Knapsack Pro

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

Solano CI

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

Netlify Build

https://www.netlify.com/products/build/
Unique feature

N/A

Deploy your sites to global Netlify infrastructure

Every commit gets its own deployed version. Automatically attach a new Deploy Preview at a unique permanent URL whenever you submit a Pull/Merge Request. Set Netlify Build to deploy every branch in the repository for unlimited staging environments.

Type of product

N/A

SaaS

Offers a free plan

No

Their website only mentions a free trial

Yes

300 build minutes/month, 1 concurrent CI build

Predictable pricing

No

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

Yes

Extra 500 build minutes costs $7/month. User seat $15/user/month.

Support / SLA

N/A

Yes

99.99% uptime SLA for Starter and Pro plan. Business plan has negotiable SLA.

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

Starter plan (free) has only 1 concurrent build but Pro plan has 3 concurrent builds included.

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

High-Performance Builds - The premium build environment gives more concurrency, processing power and asynchronous deploys.

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

Yes

When you trigger a build on Netlify, their buildbot starts a Docker container to build your website. The buildbot will look for instructions about required languages and software needed to run your command before running build command. The instructions are called dependencies, and how you declare them depends on the programming languages and tools used in build. Build image selection is available. Until recently, all Netlify sites were built using the same build image. Netlify is experimenting with allowing customers to select from multiple Docker images with different operating systems and software versions.

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

Simple dashboard to see CI builds. Other than CI analytics Netlify has Netlify Analytics that brings data captured directly from their servers for your website.

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

N/A

Yes

Team members managment. Role-based access control only in business plan.

Self-hosted option

N/A

No

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, partially

Simple steps, define your own steps in bash commands

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

No

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.

No

There are only small helpful things like incoming webhooks so other services can trigger Netlify deploys, and send outgoing webhooks as a deploy starts, succeeds, or fails.

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

It has support for Ruby.

Specific language support: JavaScript

N/A

Yes

It has support for JavaScript.

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

N/A

Yes

Netlify has incoming webhooks so other services can trigger Netlify deploys, and send outgoing webhooks as a deploy starts, succeeds, or fails. For instance you can integrate it with Slack.

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

No

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/

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