Drone vs Heroku CI comparison of Continuous Integration servers

	Drone https://drone.io	Heroku CI https://www.heroku.com/continuous-integration
Unique feature	Customization	Heroku Flow
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.	No (partial) For CI only, the cost starts at $10 for pipeline, plus a variable amount depending on how long the build runs for (prorated per second). The servers used for CI cost $250 for a full month, which means you get about 3 hours for $1. For hosting, there's a free tier, limited to 1 web/1 worker with 512 MB RAM. One of the more annoying limitations is that free dynos are put into sleep mode after 30 min. of inactivity, which increases loading times considerably.
Predictable pricing	Yes Predictable pricing based on number of users and repositories. They have a calculator to help determine cost.	Yes Clearly defined, offers a calculator.
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
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 Up to 16 nodes. You can ask Heroku support to enable up to 32 parallel dynos.
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)	N/A
Containers support / Build environment	Yes By default, they offer Docker support for the CI/CD job runners.	Yes Builds run in isolation on new dynos (Heroku containers). Wide support via buildpacks: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/buildpacks
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 Great visual overview built-in.
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 One of the more mature solutions for teams on the market, Heroku Teams is available for free for 1-5 people, and comes at a cost for 6+ team members: https://www.heroku.com/pricing#team-comparison. Allows setting roles and app-level permissions with ease.
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 Very easy and intuitive process that allows defining a pipeline from code commit, to code review (review apps), user acceptance testing and production deployment, via Heroku Flow. Works best if the project is also hosted on Heroku.
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
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 Wide array of 3rd party add-ons available via Heroku Elements: https://elements.heroku.com/addons. Custom buildpacks are also available for almost any stack you might be using (over 5500 buildpacks available at the moment)
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 Although not specifically built in to Heroku, it's guaranteed that any Ruby specific need that might arise would be solved via add-ons, buildpacks or other integrations available.
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 Although not specifically built in to Heroku, it's guaranteed that any Javascript specific need that might arise would be solved via add-ons, buildpacks or other integrations available.
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 The strongest built-in integrations are with GitHub and Slack (ChatOps) but even allows integrating 3rd party CI servers in the workflow if you so require, among others.
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 Offers a feature rich API that allows CRUD operations on the most important features, such as promoting an app to production, or inspecting a specific pipeline.
Auditing	Yes	Yes
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 Heroku CI comparison of Continuous Integration servers What are the differences between Drone and Heroku CI?

Drone

Heroku CI

Customization

Heroku Flow

SaaS / On Premise

SaaS

Yes

No (partial)

Yes

Yes

N/A

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

N/A

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

N/A

Yes

Yes

Yes

No (partial)

Yes

No (partial)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

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

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

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