Knapsack Pro
Knapsack Pro
Jenkinshttps://jenkins.io |
Semaphore CIhttps://semaphoreci.com |
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|---|---|---|
| Unique feature |
Plugins
|
Autoscaling made easy / Great CLI
|
| Type of product |
Self-hosted / On Premise
|
SaaS
|
| Offers a free plan |
Yes Free, open source software |
Yes 1,300 service minutes every month. Plans to release a free tier for open source projects. |
| Predictable pricing |
Yes Jenkins is free software, the only costs are those assigned to running your infrastructure. |
Yes Semaphore doesn't have traditional pricing tiers, instead it lists the types of machines you can use and their pricing per second of service. They plan to release an annual plan at some point. |
| 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.) |
N/A Not clear if they offer any real SLA on 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 (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 Allows defining a custom build matrix such that your build can be parallelized accross several different environments. |
|
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
|
| 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 Allows running builds inside docker containers |
|
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
|
|
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. |
No
|
| Hosted plans / SaaS |
No Only available for self-hosting. |
Yes
|
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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 Allows defining complex build workflows with ease |
|
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. |
N/A
|
|
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. |
N/A
|
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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 Provides rich documentation on integrating Semaphore CI in Ruby projects. Also provides sudo access if you need to install system dependencies or C extensions. |
| 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 Provides rich documentation on integrating Semaphore CI in Javascript projects |
|
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 Integration with GitHub and Slack. They allow building iOS projects via their macOS Mojave VM image. |
|
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. |
No
|
| 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
|
| Additional notes |
|
List of features is based on Semaphore 2.0 |