Knapsack Pro

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

TeamCity

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

Buildkite

https://buildkite.com
Unique feature

Technology awareness

Runs on own infrastructure, API

Type of product

On Premise

SaaS

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

Free for open source projects and selected organizations

Predictable pricing

Yes

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

Yes

Clearly defined monthly and annual plans

Support / SLA

Yes

Yes

Depending on the plan, ranging from community support, all the way to an assigned Technical Manager, SLAs and live chat 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

Run an unlimited number of concurrent agents, and an unlimited number of concurrent jobs. You can run your tests in isolated Docker container per agent.

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.

Yes

Run an unlimited number of concurrent agents, and an unlimited number of concurrent jobs

Containers support / Build environment

Yes

First class Docker support, among others

Yes

Since the agents run on your own infra, you're free to do whatever

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

The Buildkite UI features great vizualisations that feature build times, error rates, and more.

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

No

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

Pipelines are defined using an Yaml config file and allow for great flexibility in defining what each step of the process does.

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

Integrations for GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket as well as SSO support (Google Suite, SAML, GraphQL API). Growing number of community plugins: https://buildkite.com/plugins

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

You can find useful plugins like https://github.com/sj26/rspec-buildkite https://github.com/ticky/simplecov-buildkite etc

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

No

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

Integrations for GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket as well as SSO support (Google Suite, SAML, GraphQL API)

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

Great GraphQL API, allows building your own dashboard with ease

Auditing

Yes

Yes

Additional notes

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

Buildkite parallel agents and how to use them for CI parallelisation

Buildkite parallelism integration

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