Knapsack Pro

Solano CI vs AppVeyor comparison of Continuous Integration servers
What are the differences between Solano CI and AppVeyor?

Solano CI

https://xebialabs.com/technology/solano-ci/

AppVeyor

https://www.appveyor.com
Unique feature

N/A

Supports NuGet packages / Windows build environment

Type of product

N/A

SaaS / On Premise

Offers a free plan

No

Their website only mentions a free trial

Yes

Free SaaS plan for open source projects. There is also a free on premise version, but it's quite limited (1 user, 1 team, community support)
Predictable pricing

No

Very hard to get any information on pricing. It seems like they target enterprise clients only.

Yes

Very simple pricing plans: 3 options for the SaaS version, two options for the on premise option. No variable pricing.
Support / SLA

N/A

Yes

All paid on premise plans offer support, as well as the two higher priced SaaS plans. Only community support available for the free on premise version and the lowest SaaS tier.
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

N/A

They mention that by paralellizing tests they get a huge performance boost (10x to 80x) but details are severly lacking.

Yes

Allows splitting tests to run on different VMs in parallel.
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

Yes

Runs every build in a VM, and it offers several options depending on the plan (SaaS or self-hosted) as well sa personal preference.
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

The wording they use implies that this is possible.

Yes

The dashboard is not as great as for other options in the market, but allows seeing project status at a glance.
Management support
How easy is it to manage users / projects / assign roles and permissions and so on

N/A

Yes

Allows creating teams and assigning roles. There is some integration with GitHub Teams but the concepts are different which might be tricky depending on how the GitHub project is managed, for instance.
Self-hosted option

N/A

Yes

Hosted plans / SaaS

N/A

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

The wording they use suggests that this is possible.

Yes

There is a single predefined possible pipeline, which defines various hooks (such as before_build / after_build). The pipeline can be configured via the UI or via an appveyor.yml file. The two are mutually exclusive, so it's either one or the other.
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

Notifications are highly configurable, but visual reports such as code coverage is not easy to implement.
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

Probably not, considering how non-transparent this product is.

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.

N/A

Yes

Many Ruby gems use AppVeyor as their CI server of choice. Among the features for Ruby are the pre-installed Ruby versions on both Windows and Ubuntu servers, as well as the appveyor-worker gem which makes it easy to report status during the build process.
Specific language support: JavaScript

N/A

Yes

Comes with node.js and io.js versions pre-installed. Also offers documentation on npm integration on their website.
Integrations
1st party support for common tools (like Slack notifications, various VCS platforms, etc)

N/A

Yes

Probably the most notable aspect here is the large array of deployment integrations available (from simple FTP uploads to Azure servers or NuGet packages).
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

N/A

Yes

Offers a basic CRUD REST API for querying projects and builds as well as a real-time Build Worker API which can send updates on build status.
Auditing

N/A

N/A

Additional notes

It seems like Solano CI has been retired, and the new solution is the XebiaLabs DevOps Platform, but which integrates Jenkins and Travis, among others: https://xebialabs.com/products/devops-platform-overview/

Very Windows oriented

How to run parallel tests on Solano CI and AppVeyor
to execute 1-hour test suite in 2 minutes?

Without Knapsack Pro

you have to wait 20 minutes for slow tests running too long on the red node

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Run fast parallel CI build with Knapsack Pro

CI build completes work in only 10 minutes because Knapsack Pro ensures all parallel nodes finish work at a similar time

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You can even run 20 parallel nodes to complete your CI build in 2 minutes

How it works

Step 1

Install Knapsack Pro client in your project


Step 2

Update your CI server config file to run tests in parallel with Knapsack Pro


Step 3

Run a CI build with parallel tests using Knapsack Pro

Diagram that shows files distributed to 3 parallel CI nodes


Knapsack Pro in Queue Mode splits tests in a dynamic way across parallel CI nodes to ensure each CI node finishes work at a similar time. Thanks to that, your CI build time is as fast as possible. It works with many supported CI servers.

How to install it

Programming Language Supported test runners Installation guide Knapsack Pro Library
README / Source
Ruby RSpec, Cucumber, Minitest, test-unit, Spinach, Turnip Install knapsack_pro gem
JavaScript Cypress.io Install @knapsack-pro/cypress
JavaScript Jest Install @knapsack-pro/jest
JavaScript / TypeScript Any test runner in JavaScript How to build native integration with Knapsack Pro API to run tests in parallel for any test runner @knapsack-pro/core
Any programming language Any test runner How to build a custom Knapsack Pro API client from scratch in any programming language -

Do you use other programming language or test runner? Let us know.

Do you know

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Get faster feedback from Solano CI and AppVeyor server

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Knapsack Pro terminal

Introduction to CI parallelisation with Knapsack Pro

Run tests in parallel on Solano CI and AppVeyor in the optimal way and avoid bottleneck parallel jobs.

How much can you save with faster tests
on Solano CI and AppVeyor?

minutes
$

Monthly you can save hours
and up to $
on faster development cycle.

Features that make your tests perform better

Discover all features or see
how to use Knapsack Pro with your CI

Trusted solution

Join the teams optimizing their tests with Knapsack Pro.

We've been really enjoying Knapsack Pro, it's been saving us a ton of time.

Devin Brown Software Engineer at Pivotal

This is a fantastic product, it's been a total game-changer for us.

Geoff Harcourt CTO at CommonLit

We are using CircleCI and we noticed that builds were being limited by the slowest parallelized container. Knapsack Pro was really east to setup and we saw huge improvements right away. Thank you for making this tool!

Martin Sieniawski Software Engineer at Collage

Knapsack Pro has helped us build an insanely fast and scalable build pipeline with almost no setup or maintenance.

Tim Lucas Co-founder of buildkite.com

Knapsack Pro saves us hours of engineer waiting time every week, and is the best solution for keeping our tests load balanced that we've used to date.

Michael Amygdalidis Senior Software Engineer at Popular Pays

I've been playing with Queue Mode. Love it! Wow, I love how fast it goes.

Michael Menne CTO at humanagency.org

I just logged into my account expecting it to say that I needed to add a credit card and was so surprised and delighted to see the trial doesn't count usage by calendar days but by testing days! This is incredible! I love it!!!

I just wanted to say that I really appreciate that small but very huge feature. Thank you for being so thoughtful :)

Shannon Baffoni Senior Software Engineer
at Blue Bottle Coffee

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