Knapsack Pro
Knapsack Pro
Heroku CIhttps://www.heroku.com/continuous-integration |
Rancher Pipelineshttps://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.x/en/project-admin/tools/pipelines/ |
|
|---|---|---|
| Unique feature |
Heroku Flow
|
DevOps tool for container orchestration
|
| Type of product |
SaaS
|
On Premise
|
| 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, open source project |
| Predictable pricing |
Yes Clearly defined, offers a calculator. |
Yes It's free! |
| Support / SLA |
Yes
|
Yes Paid support available: https://rancher.com/pricing/ |
|
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 You can run multiple parallel steps within a build stage |
|
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 Unclear from the documentation (probably not) |
| 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
|
|
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 Not particularly clear, but it appears you can monitor stats in a Grafana dashboard: https://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.x/en/project-admin/tools/monitoring/ |
|
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 User management is available, with specific roles assigned, or permissions to certain resources and projects |
| Self-hosted option |
No
|
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 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 as code (YML files), but also manageable via the UI |
|
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) |
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 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. |
N/A Pipelines / CI is just a small part of Rancher. No specific support mentioned. |
| 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. |
N/A Pipelines / CI is just a small part of Rancher. No specific support mentioned. |
|
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 available for GitLab, GitHub and Bitbucket |
|
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 REST API available. It provides introspection and documentation: https://github.com/rancher/api-spec/blob/master/specification.md#filtering. It should offer enough access to allow building whatever customizations or integrations with 3rd party tools deemed necessary. |
| Auditing |
Yes
|
Yes Allows logging to various systems (Kafka, Elastic, etc) which should make audit possible |
| Additional notes |
|
Rancher is a full software stack for container orchestration, going as far as building their own Linux distribution (RancherOS). Using Rancher seems more like a decision to be made considering all other features Rancher offers, not just the CI server. Also worth noting that Rancher uses Jenkins under the hood, but the engine is locked so projects can't just be migrated between the two. |