Knapsack Pro

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

Drone

https://drone.io

CodeShip

https://codeship.com
Unique feature

Customization

Runs on own infrastructure

Type of product

SaaS / On Premise

SaaS

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 up to 100 builds per month

Predictable pricing

Yes

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

Yes

Clearly defined, calculator, expensive

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

Offers great dev 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

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

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)

No

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

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

Yes

Native support for Docker

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

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

Full with organization and teams management

Self-hosted option

Yes

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

Easily configurable pipelines via YML files.

Yes

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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/

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

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

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!

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).

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

CodeShip parallelism integration

Start using Knapsack Pro with Drone or CodeShip

Sign up and speed up your tests.

Get started free