Knapsack Pro
Knapsack Pro
Netlify Buildhttps://www.netlify.com/products/build/ |
Dronehttps://drone.io |
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| Unique feature |
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. |
Customization
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| Type of product |
SaaS
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SaaS / On Premise
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| Offers a free plan |
Yes 300 build minutes/month, 1 concurrent CI build |
Yes The cloud version is free for open source projects. Also offers a free plan for any project, with a limit of 5000 builds per year. The on-premise version is available as a Docker image. |
| Predictable pricing |
Yes Extra 500 build minutes costs $7/month. User seat $15/user/month. |
Yes Predictable pricing based on number of users and repositories. They have a calculator to help determine cost. |
| Support / SLA |
Yes 99.99% uptime SLA for Starter and Pro plan. Business plan has negotiable SLA. |
N/A It's not clear what their support commitment is. They have a fairly active community on Discourse, for community support. |
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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 Starter plan (free) has only 1 concurrent build but Pro plan has 3 concurrent builds included. |
Yes Pipeline task configuration allows running tasks in parallel |
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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 High-Performance Builds - The premium build environment gives more concurrency, processing power and asynchronous deploys. |
Yes Pipelines can be configured to run on multiple machines, although they recommend that to be an option only if paralellizing tasks and scaling vertically doesn't suffice. They even support multi-platform distribution (ie: running tasks on various operating systems) |
| Containers support / Build environment |
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. |
Yes By default, they offer Docker support for the CI/CD job runners. |
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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 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. |
Yes
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Management support
How easy is it to manage users / projects / assign roles and permissions and so on |
Yes Team members managment. Role-based access control only in business plan. |
Yes They offer in-depth documentation for user and server management. A lot of it can be done via the drone CLI tool, which seems to be the focal point of the docs. |
| Self-hosted option |
No
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Yes
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| Hosted plans / SaaS |
Yes
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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, partially Simple steps, define your own steps in bash commands |
Yes Easily configurable pipelines via YML files. |
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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. |
No
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N/A
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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? |
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. |
Yes Drone CI allows integrating plugins into the CI/CD process. They have a list of available community plugins and provide documentation on building your own. Plugins are Docker containers which plug directly into the CI/CD process. |
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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 It has support for Ruby. |
No (partial) No specific support, but they do provide sufficient documentation on getting a Ruby project up and running, including a multi-platform example. |
| Specific language support: JavaScript |
Yes It has support for JavaScript. |
No (partial) No specific 1st party support, but the plugin marketplace features an NPM authoring and an NPM authentication plugin. |
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Integrations
1st party support for common tools (like Slack notifications, various VCS platforms, etc) |
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. |
Yes Integrates well with source code management platforms (1st party support for GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket) as well as other systems via 3rd party plugins. |
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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 |
No
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Yes Drone provides a feature-rich REST API, as well as an official Go SDK for it. |
| Auditing |
N/A
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Yes
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| Additional notes |
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The fact that Drone works with any source code manager, as well as the fact that it can run tasks on multiple platforms makes it stand out from the rest. Very nifty! |