Dronehttps://drone.io |
Buildkitehttps://buildkite.com |
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Unique feature |
Customization
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Runs on own infrastructure, API
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Type of product |
SaaS / On Premise
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SaaS
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Offers a free plan |
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. |
Yes Free for open source projects and selected organizations |
Predictable pricing |
Yes Predictable pricing based on number of users and repositories. They have a calculator to help determine cost. |
Yes Clearly defined monthly and annual plans |
Support / SLA |
N/A It's not clear what their support commitment is. They have a fairly active community on Discourse, for community support. |
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 Pipeline task configuration allows running tasks in parallel |
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 |
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) |
Yes Run an unlimited number of concurrent agents, and an unlimited number of concurrent jobs |
Containers support / Build environment |
Yes By default, they offer Docker support for the CI/CD job runners. |
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
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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 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. |
Yes
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Self-hosted option |
Yes
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No
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Hosted plans / SaaS |
Yes
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Yes
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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 Easily configurable pipelines via 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. |
N/A
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Yes
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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 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. |
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. |
No (partial) No specific support, but they do provide sufficient documentation on getting a Ruby project up and running, including a multi-platform example. |
Yes You can find useful plugins like https://github.com/sj26/rspec-buildkite https://github.com/ticky/simplecov-buildkite etc |
Specific language support: JavaScript |
No (partial) No specific 1st party support, but the plugin marketplace features an NPM authoring and an NPM authentication plugin. |
No
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Integrations
1st party support for common tools (like Slack notifications, various VCS platforms, etc) |
Yes Integrates well with source code management platforms (1st party support for GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket) as well as other systems via 3rd party plugins. |
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 Drone provides a feature-rich REST API, as well as an official Go SDK for it. |
Yes Great GraphQL API, allows building your own dashboard with ease |
Auditing |
Yes
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Yes
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Additional notes |
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! |
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