CircleCI is a software delivery engine from the company of the same name in San Francisco, that helps teams ship software faster, offering their platform for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). Ultimately, the solution helps to map every source of change for software teams, so they can accelerate innovation and growth.
$15
per month
CloudBees Codeship
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Codeship from CloudBees is a build automation platform from the Austrian company of the same name.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
