Knapsack Pro

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

Rancher Pipelines

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

Github Actions

https://github.com/features/actions
Unique feature

DevOps tool for container orchestration

Best GitHub integration possible

Type of product

On Premise

SaaS / On Premise

Offers a free plan

Yes

Free, open source project

Yes

The on premise plan (not yet available) will be free, 2000 build minutes included in the free cloud plan. Completely free plan for open source projects.

Predictable pricing

Yes

It's free!

Yes (partial)

While it's clear what the cost is (priced per build-minute), figuring out costs can be a hassle, especially as the price can vary quite a bit depending on commits to the project. One advantage for GitHub Actions is that the tiers define a maximum amount of minutes, so it's easier to predict the final cost. You can also purchase aditional runners with pricing dependent on the platform (MacOS, Linux, Windows)

Support / SLA

Yes

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

Yes

Community support available for any tier, unclear at what point and if dedicated support is available. Safe to assume that eneterprise clients can access technical 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

Matrix builds allow concurrent jobs, even multi-platform.

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)

N/A

No specific mention, but given the fact that tasks can be run on multiple platforms, it's likely that distributed builds are also available.

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

Yes

Linux, macOS, Windows, and containers, or run directly in a VM.

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

Minimal status overview definitely available, with live logs and GitHub integration. Unclear how far it goes.

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

N/A

Unclear from the available documentation

Self-hosted option

Yes

Yes

Coming soon, not available yet.

Hosted plans / SaaS

No

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

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

Yes

Called GitHub Action Workflows, they are defined in separate Docker containers, using the YAML syntax (they used to support HCL, but they're migrating away from that)

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

N/A

Unclear from the available documentation

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

Thanks to the large following, GitHub Actions already enjoys a wide varierty of available pre-made workflows, which you can browse right on the homepage: https://github.com/features/actions

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

Unclear how, but they mention Ruby support specifically on the homepage

Specific language support: JavaScript

N/A

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

Yes

Unclear how, but they mention Javascript (Node.js) support specifically on the homepage

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

Yes

Integrations available for GitLab, GitHub and Bitbucket

Yes

Integrations made possible via the shared third party workflows available (AWS, Azure, Zeit, Kubernetes and many more)

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.

N/A

Unclear at the moment, but assume GitHub Actions will be integrated with the GitHub GraphQL API (one of the more mature GraphQL API implementations available)

Auditing

Yes

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

N/A

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.

GitHub Actions testing Ruby on Rails with RSpec and parallel jobs (matrix feature)

How to run Jest tests on GitHub Actions - JS parallel jobs with matrix feature (NodeJS YAML config)

GitHub Actions Cypress.io E2E testing parallel jobs with matrix feature (NodeJS YAML config)

Github Actions parallelism integration

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