Knapsack Pro

GoCD vs Cirrus CI comparison of Continuous Integration servers
What are the differences between GoCD and Cirrus CI?

GoCD

https://www.gocd.org

Cirrus CI

https://cirrus-ci.org
Unique feature

Free, open source CI/CD server

FreeBSD support

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

Free for open source projects

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

Besides the seat (per-user access) you need to buy compute credits for running the build, priced differently depending on the machine you're running builds on.

Support / SLA

Yes

Paid support available for enterprise plans

N/A

Not clear if they offer any real SLA on 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

There are limits on how many tasks can be run in parallel for the free tier builds: https://cirrus-ci.org/faq/#are-there-any-limits

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

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

Native Docker and Kubernetes support

Yes

Allows containers or VMs for every major operating system.

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

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.

N/A

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

Defined via YML config files

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

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

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)

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.

Yes

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

No (partial)

No specific support from what I can gather, but it does provide documentation for Ruby, including integration with the knapsack_pro gem.

Specific language support: JavaScript

Yes

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

No

No specific support and no documentation on setting up a CI/CD process for a Javascript project.

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

Integrates well with GitHub - the whole CI/CD process starts with a commit to a GitHub repo.

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

Provides a pretty nifty GraphQL API which allows querying the Cirrus CI Schema, as well as webhooks support for other types of custom integrations (such as Slack or IRC notifications, for example). They also added support for GitHub actions

Auditing

Yes

N/A

From what we can tell, there's no specific support for auditing changes in the Cirrus CI config (other than what is traceable via git commits to the YML config file)

Additional notes

Seems to be used by companies with a solid engineering background (Google)

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