Knapsack Pro

Netlify Build vs Rancher Pipelines comparison of Continuous Integration servers
What are the differences between Netlify Build and Rancher Pipelines?

Netlify Build

https://www.netlify.com/products/build/

Rancher Pipelines

https://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.x/en/project-admin/tools/pipelines/
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.

DevOps tool for container orchestration

Type of product

SaaS

On Premise

Offers a free plan

Yes

300 build minutes/month, 1 concurrent CI build

Yes

Free, open source project

Predictable pricing

Yes

Extra 500 build minutes costs $7/month. User seat $15/user/month.

Yes

It's free!

Support / SLA

Yes

99.99% uptime SLA for Starter and Pro plan. Business plan has negotiable SLA.

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

Starter plan (free) has only 1 concurrent build but Pro plan has 3 concurrent builds included.

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

Yes

High-Performance Builds - The premium build environment gives more concurrency, processing power and asynchronous deploys.

N/A

Unclear from the documentation (probably not)

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

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

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

Team members managment. Role-based access control only in business plan.

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, partially

Simple steps, define your own steps in bash commands

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.

No

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?

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.

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

It has support for Ruby.

N/A

Pipelines / CI is just a small part of Rancher. No specific support mentioned.

Specific language support: JavaScript

Yes

It has support for JavaScript.

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

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

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

No

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

N/A

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.

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