Knapsack Pro

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

Solano CI

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

Drone

https://drone.io
Unique feature

N/A

Customization

Type of product

N/A

SaaS / On Premise

Offers a free plan

No

Their website only mentions a free trial

Yes

The cloud version is free for open source projects. Also offers a free plan for any project, with a limit of 5000 builds per year. The on-premise version is available as a Docker image.
Predictable pricing

No

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

Yes

Predictable pricing based on number of users and repositories. They have a calculator to help determine cost.
Support / SLA

N/A

N/A

It's not clear what their support commitment is. They have a fairly active community on Discourse, for community 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

N/A

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

Yes

Pipeline task configuration allows running tasks 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

Yes

Pipelines can be configured to run on multiple machines, although they recommend that to be an option only if paralellizing tasks and scaling vertically doesn't suffice. They even support multi-platform distribution (ie: running tasks on various operating systems)
Containers support / Build environment

Yes

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

The wording they use implies that this is possible.

Yes

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

N/A

Yes

They offer in-depth documentation for user and server management. A lot of it can be done via the drone CLI tool, which seems to be the focal point of the docs.
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

Easily configurable pipelines via YML 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

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

Yes

Drone CI allows integrating plugins into the CI/CD process. They have a list of available community plugins and provide documentation on building your own. Plugins are Docker containers which plug directly into the CI/CD process.
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

No (partial)

No specific support, but they do provide sufficient documentation on getting a Ruby project up and running, including a multi-platform example.
Specific language support: JavaScript

N/A

No (partial)

No specific 1st party support, but the plugin marketplace features an NPM authoring and an NPM authentication plugin.
Integrations
1st party support for common tools (like Slack notifications, various VCS platforms, etc)

N/A

Yes

Integrates well with source code management platforms (1st party support for GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket) as well as other systems via 3rd party plugins.
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

Drone provides a feature-rich REST API, as well as an official Go SDK for it.
Auditing

N/A

Yes

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/

The fact that Drone works with any source code manager, as well as the fact that it can run tasks on multiple platforms makes it stand out from the rest. Very nifty!

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