Knapsack Pro

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

Cirrus CI

https://cirrus-ci.org

TeamCity

https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/
Unique feature

FreeBSD support

Technology awareness

Type of product

SaaS / On Premise

On Premise

Offers a free plan

Yes

Free for open source projects

Yes

They offer a great free professional plan, limited to 100 build configurations and 3 build agents. From there, you pay for each aditional agent you want (discounts if you purchase more than 1 agent at a time). They also provide a free plan for open source, non commercial projects, and steep 50% discounts for startups.

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

They have a clear list of prices per number of agents.

Support / SLA

N/A

Not clear if they offer any real SLA on support.

Yes

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

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

No specific mention that we could find, but judging by the wording used it would appear that tasks can be divided accross different machines.

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

Allows containers or VMs for every major operating system.

Yes

First class Docker support, among others

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

Great system overview, even allows building your own dashboards in order to see everything you're interested in at a glance.

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

N/A

Yes

Allows assigning roles, LDAP and Windows domain integrations and more.

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

Unlike most options in the CI/CD space, TeamCity allows defining pipelines using a Kotlin-based DSL. This unlocks a lot of potential, such as templates for common CI/CD tasks, and deep integration with various IDEs (not just JetBrains IDEs)

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

Something that stands out from the rest, allows integrating third party reports, as long as they produce HTML output.

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

Yes

JetBrains has a rich ecosystem of plugins in general.

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.

Yes

Using what they call 'Technology Awareness', promises great intehration with Ruby projects, with features such as testing framework support, static analysis and code coverage available out of the box, with no additional work required: https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/features/technology_awareness.html

Specific language support: JavaScript

No

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

No (partial)

Unlike Ruby, there's no first class support for Javascript, although they do advertise the fact that their large collections of plugins can cover any use case for Javascript projects: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/teamcity

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

Great cloud integrations (Google Cloud, AWS, VMWare, etc) as well as 'key' integrations (VSCode, Jira, even NuGet)

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

Unlike most tools, which offer just a Rest API, TeamCity provides ample opportunity for extension via plugins, their own API, and service messages (formatted messages on stdout)

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

Additional notes

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

Great ecosystem, with a strong focus on integration with other tools (not only JetBrains).

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