Knapsack Pro

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

Cirrus CI

https://cirrus-ci.org

Rancher Pipelines

https://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.x/en/project-admin/tools/pipelines/
Unique feature

FreeBSD support

DevOps tool for container orchestration

Type of product

SaaS / On Premise

On Premise

Offers a free plan

Yes

Free for open source projects

Yes

Free, open source project

Predictable pricing

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.

Yes

It's free!

Support / SLA

N/A

Not clear if they offer any real SLA on support.

Yes

Paid support available: https://rancher.com/pricing/

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

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

Yes

You can run multiple parallel steps within a build stage

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

N/A

N/A

Unclear from the documentation (probably not)

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

Allows containers or VMs for every major operating system.

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

Yes

Not particularly clear, but it appears you can monitor stats in a Grafana dashboard: https://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.x/en/project-admin/tools/monitoring/

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

N/A

Yes

User management is available, with specific roles assigned, or permissions to certain resources and projects

Self-hosted option

Yes

Yes

Hosted plans / SaaS

Yes

No

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

Defined via YML config files

Yes

Pipelines as code (YML files), but also manageable via the UI

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.

N/A

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?

N/A

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.

No (partial)

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

N/A

Pipelines / CI is just a small part of Rancher. No specific support mentioned.

Specific language support: JavaScript

No

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

N/A

Pipelines / CI is just a small part of Rancher. No specific support mentioned.

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

Yes

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

Yes

Integrations available for GitLab, GitHub and Bitbucket

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

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

Yes

REST API available. It provides introspection and documentation: https://github.com/rancher/api-spec/blob/master/specification.md#filtering. It should offer enough access to allow building whatever customizations or integrations with 3rd party tools deemed necessary.

Auditing

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)

Yes

Allows logging to various systems (Kafka, Elastic, etc) which should make audit possible

Additional notes

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

Rancher is a full software stack for container orchestration, going as far as building their own Linux distribution (RancherOS). Using Rancher seems more like a decision to be made considering all other features Rancher offers, not just the CI server. Also worth noting that Rancher uses Jenkins under the hood, but the engine is locked so projects can't just be migrated between the two.

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