Knapsack Pro

TeamCity vs Bitbucket Pipelines comparison of Continuous Integration servers
What are the differences between TeamCity and Bitbucket Pipelines?

TeamCity

https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/

Bitbucket Pipelines

https://bitbucket.org/product/features/pipelines
Unique feature

Technology awareness

Best Jira integration possible

Type of product

On Premise

SaaS / On Premise

Offers a free plan

Yes

They offer a great free professional plan, limited to 100 build configurations and 3 build agents. From there, you pay for each aditional agent you want (discounts if you purchase more than 1 agent at a time). They also provide a free plan for open source, non commercial projects, and steep 50% discounts for startups.

Yes

Offers a very modest free cloud plan, limited to 5 users, 50 minutes of build time per month and 1GB storage. There's no free self-hosted version, but they do offer a $10 one-time payment plan for 10 users (build time and storage is only limited by your infrastructure)

Predictable pricing

Yes

They have a clear list of prices per number of agents.

Yes

Pricing is based on amount of users for both the cloud and on premise versions. The cloud offering has different tiers depending on build times and storage.

Support / SLA

Yes

Yes

Dedicated tehnical 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

Yes

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 that we could find, but judging by the wording used it would appear that tasks can be divided accross different machines.

N/A

Documentation is unclear, but it's reasonable to assume that distributed builds for the on premise version are not an issue.

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

First class Docker support, among others

Yes

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

Great system overview, even allows building your own dashboards in order to see everything you're interested in at a glance.

Yes

Excellent overview and contextual feedback.

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

Yes

Allows assigning roles, LDAP and Windows domain integrations and more.

Yes

Self-hosted option

Yes

Yes

Hosted plans / SaaS

No

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

Unlike most options in the CI/CD space, TeamCity allows defining pipelines using a Kotlin-based DSL. This unlocks a lot of potential, such as templates for common CI/CD tasks, and deep integration with various IDEs (not just JetBrains IDEs)

Yes

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

Something that stands out from the rest, allows integrating third party reports, as long as they produce HTML output.

Yes

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

JetBrains has a rich ecosystem of plugins in general.

Yes

Large collection of available apps: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/apps-and-integrations-675189068.html

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

Using what they call 'Technology Awareness', promises great intehration with Ruby projects, with features such as testing framework support, static analysis and code coverage available out of the box, with no additional work required: https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/features/technology_awareness.html

Yes

Clear, concise documentation on setting up a Ruby project with Bitbucket pipelines: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/ruby-with-bitbucket-pipelines-872005618.html

Specific language support: JavaScript

No (partial)

Unlike Ruby, there's no first class support for Javascript, although they do advertise the fact that their large collections of plugins can cover any use case for Javascript projects: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/teamcity

Yes

Clear, concise documentation on setting up a Javascript project with Bitbucket pipelines: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/javascript-node-js-with-bitbucket-pipelines-873891287.html

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

Yes

Great cloud integrations (Google Cloud, AWS, VMWare, etc) as well as 'key' integrations (VSCode, Jira, even NuGet)

Yes

Large collection of available integrations: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/apps-and-integrations-675189068.html

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

Unlike most tools, which offer just a Rest API, TeamCity provides ample opportunity for extension via plugins, their own API, and service messages (formatted messages on stdout)

Yes

Auditing

Yes

Yes

Additional notes

Great ecosystem, with a strong focus on integration with other tools (not only JetBrains).

There's some confusion regarding Bitbucket Pipelines and Bamboo, where they overlap and where not. Atlassian discontinued their Bamboo Cloud offering ~3 years ago, so at a high-level they are different products in that regard. What can be said about both is that they are top-tier tools for high-demand engineering teams, especially valuable as long as the other tools in the Atlassian suite are adopted (Bitbucket is a must for Bitbucket pipelines, being just one if it's features, but other tools like Jira are not to be dismissed either). It does seem like Bitbucket Pipelines is the more mature product of the two though.

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