Knapsack Pro

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

Rancher Pipelines

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

Bamboo

https://www.atlassian.com/software/bamboo
Unique feature

DevOps tool for container orchestration

Atlassian suite integration

Type of product

On Premise

On Premise

Offers a free plan

Yes

Free, open source project

Yes

The full Atlassian suite is free for open source projects (https://www.atlassian.com/software/views/open-source-license-request). For all others, they offer a minimal free trial.

Predictable pricing

Yes

It's free!

Yes

They price their product based on number of build agents (more concurrency, more expensive). Given the notoriety and depth of the Atlassian suite, the pricing can be steep for small companies.

Support / SLA

Yes

Paid support available: https://rancher.com/pricing/

Yes

Dedicated tehnical 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

You can run multiple parallel steps within a build stage

Yes

Up to 100 parallel agents

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

N/A

Unclear from the documentation (probably not)

Yes

Agents can run on multiple machines.

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

Yes

By default, they offer Docker support for the CI/CD job runners.

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

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/

Yes

Excellent dashboards, even more so thanks to integrations with the other tools in the Atlassian arsenal

Management support
How easy is it to manage users / projects / assign roles and permissions and so on

Yes

User management is available, with specific roles assigned, or permissions to certain resources and projects

Yes

Great management support, built for large scale companies, even allows setting per-environment permissions (ie: QA team can only deploy to their own, isolated environment)

Self-hosted option

Yes

Yes

Hosted plans / SaaS

No

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

Pipelines as code (YML files), but also manageable via the UI

Yes

Advanced pipeline support - with features built for feature branch support, various triggers, schedules, external notifications and more.

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

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?

N/A

Yes

Large selection (~200) of apps that integrate with Bamboo, available on the official marketplace for Bamboo: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/addons/app/bamboo

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.

N/A

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

Yes (partial)

It looks like the documentation and features for Ruby are lagging behind. All I could find is this repo: https://github.com/drscream/bamboozled-ruby-plugin, following this support ticket: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BAM-10948 from this documentation stub page: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bamboo0601/getting-started-with-ruby-and-bamboo-935580774.html

Specific language support: JavaScript

N/A

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

No

No specific support, beyond some documentation on integrating Selenium (not marked as partial support since that documentation is only promoted in the Atlassian docs, but is hosted by BrowserStack)

Integrations
1st party support for common tools (like Slack notifications, various VCS platforms, etc)

Yes

Integrations available for GitLab, GitHub and Bitbucket

Yes

Deep integration with the Atlassian product stack (Jira, 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

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.

Yes

Auditing

Yes

Allows logging to various systems (Kafka, Elastic, etc) which should make audit possible

Yes

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.

Not really something that should be purchased separatelly from the Atlassian stack.

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