Knapsack Pro

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

Semaphore CI

https://semaphoreci.com

Cirrus CI

https://cirrus-ci.org
Unique feature

Autoscaling made easy / Great CLI

FreeBSD support

Type of product

SaaS

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

Free for open source projects

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

Besides the seat (per-user access) you need to buy compute credits for running the build, priced differently depending on the machine you're running builds on.

Support / SLA

N/A

Not clear if they offer any real SLA on support.

N/A

Not clear if they offer any real SLA on 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

There are limits on how many tasks can be run in parallel for the free tier builds: https://cirrus-ci.org/faq/#are-there-any-limits

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

Allows containers or VMs for every major operating system.

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

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

Yes

N/A

Self-hosted option

No

Yes

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

Defined via YML config files

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

N/A

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

N/A

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)

No specific support from what I can gather, but it does provide documentation for Ruby, including integration with the knapsack_pro gem.

Specific language support: JavaScript

Yes

Provides rich documentation on integrating Semaphore CI in Javascript projects

No

No specific support and no documentation on setting up a CI/CD process for a Javascript project.

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

Integrates well with GitHub - the whole CI/CD process starts with a commit to a GitHub repo.

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

Provides a pretty nifty GraphQL API which allows querying the Cirrus CI Schema, as well as webhooks support for other types of custom integrations (such as Slack or IRC notifications, for example). They also added support for GitHub actions

Auditing

Yes

N/A

From what we can tell, there's no specific support for auditing changes in the Cirrus CI config (other than what is traceable via git commits to the YML config file)

Additional notes

List of features is based on Semaphore 2.0

Seems to be used by companies with a solid engineering background (Google)

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

Semaphore CI parallelism integration

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