Circle CI vs AppVeyor comparison of Continuous Integration servers

	Circle CI https://circleci.com	AppVeyor https://www.appveyor.com
Unique feature	Premium Support	Supports NuGet packages / Windows build environment
Type of product	SaaS, Self-hosted / On Premise	SaaS / On Premise
Offers a free plan	Yes Provides a free plan for it's SaaS solution, for up to 1000 build minutes per month, 1 container and 1 concurrent job. On top of this, it has a special Free Tier for open source projects, which extend the number of containers and concurrent jobs available.	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)
Predictable pricing	Yes Provides a calculator, based on the number of concurrent jobs and containers, which can be used to determine pricing before purchase. They also give a guideline based on the number of developers you employ (2-3 containers per full-time developer)	Yes Very simple pricing plans: 3 options for the SaaS version, two options for the on premise option. No variable pricing.
Support / SLA	Yes While it's community is not quite as vibrant as it is for Jenkins, CircleCI even offers support premium support for companies who cannot afford any downtime in their CI/CD pipelines (https://circleci.com/support/premium-support/). For the regular plans, all plans except the free tier offer official email support. The free tier only includes community support (Discuss, StackOverflow, etc.)	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.
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 CircleCI can run builds in parallel, each build in a completely isolated environment by using containers.	Yes Allows splitting tests to run on different VMs in parallel.
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 The SaaS version distributes builds by default, while the self-hosted version has all the tools built-in for managing the cluster of builder machines.	N/A
Containers support / Build environment	Yes CircleCI runs every build in a container, or VM, ensuring an isolated, local scope for each build. The environment is also reset with each build, which can highlight hard-to-track issues related to assumptions about the environment that the project is deployed to.	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.
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 Available by default in Circle CI: https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/status/#section=jobs. Aditionally, the Insights Dashboard provides a very useful overview on build times, error rates and status for your projects: https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/insights/#section=jobs	Yes The dashboard is not as great as for other options in the market, but allows seeing project status at a glance.
Management support How easy is it to manage users / projects / assign roles and permissions and so on	No (partial) Using the Cloud plan for Circle CI requires no dedicated person for maintanence / management of the service. The CircleCI Server option (self-hosted) is also hassle free, as the process of installing and managing CircleCI and it's dependencies is automated. Developers are also given SSH acces to the builds (not the whole environment), while sys-admins can work on the host machine without worry about affecting the builds (which are containerized).	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.
Self-hosted option	Yes	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 in CircleCI are defined declaratively using an Yaml config file. CircleCI has special provisions for storing secrets in these files.	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.
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 Reports are available	Yes Notifications are highly configurable, but visual reports such as code coverage is not easy to implement.
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, partially While CircleCI doesn't natively support plugins, it's core features address all of the core functionality that a CI/CD service needs. For integrating with other platforms or tools, there are integrations such as https://slack.com/apps/A0F7VRE7N-circleci. Certain jobs are available as CircleCI Orbs: https://circleci.com/orbs/	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 For collecting test metadata and coverage, there is built-in support for Ruby (specifically, Cucumber and RSpec). Setting this up takes very little time and is well-documented on CircleCI's docs.	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.
Specific language support: JavaScript	Yes For collecting test metadata and coverage, there is built-in support for Javascript. For code coverage, CircleCI understands Istanbul output (Jest also uses Istanbul for the code coverage reports), while for test metadata, the JUnit output format is natively supported.	Yes Comes with node.js and io.js versions pre-installed. Also offers documentation on npm integration on their website.
Integrations 1st party support for common tools (like Slack notifications, various VCS platforms, etc)	Yes Available as CircleCI Orbs: https://circleci.com/orbs/	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).
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 REST API documentation available at https://circleci.com/docs/api/#api-overview. Creating Orbs is also documented at https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/orb-author/#introduction	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.
Auditing	N/A	N/A
Additional notes		Very Windows oriented

Programming Language	Supported test runners	Installation guide	Knapsack Pro Library README / Source
Ruby	RSpec, Cucumber, Minitest, test-unit, Spinach, Turnip	Install	knapsack_pro gem
JavaScript	Cypress.io	Install	@knapsack-pro/cypress
JavaScript	Jest	Install	@knapsack-pro/jest
JavaScript / TypeScript	Any test runner in JavaScript	How to build native integration with Knapsack Pro API to run tests in parallel for any test runner	@knapsack-pro/core
Any programming language	Any test runner	How to build a custom Knapsack Pro API client from scratch in any programming language	-

Circle CI vs AppVeyor comparison of Continuous Integration servers What are the differences between Circle CI and AppVeyor?

Circle CI

AppVeyor

Premium Support

Supports NuGet packages / Windows build environment

SaaS, Self-hosted / On Premise

SaaS / On Premise

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

N/A

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

No (partial)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes, partially

N/A

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

N/A

N/A

How to run parallel tests on Circle CI and AppVeyor to execute 1-hour test suite in 2 minutes?

Without Knapsack Pro

Run fast parallel CI build with Knapsack Pro

How it works

How to install it

Do you know

Start using Knapsack Pro

Sign up and speed up your tests.

Get faster feedback from Circle CI and AppVeyor server

How to get faster Circle CI builds with dynamic test suite split instead of deterministic split

How to split E2E tests on multiple CI nodes using Cypress.io test runner

Jest JavaScript Testing and CI parallelisation how to do it?

Circle CI parallelism integration

Introduction to CI parallelisation with Knapsack Pro

How much can you save with faster tests on Circle CI and AppVeyor?

Features that make your tests perform better

Queue mode see video

Fallback mode

All supported test runners

Trusted solution

Start using Knapsack Pro with Circle CI or AppVeyor

Sign up and speed up your tests.

Circle CI vs AppVeyor comparison of Continuous Integration servers
What are the differences between Circle CI and AppVeyor?

How to run parallel tests on Circle CI and AppVeyor
to execute 1-hour test suite in 2 minutes?

How much can you save with faster tests
on Circle CI and AppVeyor?