Knapsack Pro

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

Shippable

https://www.shippable.com

Semaphore CI

https://semaphoreci.com
Unique feature

N/A

Autoscaling made easy / Great CLI

Type of product

SaaS / On Premise

SaaS

Offers a free plan

Yes

Free unlimited builds for open source projects, 150 builds per month for all others (hosted plan). For the on-premise solution they only offer a 30 day trial.

Yes

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

Predictable pricing

Yes

Clear pricing based on number of concurrent jobs. They also allow a varied combination of platforms you want to run (Ubuntu, Windows, MacOS, CentOS) and provide a Bring Your Own Node option (so you can run builds on your own infrastructure)

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.

Support / SLA

Yes

One of the few competitors to offer support tiers with clearly defined SLAs: https://www.shippable.com/premium-support.html as well as Services and Training: https://www.shippable.com/devops-services.html

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

One thing that stands out, is the shipctl CLI tool, which can automatically determine which tests to run in parallel, based on previous performance, such that a minimal amount of time is ensured: http://docs.shippable.com/ci/running-parallel-tests/#running-tests-in-parallel

Yes

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

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

No specific mention. From the wording, multiple environments are certainly available, but it's unclear if the tasks can be distributed to multiple containers/VMs on the same machine, or multiple machines.

N/A

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

Native Docker support

Yes

Allows running builds inside docker containers

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

Detailed statistics available at multiple levels (job, account, project, etc.). They also include a view they call SPOG (Single Pane of Glass) which allows viewing a real-time representation of all of the pipelines in the organization, from where you can drill-in to the leaf nodes you're interested in.

Yes

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

Yes

Yes

Self-hosted option

Yes

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

Configurable via an YML file (called Assembly Lines)

Yes

Allows defining complex build workflows with ease

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

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?

Yes

https://www.shippable.com/integrations.html

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

Ruby is available by default on the Shippable container images. They also provide support for tools such as Cucumber or RSpec. Specific documentation for Ruby available on the website: http://docs.shippable.com/ci/ruby-continuous-integration/

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.

Specific language support: JavaScript

Yes

Specific documentation for Node.js available: http://docs.shippable.com/ci/ruby-continuous-integration/

Yes

Provides rich documentation on integrating Semaphore CI in Javascript projects

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

Yes

http://docs.shippable.com/ci/ruby-continuous-integration/

Yes

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

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

Provides a straight-forward REST API: http://docs.shippable.com/platform/api/api-overview/. They also provide ways to integrate notifications in your workflow, via webhooks or specific channels (IRC, Slack, Email, etc): http://docs.shippable.com/ci/send-notifications/

No

Auditing

Yes

Yes

Additional notes

List of features is based on Semaphore 2.0

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

Semaphore CI parallelism integration

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