Knapsack Pro
Knapsack Pro
Circle CIhttps://circleci.com |
Buildkitehttps://buildkite.com |
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| Unique feature |
Premium Support
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Runs on own infrastructure, API
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| Type of product |
SaaS, Self-hosted / On Premise
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SaaS
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| 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 for open source projects and selected organizations |
| 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 Clearly defined monthly and annual plans |
| 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 Depending on the plan, ranging from community support, all the way to an assigned Technical Manager, SLAs and live chat support. |
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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 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. |
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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. |
Yes Run an unlimited number of concurrent agents, and an unlimited number of concurrent jobs |
| 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 Since the agents run on your own infra, you're free to do whatever |
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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 Buildkite UI features great vizualisations that feature build times, error rates, and more. |
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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
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| Self-hosted option |
Yes
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No
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| Hosted plans / SaaS |
Yes
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Yes
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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 Pipelines are defined using an Yaml config file and allow for great flexibility in defining what each step of the process does. |
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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
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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/ |
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 |
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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 You can find useful plugins like https://github.com/sj26/rspec-buildkite https://github.com/ticky/simplecov-buildkite etc |
| 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. |
No
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Integrations
1st party support for common tools (like Slack notifications, various VCS platforms, etc) |
Yes Available as CircleCI Orbs: https://circleci.com/orbs/ |
Yes Integrations for GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket as well as SSO support (Google Suite, SAML, GraphQL API) |
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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 Great GraphQL API, allows building your own dashboard with ease |
| Auditing |
N/A
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Yes
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| Additional notes |
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