Jenkins is an open source automation server. Jenkins provides hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying and automating any project. As an extensible automation server, Jenkins can be used as a simple CI server or turned into a continuous delivery hub for any project.
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Octopus Deploy
Score 10.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Australian company Octopus Deploy offers their eponymous automated deployment and release management software that integrates with the user's preferred CI server and adds deployment & ops automation capabilities. Octopus Deploy enables developers, release managers, and operations folks to bring all automation into a single place. The vendor states that by reusing configuration variables, environment definition, API keys, connection strings, permissions, service principals, and automation logic,…
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Pricing
Jenkins
Octopus Deploy
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Cloud
Free 30 day trial
unlimited targets/users/projects
Server
Free 30 day trial
unlimited targets/users/projects
Enterprise
Starting at $18 per month
Enterprise
Starting at $18 per month
Server
Starting at $12 per month
Cloud
Starting at $12 per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Jenkins
Octopus Deploy
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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Octopus Server edition is available as a 30 day free trial on our unlimited tier for any scenario, including production, and commercial use. After the trial period ends you can keep your working configuration and upgrade to a paid license and continue deploying uninterrupted.
Octopus Cloud is an alternative that is hosted by us, and is also available as a 30 day unlimited trial. No credit card is needed to create a Octopus Cloud trial instance. You can convert the Cloud trial to a paid instance at any time during or after the trial period, and keep all of your instance configuration.
Octopus also offers an Enterprise tier which offers advanced features for teams at scale including, advanced high availability, insights & DORA metrics, ServiceNow & Jira Service Management integration, unlimited instances, 24/7 support & service credits, and a Customer Success Manager.
Volume discounts are available above 500 targets, and temporary bursting for certain scenarios is supported.
Jenkins is a highly customizable CI/CD tool with excellent community support. One can use Jenkins to build and deploy monolith services to microservices with ease. It can handle multiple "builds" per agent simultaneously, but the process can be resource hungry, and you need some impressive specs server for that. With Jenkins, you can automate almost any task. Also, as it is an open source, we can save a load of money by not spending on enterprise CI/CD tools.
The ability to manage different stages and define a workflow is very useful for ops troubleshooting as well as deployment. You can see which version each environment has for each project, and promote or redeploy versions.
You can view deployment logs and dig deep into problems or long deployment steps.
Finding old releases can be a pain, and there isn't a good way to compare releases.
It does not really lend itself well to viewing what the content of a release is further than the version number. Ideally, you would be able to tie a deployment to the builds from the build server as well as specific commits from source control.
Automated Builds: Jenkins is configured to monitor the version control system for new pull requests. Once a pull request is created, Jenkins automatically triggers a build process. It checks out the code, compiles it, and performs any necessary build steps specified in the configuration.
Unit Testing: Jenkins runs the suite of unit tests defined for the project. These tests verify the functionality of individual components and catch any regressions or errors. If any unit tests fail, Jenkins marks the build as unsuccessful, and the developer is notified to fix the issues.
Code Analysis: Jenkins integrates with code analysis tools like SonarQube or Checkstyle. It analyzes the code for quality, adherence to coding standards, and potential bugs or vulnerabilities. The results are reported back to the developer and the product review team for further inspection.
Many different platforms, languages, and operating systems are supported. You can deploy to your own server or the cloud. You can deploy to Windows, Linux, etc.
Many different "step templates" are included, which make it very easy to deploy what you want, how you want. Such as deploying over SSH, FTP, etc.
Support is very responsive and personable. You won't just be talking to a robot or a script. They will either solve your problem or understand it enough to solve it in a future release.
Their documentation is well thought-out and very helpful. I have found very few missing pieces.
Jenkins can be vulnerable to security issues due to its open-source nature and the availability of many third-party plugins. There have been instances where malicious plugins have been discovered, and these can pose a significant risk to organisations.
