Drone vs Rancher Pipelines comparison of Continuous Integration servers

	Drone https://drone.io	Rancher Pipelines https://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.x/en/project-admin/tools/pipelines/
Unique feature	Customization	DevOps tool for container orchestration
Type of product	SaaS / On Premise	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 project
Predictable pricing	Yes Predictable pricing based on number of users and repositories. They have a calculator to help determine cost.	Yes It's free!
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 Paid support available: https://rancher.com/pricing/
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 You can run multiple parallel steps within a build stage
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 Unclear from the documentation (probably not)
Containers support / Build environment	Yes By default, they offer Docker support for the CI/CD job runners.	Yes
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 Not particularly clear, but it appears you can monitor stats in a Grafana dashboard: https://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.x/en/project-admin/tools/monitoring/
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 User management is available, with specific roles assigned, or permissions to certain resources and projects
Self-hosted option	Yes	Yes
Hosted plans / SaaS	Yes	No
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 as code (YML files), but also manageable via the UI
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.	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.	N/A Pipelines / CI is just a small part of Rancher. No specific support mentioned.
Specific language support: JavaScript	No (partial) No specific 1st party support, but the plugin marketplace features an NPM authoring and an NPM authentication plugin.	N/A Pipelines / CI is just a small part of Rancher. No specific support mentioned.
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 available for GitLab, GitHub and Bitbucket
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 available. It provides introspection and documentation: https://github.com/rancher/api-spec/blob/master/specification.md#filtering. It should offer enough access to allow building whatever customizations or integrations with 3rd party tools deemed necessary.
Auditing	Yes	Yes Allows logging to various systems (Kafka, Elastic, etc) which should make audit possible
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!	Rancher is a full software stack for container orchestration, going as far as building their own Linux distribution (RancherOS). Using Rancher seems more like a decision to be made considering all other features Rancher offers, not just the CI server. Also worth noting that Rancher uses Jenkins under the hood, but the engine is locked so projects can't just be migrated between the two.

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 Rancher Pipelines comparison of Continuous Integration servers What are the differences between Drone and Rancher Pipelines?

Drone

Rancher Pipelines

Customization

DevOps tool for container orchestration

SaaS / On Premise

On Premise

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

N/A

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

N/A

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

N/A

Yes

Yes

N/A

No (partial)

N/A

No (partial)

N/A

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

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

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

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