Knapsack Pro

Google Cloud Build vs TeamCity comparison of Continuous Integration servers
What are the differences between Google Cloud Build and TeamCity?

Google Cloud Build

https://cloud.google.com/cloud-build/

TeamCity

https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/
Unique feature

Security / speed

Technology awareness

Type of product

SaaS

On Premise

Offers a free plan

Yes

Google offers a generous 120 build-minutes per day plan, not including time spent waiting in the queue.

Yes

They offer a great free professional plan, limited to 100 build configurations and 3 build agents. From there, you pay for each aditional agent you want (discounts if you purchase more than 1 agent at a time). They also provide a free plan for open source, non commercial projects, and steep 50% discounts for startups.

Predictable pricing

Yes (partial)

While it's clear what the cost is (priced per build-minute), figuring out costs can be a hassle, especially as the price can vary quite a bit depending on commits to the project.

Yes

They have a clear list of prices per number of agents.

Support / SLA

Yes

Even available as a paid add-on, for 24/7 phone support for example: https://cloud.google.com/support/

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

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

N/A

N/A

No specific mention that we could find, but judging by the wording used it would appear that tasks can be divided accross different machines.

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

Native Docker and Packer support

Yes

First class Docker support, among others

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

Great system overview, even allows building your own dashboards in order to see everything you're interested in at a glance.

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

Yes

Yes

Allows assigning roles, LDAP and Windows domain integrations and more.

Self-hosted option

No (partial)

While there's no self hosted variant, they provide a local Cloud Build image which allows you to build locally, very valuable for debugging.

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

Configurable via YML and/or JSON files.

Yes

Unlike most options in the CI/CD space, TeamCity allows defining pipelines using a Kotlin-based DSL. This unlocks a lot of potential, such as templates for common CI/CD tasks, and deep integration with various IDEs (not just JetBrains IDEs)

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

Something that stands out from the rest, allows integrating third party reports, as long as they produce HTML output.

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

There are predefined images built for Cloud Build, which can be integrated right away in your build process. Some of them are first party: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/cloud-builders and others are community contributed: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/cloud-builders-community

Yes

JetBrains has a rich ecosystem of plugins in general.

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.

N/A

Nothing specific as far as we can tell

Yes

Using what they call 'Technology Awareness', promises great intehration with Ruby projects, with features such as testing framework support, static analysis and code coverage available out of the box, with no additional work required: https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/features/technology_awareness.html

Specific language support: JavaScript

Yes (partial)

npm, yarn and jasmine-node support via predefined Cloud Build steps.

No (partial)

Unlike Ruby, there's no first class support for Javascript, although they do advertise the fact that their large collections of plugins can cover any use case for Javascript projects: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/teamcity

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

Yes

Various integrations available via custom Build Steps, as well as natively (Kubernetes, Docker, etc.)

Yes

Great cloud integrations (Google Cloud, AWS, VMWare, etc) as well as 'key' integrations (VSCode, Jira, even NuGet)

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

REST API and comprehensive CLI tool, as well as a pub/sub system for build notifications.

Yes

Unlike most tools, which offer just a Rest API, TeamCity provides ample opportunity for extension via plugins, their own API, and service messages (formatted messages on stdout)

Auditing

Yes

Yes

Additional notes

Not unlike other Google tools, there's a strong emphasis on allowing developers to build on top of the service. Becomes more valuable if you're using other Google Cloud services as well.

Great ecosystem, with a strong focus on integration with other tools (not only JetBrains).

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