Knapsack Pro

CodeFresh CI vs AWS CodeBuild comparison of Continuous Integration servers
What are the differences between CodeFresh CI and AWS CodeBuild?

CodeFresh CI

https://codefresh.io

AWS CodeBuild

https://aws.amazon.com/codebuild/
Unique feature

Built for Kubernetes

AWS integration

Type of product

SaaS / On Premise

SaaS

Offers a free plan

Yes

Offers a minimal free plan (only one concurrent job, 3 users, various other limitations)

Yes

The AWS free-tier includes 100 build-minutes per month, on their smallest machine. It's unclear, but it seems like this applies only to the first year of service.

Predictable pricing

Yes

Easy price calculator, based on the number of machines, concurrent jobs and special features.

Yes (partial)

While it's clear what the cost is (priced per build-minute), figuring out costs can be a hassle, especially as the price can vary quite a bit depending on commits to the project.

Support / SLA

Yes

Paid support for enterprise plans

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

N/A

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

Unclear from the documentation (probably not)

N/A

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

Built for Kubernetes, so containers are a must.

Yes

Builds run in specific-to-the-project, isolated environments

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

They seem to provide pretty great status overview, depending on the type of plan you're using.

Yes

Offers minimal information built in, but allows integrations with tools such as CloudWatch (another Amazon product), or streaming build information to your own API, for more in-depth analysis.

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

Yes

Yes

Professional user management via AWS Identity and Access Management: https://aws.amazon.com/iam/

Self-hosted option

Yes

Only available for enterprise plans

No

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 as code (YML files)

Yes

As it's usually the case with Amazon, CodeBuild simply provides the 'build' part of a true CI/CD system, while pipelines are managed via CodePipeline, another Amazon product: https://aws.amazon.com/codepipeline/pricing/?nc=sn&loc=3

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

Yes

Offers minimal information built in, but allows integrations with tools such as CloudWatch (another Amazon product), or streaming build information to your own API, for more in-depth analysis.

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

Every step in a CodeFresh pipeline is a Docker image. A wide array of steps is available over at https://steps.codefresh.io/

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

Specific documentation for a sample Ruby-on-Rails project: https://codefresh.io/docs/docs/learn-by-example/ruby/

No (partial)

The environments available on CodeBuilt include Ruby pre-installed: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codebuild/latest/userguide/build-env-ref-available.html, but that seems to be as far as specific support goes

Specific language support: JavaScript

Yes

There's an 'npm publish' step available, and they also provide a few Javascript examples over at https://codefresh.io/docs/docs/learn-by-example/nodejs/ (one is just a sample, one is a little more complex, using Redis, Python, etc., and one is a React App)

No (partial)

The environments available on CodeBuilt include Node pre-installed: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codebuild/latest/userguide/build-env-ref-available.html, but that seems to be as far as specific support goes

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

Yes

https://steps.codefresh.io

Yes

CodeBuild builds can be connected to sources such as GitHub or BitBucket, but being an Amazon Service, the deepest integrations are with other Amazon Code services (CodePipeline, CodeDeploy, and others: https://aws.amazon.com/products/developer-tools/)

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

Rich REST API available, well documented at https://g.codefresh.io/api/

Yes

Amazon SDKs can be used to interact with CodeBuild

Auditing

Yes

Audit logs available: https://codefresh.io/docs/docs/enterprise/audit-logs/

Yes

Additional notes

Like most things Amazon, it becomes more valuable as you acquire and integrate various Amazon solutions, not necesarily as a standalone tool.

How to use Codefresh matrix parallel steps to run parallel tests in Ruby on Rails

Cypress Parallel testing on Codefresh.io

CodeFresh CI parallelism integration

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