Knapsack Pro

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

Netlify Build

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

Travis CI

https://travis-ci.org
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.

Build Matrix, ease of use, GitHub integration

Type of product

SaaS

SaaS, Self-hosted / On Premise

Offers a free plan

Yes

300 build minutes/month, 1 concurrent CI build

Yes

Free for open source projects

Predictable pricing

Yes

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

Yes

Clearly defined monthly plans, depending on concurrent jobs needed.

Support / SLA

Yes

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

Yes

Available via email, or dedicated online interface for paid 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

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

Yes

TravisCI makes it very easy to split your build into different stages which are then run in parallel (ie: run integration tests separate from the unit tests). TravisCI calls this a build matrix: https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/build-matrix/. You can also very easily split tests accross several VMs using the knapsack_pro gem.

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

TravisCI runs each build in a isolated virtual machine. Pre-build packages include a few which support specific languages (Ruby and JavaScript included) or other software (Git, various databases), but vanilla packages such as Ubuntu Trusty are also available.

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

Available by default in Travis (this is what most of the web UI consists of)

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.

N/A

Self-hosted option

No

Yes

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

No

Specifically built around GitHub pull requests. Pipelines can be defined, but parts of the process need to be implemented separatelly in GitHub.

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 (partial)

No persistent storage eliminates the possibility of code coverage reports on TravisCI alone. There is support for integrated 3rd parties such as Coveralls for reporting code coverage.

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.

No plugin support in TravisCI, plugins for other tools

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

TravisCI is designed to be a simple way to integrate CI/CD in your workflow so it has a couple of features aimed at specific languages, such as Ruby, starting from pre-built containers (with RVM already installed, for example) all the way to automatically running specific platform commands (such as detecting a Gemfile in the root of the project and automatically bundling dependencies). TravisCI also builds a Ruby SDK for easier use of the API.

Specific language support: JavaScript

Yes

It has support for JavaScript.

Yes

TravisCI is designed to be a simple way to integrate CI/CD in your workflow so it has a couple of features aimed at specific languages, such as Javascript, starting from pre-built containers (with node already installed, for example) all the way to automatically running specific platform commands (such as detecting a package.json in the root of the project and running npm test)

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

By default, TravisCI is built to work with GitHub. Additionally, there is strong support for 3rd party tools like Coveralls, BrowserStack, etc.

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

Offers a feature-rich API that allows both reading data, as well as triggering or cancelling builds.

Auditing

N/A

N/A

Additional notes

Travis CI build matrix feature how to use it for CI parallelisation

Travis CI parallelism integration

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