Knapsack Pro

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

CodeFresh CI

https://codefresh.io

Semaphore CI

https://semaphoreci.com
Unique feature

Built for Kubernetes

Autoscaling made easy / Great CLI

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

1,300 service minutes every month. Plans to release a free tier for open source projects.

Predictable pricing

Yes

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

Yes

Semaphore doesn't have traditional pricing tiers, instead it lists the types of machines you can use and their pricing per second of service. They plan to release an annual plan at some point.

Support / SLA

Yes

Paid support for enterprise plans

N/A

Not clear if they offer any real SLA on 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

Allows defining a custom build matrix such that your build can be parallelized accross several different environments.

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

Allows running builds inside docker containers

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

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

Allows defining complex build workflows with ease

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

N/A

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/

Yes

Provides rich documentation on integrating Semaphore CI in Ruby projects. Also provides sudo access if you need to install system dependencies or C extensions.

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)

Yes

Provides rich documentation on integrating Semaphore CI in Javascript projects

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

Yes

https://steps.codefresh.io

Yes

Integration with GitHub and Slack. They allow building iOS projects via their macOS Mojave VM image.

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/

No

Auditing

Yes

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

Yes

Additional notes

List of features is based on Semaphore 2.0

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

Cypress Parallel testing on Codefresh.io

Running Rails tests in parallel on Semaphore CI 2.0 with dynamic test files split

CodeFresh CI parallelism integration

Semaphore CI parallelism integration

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