If you‘re an engineering leader looking to accelerate release velocity, improve software quality, and make your developers happier in 2023, Continuous Integration (CI) is essential.
CI automates the process of building, testing, and validating each code change made by developers multiple times per day. This catch bugs early, provide rapid feedback, and keep the master branch releasable.
But with so many CI/CD solutions on the market, how do you pick the right one?
This detailed guide examines 11 top platforms based on capabilities, developer experience, and pricing to help you transform developer productivity.
Why CI/CD Matters More Than Ever
Today‘s business environment demands software delivery cycles measure in days or weeks, not months or years.
To keep up, development teams need tooling that simplifies coding while providing guardrails that allow moving fast without breaking things.
Continuous Integration enters by instantly validating each code contribution against a suite of automated tests. This catches issues early before problems multiply. Teams gain rapid feedback allowing more iterations.
Expanding to Continuous Delivery takes validated code and automatically releases it through staging environments out to production. This amplifies business agility and responsiveness.
Leading industry research firm IDG estimates 57% of organizations now practice CI/CD in some form already – a number growing yearly. High performing teams deploy 206 times more frequently according to Puppet‘s State of DevOps Report.
But implementing CI/CD remains challenging with a maze of tools each promising improved productivity. This guide shows how to cut through the noise.
Key Capabilities to Look For
Before exploring individual solutions, let‘s level-set on core capabilities that comprise robust CI/CD:
Powerful Workflow Orchestration – Flexibly model multi-stage pipelines with fan-in/fan-out logic and reusable blocks
Actionable Insights – Dashboards with deployment frequency, lead time, quality metrics help optimize
Reliable Testing – Identify flaky tests and safeguard pipeline integrity with quality gates
Simplified Configuration – YAML pipelines configured as code for consistency and maintenance
Developer Focus – Tight IDE integration and quality feedback loops prevent productivity drain
Battle-tested Security – Isolated build environments, least privilege access, and encryption
Today‘s tools aim to deliver these benefits. Keep them in mind as we explore top options below.
1. Jenkins – The Open Source Leader
As one of the first CI/CD platforms dating back to 2011, Jenkins remains the most widely-installed open source automation server.
Notable Features:
- Extensible and adaptable – Plugins enable limitless customization
- Scales from small to ultra large – Distributed masters/agents architecture
- Agnostic to technologies – Supports every language, platform, tool
- Easy for devs to use – Clean UI and IDE integration
A Jenkins pipeline allows modeling everything from build, test, analysis, staging, and production deployment in a single automated workflow.
The thriving global community behind Jenkins means plugins and support for virtually any need. No CI requirement exists that Jenkins can‘t handle with its flexible and modular architecture.
If your team values open source flexibility, Jenkins warrants deep consideration.
2. CircleCI – Insights-Driven SaaS
As a cloud-first SaaS CI/CD platform processing over 1 million builds daily, CircleCI focuses on data and insights to optimize the SDLC.
Standout Features:
- Powerful analytics – CI/CD metrics highlight productivity killers
- No servers to manage – Pure SaaS means no ops overhead
- Convenience pricing – Per user model simple and transparent
- GitHub perfection – Custom notifications, approvals, Slack alerts
CircleCI moves beyond basic CI/CD to offer teams a central hub to view build status, test coverage, deploy frequency, and other key DevOps metrics.
Integrations like Jira, Slack, AWS CloudFormation, and Terraform allow modeling sophisticated release workflows. Convenience pricing at $30 per user/month provides predictable costs.
For public teams desiring cloud convenience, CircleCI hits all marks.
3. GitLab – Tightly Integrated Option
Developed alongside their popular git-based DevOps platform, GitLab CI/CD brings continuous integration native into teams‘ existing inner loop.
Key Advantages
- Free and unlimited – Generous capabilities included for all users
- Built-in integration – No context switching away from GitLab
- Traceability end-to-end – Follow code repos to deployments
- Shared runners – Pools of capacity avoid resource contention
With CI/CD configuration stored as .gitlab-ci.yml right alongside source code, developers gain ultimate customization in modeling pipelines tailored to each microservice.
Review apps created for every branch allow previewing changes in real application context before merging. GitLab CI/CD fits like a glove for teams invested into their platform.
4. Buddy – Simplicity Above All
Buddy sells itself as "CI/CD for the rest of us" with an easy-to-use interface requiring no specialized DevOps skills.
