Knapsack Pro

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

Bamboo

https://www.atlassian.com/software/bamboo

Buildkite

https://buildkite.com
Unique feature

Atlassian suite integration

Runs on own infrastructure, API

Type of product

On Premise

SaaS

Offers a free plan

Yes

The full Atlassian suite is free for open source projects (https://www.atlassian.com/software/views/open-source-license-request). For all others, they offer a minimal free trial.

Yes

Free for open source projects and selected organizations

Predictable pricing

Yes

They price their product based on number of build agents (more concurrency, more expensive). Given the notoriety and depth of the Atlassian suite, the pricing can be steep for small companies.

Yes

Clearly defined monthly and annual plans

Support / SLA

Yes

Dedicated tehnical support.

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

Up to 100 parallel agents

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

Yes

Agents can run on multiple machines.

Yes

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

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

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

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

Excellent dashboards, even more so thanks to integrations with the other tools in the Atlassian arsenal

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

Great management support, built for large scale companies, even allows setting per-environment permissions (ie: QA team can only deploy to their own, isolated environment)

Yes

Self-hosted option

Yes

No

Hosted plans / SaaS

No

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

Advanced pipeline support - with features built for feature branch support, various triggers, schedules, external notifications and more.

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

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?

Yes

Large selection (~200) of apps that integrate with Bamboo, available on the official marketplace for Bamboo: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/addons/app/bamboo

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 (partial)

It looks like the documentation and features for Ruby are lagging behind. All I could find is this repo: https://github.com/drscream/bamboozled-ruby-plugin, following this support ticket: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BAM-10948 from this documentation stub page: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bamboo0601/getting-started-with-ruby-and-bamboo-935580774.html

Yes

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

Specific language support: JavaScript

No

No specific support, beyond some documentation on integrating Selenium (not marked as partial support since that documentation is only promoted in the Atlassian docs, but is hosted by BrowserStack)

No

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

Yes

Deep integration with the Atlassian product stack (Jira, etc.).

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

Yes

Great GraphQL API, allows building your own dashboard with ease

Auditing

Yes

Yes

Additional notes

Not really something that should be purchased separatelly from the Atlassian stack.

Buildkite parallel agents and how to use them for CI parallelisation

Buildkite parallelism integration

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