Drone vs Circle CI comparison of Continuous Integration servers

	Drone https://drone.io	Circle CI https://circleci.com
Unique feature	Customization	Premium Support
Type of product	SaaS / On Premise	SaaS, Self-hosted / On Premise
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 Provides a free plan for it's SaaS solution, for up to 1000 build minutes per month, 1 container and 1 concurrent job. On top of this, it has a special Free Tier for open source projects, which extend the number of containers and concurrent jobs available.
Predictable pricing	Yes Predictable pricing based on number of users and repositories. They have a calculator to help determine cost.	Yes Provides a calculator, based on the number of concurrent jobs and containers, which can be used to determine pricing before purchase. They also give a guideline based on the number of developers you employ (2-3 containers per full-time developer)
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 While it's community is not quite as vibrant as it is for Jenkins, CircleCI even offers support premium support for companies who cannot afford any downtime in their CI/CD pipelines (https://circleci.com/support/premium-support/). For the regular plans, all plans except the free tier offer official email support. The free tier only includes community support (Discuss, StackOverflow, etc.)
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 CircleCI can run builds in parallel, each build in a completely isolated environment by using containers.
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 The SaaS version distributes builds by default, while the self-hosted version has all the tools built-in for managing the cluster of builder machines.
Containers support / Build environment	Yes By default, they offer Docker support for the CI/CD job runners.	Yes CircleCI runs every build in a container, or VM, ensuring an isolated, local scope for each build. The environment is also reset with each build, which can highlight hard-to-track issues related to assumptions about the environment that the project is deployed to.
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 Available by default in Circle CI: https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/status/#section=jobs. Aditionally, the Insights Dashboard provides a very useful overview on build times, error rates and status for your projects: https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/insights/#section=jobs
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.	No (partial) Using the Cloud plan for Circle CI requires no dedicated person for maintanence / management of the service. The CircleCI Server option (self-hosted) is also hassle free, as the process of installing and managing CircleCI and it's dependencies is automated. Developers are also given SSH acces to the builds (not the whole environment), while sys-admins can work on the host machine without worry about affecting the builds (which are containerized).
Self-hosted option	Yes	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 Easily configurable pipelines via YML files.	Yes Pipelines in CircleCI are defined declaratively using an Yaml config file. CircleCI has special provisions for storing secrets in these 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	Yes Reports are available
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, partially While CircleCI doesn't natively support plugins, it's core features address all of the core functionality that a CI/CD service needs. For integrating with other platforms or tools, there are integrations such as https://slack.com/apps/A0F7VRE7N-circleci. Certain jobs are available as CircleCI Orbs: https://circleci.com/orbs/
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 For collecting test metadata and coverage, there is built-in support for Ruby (specifically, Cucumber and RSpec). Setting this up takes very little time and is well-documented on CircleCI's docs.
Specific language support: JavaScript	No (partial) No specific 1st party support, but the plugin marketplace features an NPM authoring and an NPM authentication plugin.	Yes For collecting test metadata and coverage, there is built-in support for Javascript. For code coverage, CircleCI understands Istanbul output (Jest also uses Istanbul for the code coverage reports), while for test metadata, the JUnit output format is natively supported.
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 Available as CircleCI Orbs: https://circleci.com/orbs/
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 REST API documentation available at https://circleci.com/docs/api/#api-overview. Creating Orbs is also documented at https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/orb-author/#introduction
Auditing	Yes	N/A
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!

Programming Language	Supported test runners	Installation guide	Knapsack Pro Library README / Source
Ruby	RSpec, Cucumber, Minitest, test-unit, Spinach, Turnip	Install	knapsack_pro gem
JavaScript	Cypress.io	Install	@knapsack-pro/cypress
JavaScript	Jest	Install	@knapsack-pro/jest
JavaScript / TypeScript	Any test runner in JavaScript	How to build native integration with Knapsack Pro API to run tests in parallel for any test runner	@knapsack-pro/core
Any programming language	Any test runner	How to build a custom Knapsack Pro API client from scratch in any programming language	-

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

Drone

Circle CI

Customization

Premium Support

SaaS / On Premise

SaaS, Self-hosted / On Premise

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

N/A

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

No (partial)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

N/A

Yes

Yes

Yes, partially

No (partial)

Yes

No (partial)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

N/A

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

How to run parallel tests on Drone and Circle CI
to execute 1-hour test suite in 2 minutes?

How much can you save with faster tests
on Drone and Circle CI?