Knapsack Pro
Knapsack Pro
Semaphore CIhttps://semaphoreci.com |
AWS CodeBuildhttps://aws.amazon.com/codebuild/ |
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|---|---|---|
| Unique feature |
Autoscaling made easy / Great CLI
|
AWS integration
|
| Type of product |
SaaS
|
SaaS
|
| Offers a free plan |
Yes 1,300 service minutes every month. Plans to release a free tier for open source projects. |
Yes The AWS free-tier includes 100 build-minutes per month, on their smallest machine. It's unclear, but it seems like this applies only to the first year of service. |
| Predictable pricing |
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. |
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. |
| Support / SLA |
N/A Not clear if they offer any real SLA on support. |
Yes
|
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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 Allows defining a custom build matrix such that your build can be parallelized accross several different environments. |
N/A
|
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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
|
N/A
|
| Containers support / Build environment |
Yes Allows running builds inside docker containers |
Yes Builds run in specific-to-the-project, isolated environments |
|
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
|
Yes Offers minimal information built in, but allows integrations with tools such as CloudWatch (another Amazon product), or streaming build information to your own API, for more in-depth analysis. |
|
Management support
How easy is it to manage users / projects / assign roles and permissions and so on |
Yes
|
Yes Professional user management via AWS Identity and Access Management: https://aws.amazon.com/iam/ |
| 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 Allows defining complex build workflows with ease |
Yes As it's usually the case with Amazon, CodeBuild simply provides the 'build' part of a true CI/CD system, while pipelines are managed via CodePipeline, another Amazon product: https://aws.amazon.com/codepipeline/pricing/?nc=sn&loc=3 |
|
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. |
N/A
|
Yes Offers minimal information built in, but allows integrations with tools such as CloudWatch (another Amazon product), or streaming build information to your own API, for more in-depth analysis. |
|
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
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N/A
|
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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 Provides rich documentation on integrating Semaphore CI in Ruby projects. Also provides sudo access if you need to install system dependencies or C extensions. |
No (partial) The environments available on CodeBuilt include Ruby pre-installed: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codebuild/latest/userguide/build-env-ref-available.html, but that seems to be as far as specific support goes |
| Specific language support: JavaScript |
Yes Provides rich documentation on integrating Semaphore CI in Javascript projects |
No (partial) The environments available on CodeBuilt include Node pre-installed: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codebuild/latest/userguide/build-env-ref-available.html, but that seems to be as far as specific support goes |
|
Integrations
1st party support for common tools (like Slack notifications, various VCS platforms, etc) |
Yes Integration with GitHub and Slack. They allow building iOS projects via their macOS Mojave VM image. |
Yes CodeBuild builds can be connected to sources such as GitHub or BitBucket, but being an Amazon Service, the deepest integrations are with other Amazon Code services (CodePipeline, CodeDeploy, and others: https://aws.amazon.com/products/developer-tools/) |
|
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 Amazon SDKs can be used to interact with CodeBuild |
| Auditing |
Yes
|
Yes
|
| Additional notes |
List of features is based on Semaphore 2.0 |
Like most things Amazon, it becomes more valuable as you acquire and integrate various Amazon solutions, not necesarily as a standalone tool. |