Knapsack Pro

Jenkins vs CodeFresh CI comparison of Continuous Integration servers
What are the differences between Jenkins and CodeFresh CI?

Jenkins

https://jenkins.io

CodeFresh CI

https://codefresh.io
Unique feature

Plugins

Built for Kubernetes

Type of product

Self-hosted / On Premise

SaaS / On Premise

Offers a free plan

Yes

Free, open source software

Yes

Offers a minimal free plan (only one concurrent job, 3 users, various other limitations)

Predictable pricing

Yes

Jenkins is free software, the only costs are those assigned to running your infrastructure.

Yes

Easy price calculator, based on the number of machines, concurrent jobs and special features.

Support / SLA

No (partial)

No official support available, or SLAs. However, Jenkins' popularity ensures you'll find support in various places (official Jenkins forum, IRC, StackOverflow etc.)

Yes

Paid support for enterprise plans

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 (partial)

Jenkins allows builds to be run in parallel, but all builds share the same environment and there can be issues arising from shared resources such as the filesystem.

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

Yes (partial)

Jenkins has a concept of master server and agents, for distributing builds, but setting that up requires quite a bit of manual work from a sysadmin, compared to other options.

N/A

Unclear from the documentation (probably not)

Containers support / Build environment

No (partial)

By default, Jenkins runs all builds in the same environment as the build server itself, which can lead to numerous issues and is generally not a good practice. Some plugins address this issue, but they need to be manually installed.

Yes

Built for Kubernetes, so containers are a must.

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

Available via the Blue Ocean project (part of Jenkins): https://jenkins.io/doc/book/blueocean/dashboard/#dashboard

Yes

They seem to provide pretty great status overview, depending on the type of plan you're using.

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

No

In practice, for Jenkins it usually means that there's someone solely in charge of the Jenkins instance (configuration, management). Collaboration features built into other similar products are lacking, as are governance features (no easy way to tell from Jenkins alone _who_ is responsabile for a broken build, for example), even if your Version Control Server of choice can give that information (via `git blame` for example).

Yes

Self-hosted option

Yes

Jenkins is Open Source Software, and self-hosting is the only way to use it.

Yes

Only available for enterprise plans

Hosted plans / SaaS

No

Only available for self-hosting.

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

Offers extensive support for custom pipelines, either through the Jenkins Pipeline DSL, written in a Jenkinsfile, either through the Web UI. Also, their Blue Ocean project is a great tool for building pipelines: https://jenkins.io/projects/blueocean/

Yes

Pipelines as code (YML files)

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

Has ready-made integrations for standard reports such as JUnit test results.

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?

> 1000 community plugins

Thanks to it's popularity, there's a large selection of available plugins for Jenkins. They can all be easily browsed over at https://plugins.jenkins.io/. The downside is that almost anything you want to do in Jenkins requires installing a plugin, even core functionality such as parsing output or checking out source code.

Yes

Every step in a CodeFresh pipeline is a Docker image. A wide array of steps is available over at https://steps.codefresh.io/

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 (Partial)

RSpec and Cucumber test suites can be integrated into Jenkins thanks to the large pool of available plugins and Ruby gems. Jenkins only understands the JUnit format natively.

Yes

Specific documentation for a sample Ruby-on-Rails project: https://codefresh.io/docs/docs/learn-by-example/ruby/

Specific language support: JavaScript

Yes (Partial)

Jest, AVA and other test suites can be integrated into Jenkins thanks to the large pool of available plugins and NPM packages. Jenkins only understands the JUnit format natively.

Yes

There's an 'npm publish' step available, and they also provide a few Javascript examples over at https://codefresh.io/docs/docs/learn-by-example/nodejs/ (one is just a sample, one is a little more complex, using Redis, Python, etc., and one is a React App)

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

Yes

Allows integrations with other tools (ie: Slack, GitHub) or communication protocols (ie: email) via it's rich plugin suite

Yes

https://steps.codefresh.io

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

For use-cases that the +1k plugins don't cover, the Jenkins Remote API is yet another way to integrate Jenkins into your favorite tools or internal products.

Yes

Rich REST API available, well documented at https://g.codefresh.io/api/

Auditing

No

Jenkins instances are really managed by a sole user with administrative privileges. This can lead to various issues when it comes to audit trails / accountability.

Yes

Audit logs available: https://codefresh.io/docs/docs/enterprise/audit-logs/

Additional notes

Continuous delivery pipelines in Jenkins and CI parallelisation

How to use Codefresh matrix parallel steps to run parallel tests in Ruby on Rails

Cypress Parallel testing on Codefresh.io

Jenkins parallelism integration

CodeFresh CI parallelism integration

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