Knapsack Pro

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

AppVeyor

https://www.appveyor.com

Drone

https://drone.io
Unique feature

Supports NuGet packages / Windows build environment

Customization

Type of product

SaaS / On Premise

SaaS / On Premise

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

The cloud version is free for open source projects. Also offers a free plan for any project, with a limit of 5000 builds per year. The on-premise version is available as a Docker image.

Predictable pricing

Yes

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

Yes

Predictable pricing based on number of users and repositories. They have a calculator to help determine cost.

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.

N/A

It's not clear what their support commitment is. They have a fairly active community on Discourse, for community 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

Pipeline task configuration allows running tasks in parallel

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

Pipelines can be configured to run on multiple machines, although they recommend that to be an option only if paralellizing tasks and scaling vertically doesn't suffice. They even support multi-platform distribution (ie: running tasks on various operating systems)

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

By default, they offer Docker support for the CI/CD job runners.

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

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

They offer in-depth documentation for user and server management. A lot of it can be done via the drone CLI tool, which seems to be the focal point of the docs.

Self-hosted option

Yes

Yes

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

Easily configurable pipelines via YML files.

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.

N/A

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

Drone CI allows integrating plugins into the CI/CD process. They have a list of available community plugins and provide documentation on building your own. Plugins are Docker containers which plug directly into the CI/CD process.

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.

No (partial)

No specific support, but they do provide sufficient documentation on getting a Ruby project up and running, including a multi-platform example.

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 (partial)

No specific 1st party support, but the plugin marketplace features an NPM authoring and an NPM authentication plugin.

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

Integrates well with source code management platforms (1st party support for GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket) as well as other systems via 3rd party plugins.

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

Drone provides a feature-rich REST API, as well as an official Go SDK for it.

Auditing

N/A

Yes

Additional notes

Very Windows oriented

The fact that Drone works with any source code manager, as well as the fact that it can run tasks on multiple platforms makes it stand out from the rest. Very nifty!

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