Knapsack Pro

AppVeyor vs Buildkite comparison of Continuous Integration servers
What are the differences between AppVeyor and Buildkite?

AppVeyor

https://www.appveyor.com

Buildkite

https://buildkite.com
Unique feature

Supports NuGet packages / Windows build environment

Runs on own infrastructure, API

Type of product

SaaS / On Premise

SaaS

Offers a free plan

Yes

Free SaaS plan for open source projects. There is also a free on premise version, but it's quite limited (1 user, 1 team, community support)

Yes

Free for open source projects and selected organizations

Predictable pricing

Yes

Very simple pricing plans: 3 options for the SaaS version, two options for the on premise option. No variable pricing.

Yes

Clearly defined monthly and annual plans

Support / SLA

Yes

All paid on premise plans offer support, as well as the two higher priced SaaS plans. Only community support available for the free on premise version and the lowest SaaS tier.

Yes

Depending on the plan, ranging from community support, all the way to an assigned Technical Manager, SLAs and live chat support.

Paralellism
Every CI servers tends to address this differently (parallel, distributed, build matrix). Some of it is just marketing, and some is just nuance. For this table, parallel means that tasks can be run concurrently on the same machine, distributed means that tasks can be scaled horizontally, on multiple machines
How to split tests in parallel in the optimal way with Knapsack Pro

Yes

Allows splitting tests to run on different VMs in parallel.

Yes

Run an unlimited number of concurrent agents, and an unlimited number of concurrent jobs. You can run your tests in isolated Docker container per agent.

Distributed builds
distributed means that tasks can be scaled horizontally, on multiple machines
How to split tests in parallel in the optimal way with Knapsack Pro

N/A

Yes

Run an unlimited number of concurrent agents, and an unlimited number of concurrent jobs

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

Runs every build in a VM, and it offers several options depending on the plan (SaaS or self-hosted) as well sa personal preference.

Yes

Since the agents run on your own infra, you're free to do whatever

Analytics / Status overview
Analytics and overview referrs to the ability to, at a glance, see what's breaking (be it a certain task, or the build for a specific project)

Yes

The dashboard is not as great as for other options in the market, but allows seeing project status at a glance.

Yes

The Buildkite UI features great vizualisations that feature build times, error rates, and more.

Management support
How easy is it to manage users / projects / assign roles and permissions and so on

Yes

Allows creating teams and assigning roles. There is some integration with GitHub Teams but the concepts are different which might be tricky depending on how the GitHub project is managed, for instance.

Yes

Self-hosted option

Yes

No

Hosted plans / SaaS

Yes

Yes

Build pipelines
A continuous delivery pipeline is a description of the process that the software goes through from a new code commit, through testing and other statical analysis steps all the way to the end-users of the product.

Yes

There is a single predefined possible pipeline, which defines various hooks (such as before_build / after_build). The pipeline can be configured via the UI or via an appveyor.yml file. The two are mutually exclusive, so it's either one or the other.

Yes

Pipelines are defined using an Yaml config file and allow for great flexibility in defining what each step of the process does.

Reports
Reports are about the abilty to see specific reports (like code coverage or custom ones), but not necesarily tied in into a larger dashboard.

Yes

Notifications are highly configurable, but visual reports such as code coverage is not easy to implement.

Yes

Ecosystem
Besides the official documentation and software, is there a large community using this product? Are there any community-driven tools / plugins that you can use?

N/A

Yes

Integrations for GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket as well as SSO support (Google Suite, SAML, GraphQL API). Growing number of community plugins: https://buildkite.com/plugins

Specific language support: Ruby
Some CI servers have built-in support for parsing RSpec or Istanbul output for example and we mention those. Some others make it even easier by detecting Gemfiles or package.json and automate parts of the process for the developer.

Yes

Many Ruby gems use AppVeyor as their CI server of choice. Among the features for Ruby are the pre-installed Ruby versions on both Windows and Ubuntu servers, as well as the appveyor-worker gem which makes it easy to report status during the build process.

Yes

You can find useful plugins like https://github.com/sj26/rspec-buildkite https://github.com/ticky/simplecov-buildkite etc

Specific language support: JavaScript

Yes

Comes with node.js and io.js versions pre-installed. Also offers documentation on npm integration on their website.

No

Integrations
1st party support for common tools (like Slack notifications, various VCS platforms, etc)

Yes

Probably the most notable aspect here is the large array of deployment integrations available (from simple FTP uploads to Azure servers or NuGet packages).

Yes

Integrations for GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket as well as SSO support (Google Suite, SAML, GraphQL API)

API
Custom integreation is available, via an API or otherwise, it's mentioned separately as it allows further customization than any of the Ecosystem/Integration options

Yes

Offers a basic CRUD REST API for querying projects and builds as well as a real-time Build Worker API which can send updates on build status.

Yes

Great GraphQL API, allows building your own dashboard with ease

Auditing

N/A

Yes

Additional notes

Very Windows oriented

Buildkite parallel agents and how to use them for CI parallelisation

Buildkite parallelism integration

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