Knapsack Pro

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

Buildkite

https://buildkite.com

Cirrus CI

https://cirrus-ci.org
Unique feature

Runs on own infrastructure, API

FreeBSD support

Type of product

SaaS

SaaS / On Premise

Offers a free plan

Yes

Free for open source projects and selected organizations

Yes

Free for open source projects

Predictable pricing

Yes

Clearly defined monthly and annual plans

Yes

Besides the seat (per-user access) you need to buy compute credits for running the build, priced differently depending on the machine you're running builds on.

Support / SLA

Yes

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

N/A

Not clear if they offer any real SLA on 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

There are limits on how many tasks can be run in parallel for the free tier builds: https://cirrus-ci.org/faq/#are-there-any-limits

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

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

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

Yes

Allows containers or VMs for every major operating system.

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

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

Yes

N/A

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

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

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?

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

N/A

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

No (partial)

No specific support from what I can gather, but it does provide documentation for Ruby, including integration with the knapsack_pro gem.

Specific language support: JavaScript

No

No

No specific support and no documentation on setting up a CI/CD process for a Javascript project.

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

Integrates well with GitHub - the whole CI/CD process starts with a commit to a GitHub repo.

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

Provides a pretty nifty GraphQL API which allows querying the Cirrus CI Schema, as well as webhooks support for other types of custom integrations (such as Slack or IRC notifications, for example). They also added support for GitHub actions

Auditing

Yes

N/A

From what we can tell, there's no specific support for auditing changes in the Cirrus CI config (other than what is traceable via git commits to the YML config file)

Additional notes

Seems to be used by companies with a solid engineering background (Google)

Buildkite parallel agents and how to use them for CI parallelisation

Buildkite parallelism integration

Start using Knapsack Pro with Buildkite or Cirrus CI

Sign up and speed up your tests.

Get started free