CircleCI vs. GitHub

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

I’ve worked with Github my entire career and view it as an essential part. As a Product manager it allows me to keep track of my features, epics, issues and QA. It is easy to set up and integrate with tools such as intercom or notion.

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

• Version control: GitHub provides a powerful and flexible Git-based version control system that allows teams to track changes to their code over time, collaborate on code with others, and maintain a history of their work.
• Code review: GitHub's pull request system enables teams to review code changes, discuss suggestions and merge changes in a central location. This makes it easier to catch bugs and ensure that code quality remains high.
• Collaboration: GitHub provides a variety of collaboration tools to help teams work together effectively, including issue tracking, project management, and wikis.

• 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

• Not an easy tool for beginners. Prior command-line experience is expected to get started with GitHub efficiently.
• Unlike other source control platforms GitHub is a little confusing. With no proper GUI tool its hard to understand the source code version/history.
• Working with larger files can be tricky. For file sizes above 100MB, GitHub expects the developer to use different commands (lfs).
• While using the web version of GitHub, it has some restrictions on the number of files that can be uploaded at once. Recommended action is to use the command-line utility to add and push files into the repository.

GitHub's ease of use and continued investment into the Developer Experience have made it the de facto tool for our engineers to manage software changes. With new features that continue to come out, we have been able to consolidate several other SaaS solutions and reduce the number of tools required for each engineer to perform their job responsibilities.

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

GitHub is a clean and modern interface. The underlying integrations make it smooth to couple tasks, projects, pull requests and other business functions together. The insights and reporting is really strong and is getting better with every release. GitHub's PR tooling is strong for being web based, i do believe a better code editor would rival having to pull merge conflicts into local IDE.

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

It's a testament to how easy it is to use GitHub and how many others use it that you can pretty much find the answer to any problem you have by searching online. Consequently, I've never needed to use their support. It's an incredibly easy tool to set up initially, so it won't require much onboarding expertise to get started.

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

GitHub comes handy in terms of usage and capabilities, it is easy to use and quite a user friendly tools when it comes to user experience, with limited UI/UX and it has vast exposure when it comes to third party integration and being quite mature and yet evolving and popular tool many other platform provide easy integration with the platform and make first choice for many tools architects.

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

• GitHub has made branching much easier for our dev team. Easy branching makes it easier for us to gain all the benefits of source control while giving us the flexibility to decide what features/branches we want to go in any particular release.
• Integration with third-party tools like Azure DevOps has allowed us to streamline workflows and gain the benefits of automated testing whenever a commit is made.
• GitHub has also raised visibility with its integration with our Sprint boards. We can easily jump to a commit from a work item.

Incentivized