Knapsack Pro

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

Bamboo

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

Gitlab CI

https://about.gitlab.com/product/continuous-integration/
Unique feature

Atlassian suite integration

AutoDev Ops / Allows keeping code management and CI in the same place

Type of product

On Premise

SaaS / On Premise

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

Very generous free plans for both the SaaS version as well as the on premise version.

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

Clear and affordable pricing for both SaaS and self-hosted versions.

Support / SLA

Yes

Dedicated tehnical support.

Yes

All paid plans include next business day 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

Easily configure jobs you want to be run in parallel via the YML config file (gitlab-ci.yml)

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

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

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

Yes

The Docker Container Registry is integrated into GitLab by default

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

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

Yes

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

Defined via YML config 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

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

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

Although not built into GitLab CI by default, the Docker support allows solving any Ruby specific need that may arise.

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)

Yes

Although not built into GitLab CI by default, the Docker support allows solving any Javascript specific need that may arise.

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

Plenty of third party integrations available throughout GitLab, most notably Kubernetes and GitHub, but also plenty of others: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/integration/README.html

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

Provides a REST API and a (new) GraphQL API, with plans to maintain the GraphQL API only going forward. Allows doing almost anything that can be done via the interface, at least in terms of CI needs.

Auditing

Yes

Yes

Additional notes

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

The Auto DevOps feature might be interesting to people looking for a very hands-off experience with getting a CI/CD process up and running https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/autodevops/

GitLab CI parallelisation - how to run parallel jobs for Ruby & JavaScript projects

Gitlab CI parallelism integration

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