Jenkins can require a significant amount of maintenance, particularly when dealing with plugin updates and compatibility issues. Maintaining a stable and up-to-date Jenkins instance can be a challenge for organisations with limited resources.
Jenkins' reporting capabilities are limited, and it can be challenging to extract meaningful insights from the data that Jenkins provides.
Support for non-Microsoft applications needs to be improved to bring it on par with other comparable automation tools.
It doesn't yet provide integration options with other IT management tools like JIRA and HP Support to implement continuous delivery and true DevOps processes.
Support for AWS/Azure has been included very recently and it's not still very mature and feature rich and is expected to improve further in upcoming releases.
We have a certain buy-in as we have made a lot of integrations and useful tools around jenkins, so it would cost us quite some time to change to another tool. Besides that, it is very versatile, and once you have things set up, it feels unnecessary to change tool. It is also a plus that it is open source.
Jenkins streamlines development and provides end to end automated integration and deployment. It even supports Docker and Kubernetes using which container instances can be managed effectively. It is easy to add documentation and apply role based access to files and services using Jenkins giving full control to the users. Any deviation can be easily tracked using the audit logs.
Some functionality feels slightly hidden in the menu system. For example: script modules are in the same menu as packages, where I feel that are not related entities. One is code for the deployment, the other is the thing that you are deploying...
No, when we integrated this with GitHub, it becomes more easy and smart to manage and control our workforce. Our distributed workforce is now streamlined to a single bucket. All of our codes and production outputs are now automatically synced with all the workers. There are many cases when our in-house team makes changes in the release, our remote workers make another release with other environment variables. So it is better to get all of the work in control.
Octopus Deploy is a software that runs very effectively, is easy to use, does not require such a high learning curve, provides the necessary tools to carry out the functions it offers, making it a very flexible software, it also allows that can be configured according to the needs of the user and provides integrations with other very advantageous tools since they are carried out in a very favorable way.
As with all open source solutions, the support can be minimal and the information that you can find online can at times be misleading. Support may be one of the only real downsides to the overall software package. The user community can be helpful and is needed as the product is not the most user-friendly thing we have used.
Octopus Deploy support has always been there for us, even when using the free tier, we get responsive hands-on help. We haven't needed to use that level of support since the documentation is clearly written, and help is readily available within the interface itself. Using Octopus Deploy is a truly joyful experience.
It is worth well the time to setup Jenkins in a docker container. It is also well worth to take the time to move any "Jenkins configuration" into Jenkinsfiles and not take shortcuts.
Overall, Jenkins is the easiest platform for someone who has no experience to come in and use effectively. We can get a junior engineer into Jenkins, give them access, and point them in the right direction with minimal hand-holding. The competing products I have used (TravisCI/GitLab/Azure) provide other options but can obfuscate the process due to the lack of straightforward simplicity. In other areas (capability, power, customization), Jenkins keeps up with the competition and, in some areas, like customization, exceeds others.
Octopus Deploy was the obvious choice at the time, its strong .net support, robustness, ease of use, and integration into an existing process was a big plus. Also, Octopus Deploy was kind enough to give my organization a not for profit community licence. In addition, the product comes from a local Brisbane based company and it is always good to support local businesses when you can.
We run about 30 test projects through Jenkins every day, multiple times a day; this allows us to focus on new tests rather than manually running all these tests.
We rely heavily on reporting capabilities and email notifications; we have some jobs that send emails every time they run so we know if there is an issue with any of our services.
Any automated deployment process will save your company a ton of money on testing and bugs. When you don't automate your deployments, you can't be certain that what you are moving between environments is the exact same code with the same or appropriate configuration. What you tested might not be what got deployed.
We've saved a lot of money using Octopus over the mostly manual process we were using before. We've removed a lot of the errors that come from manual, human intervention.
Octopus has also allowed us to accomplish more with fewer people. It is easy to bring new people up to speed on the deployment process, and we can be confident of success after very little training.
