Knapsack Pro

CodeShip vs Drone comparison of Continuous Integration servers
What are the differences between CodeShip and Drone?

CodeShip

https://codeship.com

Drone

https://drone.io
Unique feature

Runs on own infrastructure

Customization

Type of product

SaaS

SaaS / On Premise

Offers a free plan

Yes

Free for up to 100 builds per month

Yes

The cloud version is free for open source projects. Also offers a free plan for any project, with a limit of 5000 builds per year. The on-premise version is available as a Docker image.

Predictable pricing

Yes

Clearly defined, calculator, expensive

Yes

Predictable pricing based on number of users and repositories. They have a calculator to help determine cost.

Support / SLA

Yes

Offers great dev support

N/A

It's not clear what their support commitment is. They have a fairly active community on Discourse, for community 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

Via easy Yaml config file, limited by the specs of the machine you have purchased

Yes

Pipeline task configuration allows running tasks in parallel

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

No

Yes

Pipelines can be configured to run on multiple machines, although they recommend that to be an option only if paralellizing tasks and scaling vertically doesn't suffice. They even support multi-platform distribution (ie: running tasks on various operating systems)

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

Native support for Docker

Yes

By default, they offer Docker support for the CI/CD job runners.

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

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

Yes

Full with organization and teams management

Yes

They offer in-depth documentation for user and server management. A lot of it can be done via the drone CLI tool, which seems to be the focal point of the docs.

Self-hosted option

No

Yes

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

Yes

Easily configurable pipelines via YML files.

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

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?

N/A

Yes

Drone CI allows integrating plugins into the CI/CD process. They have a list of available community plugins and provide documentation on building your own. Plugins are Docker containers which plug directly into the CI/CD process.

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

Fairly complete documentation on Ruby projects: https://documentation.codeship.com/pro/languages-frameworks/ruby/

No (partial)

No specific support, but they do provide sufficient documentation on getting a Ruby project up and running, including a multi-platform example.

Specific language support: JavaScript

Yes

Fairly complete documentation on Node.js projects: https://documentation.codeship.com/pro/languages-frameworks/nodejs/

No (partial)

No specific 1st party support, but the plugin marketplace features an NPM authoring and an NPM authentication plugin.

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

Yes

Easy to integrate a bunch of 3rd party services, such as Code Climate, Codecov, Rancher, Pager Duty and many more: https://documentation.codeship.com/general/integrations/codeclimate/

Yes

Integrates well with source code management platforms (1st party support for GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket) as well as other systems via 3rd party plugins.

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

Custom integrations are possible: https://documentation.codeship.com/general/integrations/custom-integration/

Yes

Drone provides a feature-rich REST API, as well as an official Go SDK for it.

Auditing

N/A

Yes

Additional notes

CodeShip Pro gives you a lot more flexibility when defining your CI/CD process, plus you get your own AWS instance, so your build doesn't run on a shared server (this can be important for HIPAA or GDPR compliance, etc).

The fact that Drone works with any source code manager, as well as the fact that it can run tasks on multiple platforms makes it stand out from the rest. Very nifty!

CodeShip Parallelisation - Parallel Test Pipelines how to run Ruby & JavaScript tests faster

CodeShip parallelism integration

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