Key Simplifiers:
- Prebuilt actions – Just mix and match 120+ premade pipeline blocks
- Intuitive flows – Model pipelines visually via drag and drop
- Rapid onboarding – From zero to pipelines in just 15 minutes
- Dedicated agents – Ensure max performance isolation
With premade building blocks handling everything from runtime selection to artifact management to notifications, Buddy allows modeling robust pipelines without coding.
For growing teams lacking DevOps experience but wanting CI/CD advantages quickly, Buddy warrants a close look with pricing starting at $75 monthly.
5. Harness – Next-Gen "Intelligent Delivery"
Harness, founded by industry pioneers, aims to disrupt status quo CI/CD with a cloud-native platform infused with Machine Learning intelligence.
Standout Innovations:
- MLOps pipeline optimization – Only rerun minimal tests required per commit
- Developer abstractions – Stay coding via CLI/IDE vs web UI
- Kubernetes-native – Maximizes robustness and utilization
- Generous free tier – Accelerate getting started
Leveraging selective test case rerunning based on change context, Harness minimizes regression testing overhead while still providing safety checks. This test optimization technique paired with standardized workflow extensions speed deployments immensely.
Harness feels very modern – aligning with trends like cloud, ML, and Kubernetes while still simplifying developers‘ inner loop.
6. CodeShip – Speed and Simplicity
Used daily by 100,000+ developers, CodeShip emphasizes keeping CI/CD workflows streamlined to prevent friction.
Efficiency Accelerators:
- Central dashboard – Single pane of glass for all CI/CD visibility
- Preconfigured pipelines – Copy, paste, tweak rather than start from scratch
- Generous free tier – 100 builds per month included
- Debuggable pipelines – Fix issues without leaving environment
CodeShip maintains one single unified view allowing managing and monitoring CI/CD workflows across entire project portfolios. This saves tremendous time otherwise wasted switching contexts.
The generous free tier covers early stage startups fully before needing to upgrade. For lean teams wanting velocity without headaches, check out CodeShip.
7. GoCD – Open Source Orchestration
Created by Thoughtworks, GoCD provides adaptive release orchestration capabilities beyond basic CI/CD – making it a great open source option.
Advanced Coordination:
- Value stream mapping – Trace deployments back to code changes
- Fan-in/fan-out support – Orchestrate intricate workflows
- Agent auto-balancing – Ensure max utilization
- Extensible and adaptable – Open plugin ecosystem
While GoCD handles standard build, test, analysis, and deployment capabilities – its strength lies in modeling complex application flows. Developers gain fine-grained control to orchestrate releases across services with traceability.
For regulated teams needing an on-prem open source tool to handle intricate workflows, GoCD warrants strong consideration.
8. AppVeyor – Specialized for Microsoft Stack
AppVeyor markets itself as a "CI/CD service for Windows developers" but has grown to support much more.
Tight Ecosystem Integration:
- First class Windows support – Tailored for .NET, Azure, VS devs
- Isolated, clean VMs – Consistent, pristine build environments
- GitHub perfection – Validate pull requests effortlessly
- Free for open source – Boost OSS project efficiency
AppVeyor shines best with Microsoft-stack dev teams working across Azure, .NET Framework, VS Code, and related toolchains. Tight integration allows building, testing, and deploying without ever leaving the editor.
For Windows-centric teams, AppVeyor ranks highly as a specialized force-multiplier perfectly adapted to that ecosystem.
9. Other Notable Solutions
Beyond the highlighted leaders above, tools like Travis CI, TeamCity, AWS CodeBuild, Nevercode, and Bamboo all warrant consideration for teams with specialized needs.
Travis CI remains popular within open source communities given its Linux expertise while TeamCity provides an enterprise-grade on-prem CI server.
AWS CodeBuild makes sense for teams fully cloud-committed on AWS already.
Nevercode and Bamboo fill niches as well with excellent mobile DevOps and Atlassian stack support respectively.
Key Takeaways
With CI/CD now considered mandatory for competitiveness, Hopefully mapping top solutions to common selection criteria provides a framework for evaluating options.
Pay particular attention to developer experience and visibility when deciding. Maximizing productivity matters most.
Many provide generous free tiers – leverage trial periods fully before committing long term. CI tools either become beloved allies or despised antagonists for engineers.
Prioritize solutions that simplify rather than overwhelm. Focus should remain on building amazing software – not babysitting pipelines.
The bottom line? Choose CI/CD tools that make your developers happier – results will surely follow.
