Heroku CIhttps://www.heroku.com/continuous-integration |
Buildkitehttps://buildkite.com |
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Unique feature |
Heroku Flow
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Runs on own infrastructure, API
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Type of product |
SaaS
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SaaS
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Offers a free plan |
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. |
Yes Free for open source projects and selected organizations |
Predictable pricing |
Yes Clearly defined, offers a calculator. |
Yes Clearly defined monthly and annual plans |
Support / SLA |
Yes
|
Yes Depending on the plan, ranging from community support, all the way to an assigned Technical Manager, SLAs and live chat 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 Up to 16 nodes. You can ask Heroku support to enable up to 32 parallel dynos. |
Yes Run an unlimited number of concurrent agents, and an unlimited number of concurrent jobs. You can run your tests in isolated Docker container per agent. |
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
|
Yes Run an unlimited number of concurrent agents, and an unlimited number of concurrent jobs |
Containers support / Build environment |
Yes Builds run in isolation on new dynos (Heroku containers). Wide support via buildpacks: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/buildpacks |
Yes Since the agents run on your own infra, you're free to do whatever |
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 Great visual overview built-in. |
Yes The Buildkite UI features great vizualisations that feature build times, error rates, and more. |
Management support
How easy is it to manage users / projects / assign roles and permissions and so on |
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. |
Yes
|
Self-hosted option |
No
|
No
|
Hosted plans / SaaS |
Yes
|
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 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. |
Yes Pipelines are defined using an Yaml config file and allow for great flexibility in defining what each step of the process does. |
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 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) |
Yes Integrations for GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket as well as SSO support (Google Suite, SAML, GraphQL API). Growing number of community plugins: https://buildkite.com/plugins |
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 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. |
Yes You can find useful plugins like https://github.com/sj26/rspec-buildkite https://github.com/ticky/simplecov-buildkite etc |
Specific language support: JavaScript |
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. |
No
|
Integrations
1st party support for common tools (like Slack notifications, various VCS platforms, etc) |
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. |
Yes Integrations for GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket as well as SSO support (Google Suite, SAML, GraphQL API) |
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 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. |
Yes Great GraphQL API, allows building your own dashboard with ease |
Auditing |
Yes
|
Yes
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Additional notes |
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