Knapsack Pro

Netlify Build vs Semaphore CI comparison of Continuous Integration servers
What are the differences between Netlify Build and Semaphore CI?

Netlify Build

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

Semaphore CI

https://semaphoreci.com
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.

Autoscaling made easy / Great CLI

Type of product

SaaS

SaaS

Offers a free plan

Yes

300 build minutes/month, 1 concurrent CI build

Yes

1,300 service minutes every month. Plans to release a free tier for open source projects.

Predictable pricing

Yes

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

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

Yes

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

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

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

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

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

N/A

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

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

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

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

Self-hosted option

No

No

Hosted plans / SaaS

Yes

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, partially

Simple steps, define your own steps in bash commands

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.

No

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?

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.

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

It has support for JavaScript.

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

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

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

No

No

Auditing

N/A

Yes

Additional notes

List of features is based on Semaphore 2.0

Running Rails tests in parallel on Semaphore CI 2.0 with dynamic test files split

Semaphore CI parallelism integration

Start using Knapsack Pro with Netlify Build or Semaphore CI

Sign up and speed up your tests.

Get started free