Knapsack Pro

Semaphore CI vs Bamboo comparison of Continuous Integration servers
What are the differences between Semaphore CI and Bamboo?

Semaphore CI

https://semaphoreci.com

Bamboo

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

Autoscaling made easy / Great CLI

Atlassian suite integration

Type of product

SaaS

On Premise

Offers a free plan

Yes

1,300 service minutes every month. Plans to release a free tier for open source projects.

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

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

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

N/A

Not clear if they offer any real SLA on support.

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

Allows defining a custom build matrix such that your build can be parallelized accross several different environments.

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

Yes

Agents can run on multiple machines.

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

Allows running builds inside docker containers

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

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

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

No

Yes

Hosted plans / SaaS

Yes

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

Allows defining complex build workflows with ease

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.

N/A

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.

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.

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

Yes

Provides rich documentation on integrating Semaphore CI in Javascript projects

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

Integration with GitHub and Slack. They allow building iOS projects via their macOS Mojave VM image.

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

No

Yes

Auditing

Yes

Yes

Additional notes

List of features is based on Semaphore 2.0

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

Running Rails tests in parallel on Semaphore CI 2.0 with dynamic test files split

Semaphore CI parallelism integration

Start using Knapsack Pro with Semaphore CI or Bamboo

Sign up and speed up your tests.

Get started free