Travis CIhttps://travis-ci.org |
AppVeyorhttps://www.appveyor.com |
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Unique feature |
Build Matrix, ease of use, GitHub integration
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Supports NuGet packages / Windows build environment
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Type of product |
SaaS, Self-hosted / On Premise
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SaaS / On Premise
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Offers a free plan |
Yes Free for open source projects |
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 |
Yes Clearly defined monthly plans, depending on concurrent jobs needed. |
Yes Very simple pricing plans: 3 options for the SaaS version, two options for the on premise option. No variable pricing. |
Support / SLA |
Yes Available via email, or dedicated online interface for paid plans. |
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 |
Yes TravisCI makes it very easy to split your build into different stages which are then run in parallel (ie: run integration tests separate from the unit tests). TravisCI calls this a build matrix: https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/build-matrix/. You can also very easily split tests accross several VMs using the knapsack_pro gem. |
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
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N/A
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Containers support / Build environment |
Yes TravisCI runs each build in a isolated virtual machine. Pre-build packages include a few which support specific languages (Ruby and JavaScript included) or other software (Git, various databases), but vanilla packages such as Ubuntu Trusty are also available. |
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 Available by default in Travis (this is what most of the web UI consists of) |
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
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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 |
Yes
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Yes
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Hosted plans / SaaS |
Yes
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Yes
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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. |
No Specifically built around GitHub pull requests. Pipelines can be defined, but parts of the process need to be implemented separatelly in GitHub. |
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. |
Yes (partial) No persistent storage eliminates the possibility of code coverage reports on TravisCI alone. There is support for integrated 3rd parties such as Coveralls for reporting code coverage. |
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? |
No plugin support in TravisCI, plugins for other tools
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N/A
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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 TravisCI is designed to be a simple way to integrate CI/CD in your workflow so it has a couple of features aimed at specific languages, such as Ruby, starting from pre-built containers (with RVM already installed, for example) all the way to automatically running specific platform commands (such as detecting a Gemfile in the root of the project and automatically bundling dependencies). TravisCI also builds a Ruby SDK for easier use of the API. |
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 |
Yes TravisCI is designed to be a simple way to integrate CI/CD in your workflow so it has a couple of features aimed at specific languages, such as Javascript, starting from pre-built containers (with node already installed, for example) all the way to automatically running specific platform commands (such as detecting a package.json in the root of the project and running npm test) |
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) |
Yes By default, TravisCI is built to work with GitHub. Additionally, there is strong support for 3rd party tools like Coveralls, BrowserStack, etc. |
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 |
Yes Offers a feature-rich API that allows both reading data, as well as triggering or cancelling builds. |
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
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N/A
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Additional notes |
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Very Windows oriented |