Knapsack Pro

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

Rancher Pipelines

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

GoCD

https://www.gocd.org
Unique feature

DevOps tool for container orchestration

Free, open source CI/CD server

Type of product

On Premise

On Premise

Offers a free plan

Yes

Free, open source project

Yes

Free, open source software. They provide some Enterprise add-ons and support at a cost though.

Predictable pricing

Yes

It's free!

Yes

For the Enterprise plans, they specify very clear tiers depending on the number of pipelines (directly correlated with the size of the organization)

Support / SLA

Yes

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

Yes

Paid support available for enterprise 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

You can run multiple parallel steps within a build stage

Yes

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

They specify supporting tools like TLB (http://test-load-balancer.github.io/) which would require distributed builds.

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

Yes

Native Docker and Kubernetes support

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

One of the greatest things about GoCD is their Value Stream Map which allows tracing every pipeline through every stage, from code commit, to testing and deployment. They also offer various dashboards for seeing status at a glance.

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

Allows managing users, assigning roles, and even defining user groups with specific rights for certain pipelines.

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

Fairly advanced support, from config files (YML, Groovy, JSON, etc) to API and UI interface for building and managing pipelines.

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

Wide array of plugins available: https://www.gocd.org/plugins/#artifact (although they seem to pride themselves on the fact that most common operations / needs are first class citizens, so no plugins needed)

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

Available via plugins, such as the Gem repository poller: https://www.gocd.org/plugins/#package-repo

Specific language support: JavaScript

N/A

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

Yes

Available via plugins, such as the npm repository poller: https://www.gocd.org/plugins/#package-repo

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

Yes

Integrations available for GitLab, GitHub and Bitbucket

Yes

Integrations are also available via plugins (for notifications, LDAP authorization, Elastic agents and more): https://www.gocd.org/plugins/#notification

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

You can build on top of GoCD in a variety of ways, from writing custom plugins to using the CCTray feed provided by it.

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.

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