Knapsack Pro

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

Buildkite

https://buildkite.com

Bitbucket Pipelines

https://bitbucket.org/product/features/pipelines
Unique feature

Runs on own infrastructure, API

Best Jira integration possible

Type of product

SaaS

SaaS / On Premise

Offers a free plan

Yes

Free for open source projects and selected organizations

Yes

Offers a very modest free cloud plan, limited to 5 users, 50 minutes of build time per month and 1GB storage. There's no free self-hosted version, but they do offer a $10 one-time payment plan for 10 users (build time and storage is only limited by your infrastructure)

Predictable pricing

Yes

Clearly defined monthly and annual plans

Yes

Pricing is based on amount of users for both the cloud and on premise versions. The cloud offering has different tiers depending on build times and storage.

Support / SLA

Yes

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

Yes

Dedicated tehnical 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

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.

Yes

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

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

N/A

Documentation is unclear, but it's reasonable to assume that distributed builds for the on premise version are not an issue.

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

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

Yes

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

Yes

Excellent overview and contextual feedback.

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

Yes

Yes

Self-hosted option

No

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

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

Yes

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

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

Yes

Large collection of available apps: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/apps-and-integrations-675189068.html

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

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

Yes

Clear, concise documentation on setting up a Ruby project with Bitbucket pipelines: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/ruby-with-bitbucket-pipelines-872005618.html

Specific language support: JavaScript

No

Yes

Clear, concise documentation on setting up a Javascript project with Bitbucket pipelines: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/javascript-node-js-with-bitbucket-pipelines-873891287.html

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

Yes

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

Yes

Large collection of available integrations: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/apps-and-integrations-675189068.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

Great GraphQL API, allows building your own dashboard with ease

Yes

Auditing

Yes

Yes

Additional notes

There's some confusion regarding Bitbucket Pipelines and Bamboo, where they overlap and where not. Atlassian discontinued their Bamboo Cloud offering ~3 years ago, so at a high-level they are different products in that regard. What can be said about both is that they are top-tier tools for high-demand engineering teams, especially valuable as long as the other tools in the Atlassian suite are adopted (Bitbucket is a must for Bitbucket pipelines, being just one if it's features, but other tools like Jira are not to be dismissed either). It does seem like Bitbucket Pipelines is the more mature product of the two though.

Buildkite parallel agents and how to use them for CI parallelisation

Buildkite parallelism integration

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