Knapsack Pro
Knapsack Pro
AppVeyorhttps://www.appveyor.com |
Heroku CIhttps://www.heroku.com/continuous-integration |
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| Unique feature |
Supports NuGet packages / Windows build environment
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Heroku Flow
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| Type of product |
SaaS / On Premise
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SaaS
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| 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) |
No (partial) For CI only, the cost starts at $10 for pipeline, plus a variable amount depending on how long the build runs for (prorated per second). The servers used for CI cost $250 for a full month, which means you get about 3 hours for $1. For hosting, there's a free tier, limited to 1 web/1 worker with 512 MB RAM. One of the more annoying limitations is that free dynos are put into sleep mode after 30 min. of inactivity, which increases loading times considerably. |
| 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, offers a calculator. |
| 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
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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 Up to 16 nodes. You can ask Heroku support to enable up to 32 parallel dynos. |
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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
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N/A
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| 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 Builds run in isolation on new dynos (Heroku containers). Wide support via buildpacks: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/buildpacks |
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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 Great visual overview built-in. |
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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 One of the more mature solutions for teams on the market, Heroku Teams is available for free for 1-5 people, and comes at a cost for 6+ team members: https://www.heroku.com/pricing#team-comparison. Allows setting roles and app-level permissions with ease. |
| Self-hosted option |
Yes
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No
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| Hosted plans / SaaS |
Yes
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Yes
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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 Very easy and intuitive process that allows defining a pipeline from code commit, to code review (review apps), user acceptance testing and production deployment, via Heroku Flow. Works best if the project is also hosted on Heroku. |
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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
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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
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Yes Wide array of 3rd party add-ons available via Heroku Elements: https://elements.heroku.com/addons. Custom buildpacks are also available for almost any stack you might be using (over 5500 buildpacks available at the moment) |
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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 Although not specifically built in to Heroku, it's guaranteed that any Ruby specific need that might arise would be solved via add-ons, buildpacks or other integrations available. |
| Specific language support: JavaScript |
Yes Comes with node.js and io.js versions pre-installed. Also offers documentation on npm integration on their website. |
Yes Although not specifically built in to Heroku, it's guaranteed that any Javascript specific need that might arise would be solved via add-ons, buildpacks or other integrations available. |
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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 The strongest built-in integrations are with GitHub and Slack (ChatOps) but even allows integrating 3rd party CI servers in the workflow if you so require, among others. |
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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 Offers a feature rich API that allows CRUD operations on the most important features, such as promoting an app to production, or inspecting a specific pipeline. |
| Auditing |
N/A
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Yes
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| Additional notes |
Very Windows oriented |
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