Knapsack Pro

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

GoCD

https://www.gocd.org

Heroku CI

https://www.heroku.com/continuous-integration
Unique feature

Free, open source CI/CD server

Heroku Flow

Type of product

On Premise

SaaS

Offers a free plan

Yes

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

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

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

Yes

Clearly defined, offers a calculator.

Support / SLA

Yes

Paid support available for enterprise plans

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

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

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

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

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

Great visual overview built-in.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Yes

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

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

Yes

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to leverage Heroku CI to run your tests faster?

Introduction to Knapsack Pro Heroku add-on

Heroku CI parallelism integration

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