Knapsack Pro

Travis CI vs Rancher Pipelines comparison of Continuous Integration servers
What are the differences between Travis CI and Rancher Pipelines?

Travis CI

https://travis-ci.org

Rancher Pipelines

https://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.x/en/project-admin/tools/pipelines/
Unique feature

Build Matrix, ease of use, GitHub integration

DevOps tool for container orchestration

Type of product

SaaS, Self-hosted / On Premise

On Premise

Offers a free plan

Yes

Free for open source projects

Yes

Free, open source project

Predictable pricing

Yes

Clearly defined monthly plans, depending on concurrent jobs needed.

Yes

It's free!

Support / SLA

Yes

Available via email, or dedicated online interface for paid plans.

Yes

Paid support available: https://rancher.com/pricing/

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

You can run multiple parallel steps within a build stage

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

N/A

Unclear from the documentation (probably not)

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

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

Not particularly clear, but it appears you can monitor stats in a Grafana dashboard: https://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.x/en/project-admin/tools/monitoring/

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

N/A

Yes

User management is available, with specific roles assigned, or permissions to certain resources and projects

Self-hosted option

Yes

Yes

Hosted plans / SaaS

Yes

No

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

Pipelines as code (YML files), but also manageable via the UI

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

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

N/A

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.

N/A

Pipelines / CI is just a small part of Rancher. No specific support mentioned.

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)

N/A

Pipelines / CI is just a small part of Rancher. No specific support mentioned.

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

Integrations available for GitLab, GitHub and Bitbucket

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

REST API available. It provides introspection and documentation: https://github.com/rancher/api-spec/blob/master/specification.md#filtering. It should offer enough access to allow building whatever customizations or integrations with 3rd party tools deemed necessary.

Auditing

N/A

Yes

Allows logging to various systems (Kafka, Elastic, etc) which should make audit possible

Additional notes

Rancher is a full software stack for container orchestration, going as far as building their own Linux distribution (RancherOS). Using Rancher seems more like a decision to be made considering all other features Rancher offers, not just the CI server. Also worth noting that Rancher uses Jenkins under the hood, but the engine is locked so projects can't just be migrated between the two.

Travis CI build matrix feature how to use it for CI parallelisation

Travis CI parallelism integration

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