Drone vs Jenkins comparison of Continuous Integration servers

	Drone https://drone.io	Jenkins https://jenkins.io
Unique feature	Customization	Plugins
Type of product	SaaS / On Premise	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 Free, open source software
Predictable pricing	Yes Predictable pricing based on number of users and repositories. They have a calculator to help determine cost.	Yes Jenkins is free software, the only costs are those assigned to running your infrastructure.
Support / SLA	N/A It's not clear what their support commitment is. They have a fairly active community on Discourse, for community support.	No (partial) No official support available, or SLAs. However, Jenkins' popularity ensures you'll find support in various places (official Jenkins forum, IRC, 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 (partial) Jenkins allows builds to be run in parallel, but all builds share the same environment and there can be issues arising from shared resources such as the filesystem.
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 (partial) Jenkins has a concept of master server and agents, for distributing builds, but setting that up requires quite a bit of manual work from a sysadmin, compared to other options.
Containers support / Build environment	Yes By default, they offer Docker support for the CI/CD job runners.	No (partial) By default, Jenkins runs all builds in the same environment as the build server itself, which can lead to numerous issues and is generally not a good practice. Some plugins address this issue, but they need to be manually installed.
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 via the Blue Ocean project (part of Jenkins): https://jenkins.io/doc/book/blueocean/dashboard/#dashboard
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 In practice, for Jenkins it usually means that there's someone solely in charge of the Jenkins instance (configuration, management). Collaboration features built into other similar products are lacking, as are governance features (no easy way to tell from Jenkins alone _who_ is responsabile for a broken build, for example), even if your Version Control Server of choice can give that information (via `git blame` for example).
Self-hosted option	Yes	Yes Jenkins is Open Source Software, and self-hosting is the only way to use it.
Hosted plans / SaaS	Yes	No Only available for self-hosting.
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 Offers extensive support for custom pipelines, either through the Jenkins Pipeline DSL, written in a Jenkinsfile, either through the Web UI. Also, their Blue Ocean project is a great tool for building pipelines: https://jenkins.io/projects/blueocean/
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 Has ready-made integrations for standard reports such as JUnit test results.
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.	> 1000 community plugins Thanks to it's popularity, there's a large selection of available plugins for Jenkins. They can all be easily browsed over at https://plugins.jenkins.io/. The downside is that almost anything you want to do in Jenkins requires installing a plugin, even core functionality such as parsing output or checking out source code.
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 (Partial) RSpec and Cucumber test suites can be integrated into Jenkins thanks to the large pool of available plugins and Ruby gems. Jenkins only understands the JUnit format natively.
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 (Partial) Jest, AVA and other test suites can be integrated into Jenkins thanks to the large pool of available plugins and NPM packages. Jenkins only understands the JUnit format natively.
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 Allows integrations with other tools (ie: Slack, GitHub) or communication protocols (ie: email) via it's rich plugin suite
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 For use-cases that the +1k plugins don't cover, the Jenkins Remote API is yet another way to integrate Jenkins into your favorite tools or internal products.
Auditing	Yes	No Jenkins instances are really managed by a sole user with administrative privileges. This can lead to various issues when it comes to audit trails / accountability.
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 Jenkins comparison of Continuous Integration servers What are the differences between Drone and Jenkins?

Drone

Jenkins

Customization

Plugins

SaaS / On Premise

Self-hosted / On Premise

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

N/A

No (partial)

Yes

Yes (partial)

Yes

Yes (partial)

Yes

No (partial)

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

N/A

Yes

Yes

> 1000 community plugins

No (partial)

Yes (Partial)

No (partial)

Yes (Partial)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

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Continuous delivery pipelines in Jenkins and CI parallelisation

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

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

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