Knapsack Pro

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

CodeFresh CI

https://codefresh.io

Buildkite

https://buildkite.com
Unique feature

Built for Kubernetes

Runs on own infrastructure, API

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

Free for open source projects and selected organizations

Predictable pricing

Yes

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

Yes

Clearly defined monthly and annual plans

Support / SLA

Yes

Paid support for enterprise plans

Yes

Depending on the plan, ranging from community support, all the way to an assigned Technical Manager, SLAs and live chat support.

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

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.

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)

Yes

Run an unlimited number of concurrent agents, and an unlimited number of concurrent jobs

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

Built for Kubernetes, so containers are a must.

Yes

Since the agents run on your own infra, you're free to do whatever

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

The Buildkite UI features great vizualisations that feature build times, error rates, and more.

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

Yes

Yes

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

Pipelines are defined using an Yaml config file and allow for great flexibility in defining what each step of the process does.

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

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/

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

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/

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

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

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

Yes

https://steps.codefresh.io

Yes

Integrations for GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket as well as SSO support (Google Suite, SAML, GraphQL API)

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

Great GraphQL API, allows building your own dashboard with ease

Auditing

Yes

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

Yes

Additional notes

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

Cypress Parallel testing on Codefresh.io

Buildkite parallel agents and how to use them for CI parallelisation

CodeFresh CI parallelism integration

Buildkite parallelism integration

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