloudBees Codeship

CircleCI is well suited if you, your developer, or team of developers have already worked with it in the past. They don't need to go through the learning curve of yet another Continuous Integration tool. Circle handles Continuous Integration workflows very well, including pretty complex workflows. With that said, Circle can get expensive if you need to run multiple containers in parallel and might not be as easy to setup as some alternatives, such as Jenkins.

Incentivized

Codeship is very well suited to teams that have specialized devops members along with other specialized developers. It lets the other developers focus on what they do best, without having to learn another technology stack. This has cut down on a lot of headaches at our company with developers needing to deploy code to various different hosting services across different content management systems. The experience to push code is essentially the same for a developer no matter what the underlying technology is

Incentivized

• Full customization and scripting abilities. Using tools like bash scripts, SSH, and Node, running almost anything upon committing some code to GitHub becomes possible.
• Integration with all of our favorite services. GitHub and Slack in particular are crucial to our business and CircleCI's integration is seamless and full-featured.
• Great config file syntax. Many CI services require you to perform advanced configuration in a UI. This is fine at first (and CircleCI offers this for many options available), but when you start needing to manage a large number of projects, committing configuration changes to a Git repository is more consistent and maintainable than making the change many different times manually in a UI.

Incentivized

• Easy and fast deployment
• A lot of tool integrations (Slack, GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab)
• Getting tests to run is fast and easy

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• UX: The overall UX is not bad, but it still needs a lot of improvement.
• It took me quite a while to realize that in order to switch projects I needed to press my current project name so a dropdown would appear.
• Integration with bitbucket is somewhat hidden from the users's hands. Got to make some improvements there.

Incentivized

CircleCI interface is awesome in that it is relatively modern and makes it clear exactly which parts of the engineering lifecycle you are in

Incentivized

It's pretty snappy, even with using workflows with multiple steps and different docker images. I've seen builds take a long time if it's really involved, but from what I can tell, it's still at least on par if not faster than other build tools.

Incentivized

I haven't personally used their support service, but I have heard from others that they are responsive. I've also seen only one or two downtimes in over a year of use and both were no more than an hour or two.

Incentivized

Jenkins and Teamcity both have additional features that maybe you require, but they are also a lot more work to get set up and working. There's a much longer learning curve to getting these configured for a simple build. They're not hosted, so you have to maintain the infrastructure and scale yourself. They're both good products if you require more than CircleCI, but if not, skip the extra headache and go with something simple like CircleCI.

Incentivized

Codeship is easier to use than Jenkins because it does not require you to set up your own server, and it provides a large amount of out-of-the-box integrations for version control systems and cloud environments. AWS CodePipeline is native to AWS and cannot deploy applications reliably to other cloud environments such as GCP or Azure.

Incentivized

• Saves us a lot of time and reduces potential mistakes by making our deployment and QA process completely automated
• Builds docker images for us so we don't have to build them locally on our machines
• Runs tests automatically on every commit, so we catch mistakes early

Incentivized

• We have a few small projects with different developers and Codeship shows everyone clearly, if something work, or if it doesn't.
• In one small project with a team of three developers, we have configured two builds and it takes 2-5 minutes for everyone on the team to push changes to an infrastructure handling a little over 3M users.