Knapsack Pro

GoCD vs Bitbucket Pipelines comparison of Continuous Integration servers
What are the differences between GoCD and Bitbucket Pipelines?

GoCD

https://www.gocd.org

Bitbucket Pipelines

https://bitbucket.org/product/features/pipelines
Unique feature

Free, open source CI/CD server

Best Jira integration possible

Type of product

On Premise

SaaS / On Premise

Offers a free plan

Yes

Free, open source software. They provide some Enterprise add-ons and support at a cost though.

Yes

Offers a very modest free cloud plan, limited to 5 users, 50 minutes of build time per month and 1GB storage. There's no free self-hosted version, but they do offer a $10 one-time payment plan for 10 users (build time and storage is only limited by your infrastructure)

Predictable pricing

Yes

For the Enterprise plans, they specify very clear tiers depending on the number of pipelines (directly correlated with the size of the organization)

Yes

Pricing is based on amount of users for both the cloud and on premise versions. The cloud offering has different tiers depending on build times and storage.

Support / SLA

Yes

Paid support available for enterprise plans

Yes

Dedicated tehnical 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

Yes

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

They specify supporting tools like TLB (http://test-load-balancer.github.io/) which would require distributed builds.

N/A

Documentation is unclear, but it's reasonable to assume that distributed builds for the on premise version are not an issue.

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

Native Docker and Kubernetes support

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

One of the greatest things about GoCD is their Value Stream Map which allows tracing every pipeline through every stage, from code commit, to testing and deployment. They also offer various dashboards for seeing status at a glance.

Yes

Excellent overview and contextual feedback.

Management support
How easy is it to manage users / projects / assign roles and permissions and so on

Yes

Allows managing users, assigning roles, and even defining user groups with specific rights for certain pipelines.

Yes

Self-hosted option

Yes

Yes

Hosted plans / SaaS

No

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

Fairly advanced support, from config files (YML, Groovy, JSON, etc) to API and UI interface for building and managing pipelines.

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.

Yes

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

Wide array of plugins available: https://www.gocd.org/plugins/#artifact (although they seem to pride themselves on the fact that most common operations / needs are first class citizens, so no plugins needed)

Yes

Large collection of available apps: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/apps-and-integrations-675189068.html

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.

Yes

Available via plugins, such as the Gem repository poller: https://www.gocd.org/plugins/#package-repo

Yes

Clear, concise documentation on setting up a Ruby project with Bitbucket pipelines: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/ruby-with-bitbucket-pipelines-872005618.html

Specific language support: JavaScript

Yes

Available via plugins, such as the npm repository poller: https://www.gocd.org/plugins/#package-repo

Yes

Clear, concise documentation on setting up a Javascript project with Bitbucket pipelines: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/javascript-node-js-with-bitbucket-pipelines-873891287.html

Integrations
1st party support for common tools (like Slack notifications, various VCS platforms, etc)

Yes

Integrations are also available via plugins (for notifications, LDAP authorization, Elastic agents and more): https://www.gocd.org/plugins/#notification

Yes

Large collection of available integrations: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/apps-and-integrations-675189068.html

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

You can build on top of GoCD in a variety of ways, from writing custom plugins to using the CCTray feed provided by it.

Yes

Auditing

Yes

Yes

Additional notes

There's some confusion regarding Bitbucket Pipelines and Bamboo, where they overlap and where not. Atlassian discontinued their Bamboo Cloud offering ~3 years ago, so at a high-level they are different products in that regard. What can be said about both is that they are top-tier tools for high-demand engineering teams, especially valuable as long as the other tools in the Atlassian suite are adopted (Bitbucket is a must for Bitbucket pipelines, being just one if it's features, but other tools like Jira are not to be dismissed either). It does seem like Bitbucket Pipelines is the more mature product of the two though.

Start using Knapsack Pro with GoCD or Bitbucket Pipelines

Sign up and speed up your tests.

Get started free