Heroku CI vs Netlify Build comparison of Continuous Integration servers

	Heroku CI https://www.heroku.com/continuous-integration	Netlify Build https://www.netlify.com/products/build/
Unique feature	Heroku Flow	Deploy your sites to global Netlify infrastructure Every commit gets its own deployed version. Automatically attach a new Deploy Preview at a unique permanent URL whenever you submit a Pull/Merge Request. Set Netlify Build to deploy every branch in the repository for unlimited staging environments.
Type of product	SaaS	SaaS
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 300 build minutes/month, 1 concurrent CI build
Predictable pricing	Yes Clearly defined, offers a calculator.	Yes Extra 500 build minutes costs $7/month. User seat $15/user/month.
Support / SLA	Yes	Yes 99.99% uptime SLA for Starter and Pro plan. Business plan has negotiable SLA.
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 Starter plan (free) has only 1 concurrent build but Pro plan has 3 concurrent builds included.
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 High-Performance Builds - The premium build environment gives more concurrency, processing power and asynchronous deploys.
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 When you trigger a build on Netlify, their buildbot starts a Docker container to build your website. The buildbot will look for instructions about required languages and software needed to run your command before running build command. The instructions are called dependencies, and how you declare them depends on the programming languages and tools used in build. Build image selection is available. Until recently, all Netlify sites were built using the same build image. Netlify is experimenting with allowing customers to select from multiple Docker images with different operating systems and software versions.
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 Simple dashboard to see CI builds. Other than CI analytics Netlify has Netlify Analytics that brings data captured directly from their servers for your website.
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 Team members managment. Role-based access control only in business plan.
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, partially Simple steps, define your own steps in bash commands
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	No
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)	No There are only small helpful things like incoming webhooks so other services can trigger Netlify deploys, and send outgoing webhooks as a deploy starts, succeeds, or fails.
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 It has support for Ruby.
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.	Yes It has support for JavaScript.
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 Netlify has incoming webhooks so other services can trigger Netlify deploys, and send outgoing webhooks as a deploy starts, succeeds, or fails. For instance you can integrate it with Slack.
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.	No
Auditing	Yes	N/A
Additional notes

Programming Language	Supported test runners	Installation guide	Knapsack Pro Library README / Source
Ruby	RSpec, Cucumber, Minitest, test-unit, Spinach, Turnip	Install	knapsack_pro gem
JavaScript	Cypress.io	Install	@knapsack-pro/cypress
JavaScript	Jest	Install	@knapsack-pro/jest
JavaScript / TypeScript	Any test runner in JavaScript	How to build native integration with Knapsack Pro API to run tests in parallel for any test runner	@knapsack-pro/core
Any programming language	Any test runner	How to build a custom Knapsack Pro API client from scratch in any programming language	-

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

Heroku CI

Netlify Build

Heroku Flow

Deploy your sites to global Netlify infrastructure

SaaS

SaaS

No (partial)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

N/A

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes, partially

Yes

No

Yes

No

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

No

Yes

N/A

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Heroku CI parallelism integration

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

How to run parallel tests on Heroku CI and Netlify Build
to execute 1-hour test suite in 2 minutes?

How much can you save with faster tests
on Heroku CI and Netlify Build?