Azure Pipelines vs. CircleCI

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Azure Pipelines
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Users can automate builds and deployments with Azure Pipelines. Build, test, and deploy Node.js, Python, Java, PHP, Ruby, C/C++, .NET, Android, and iOS apps. Run in parallel on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Azure Pipelines can be purchased standalone, but it is also part of Azure DevOps Services agile development planning and CI/CD suite.N/A
CircleCI
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
CircleCI is a software delivery engine from the company of the same name in San Francisco, that helps teams ship software faster, offering their platform for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). Ultimately, the solution helps to map every source of change for software teams, so they can accelerate innovation and growth.
$15
per month
Pricing
Azure PipelinesCircleCI
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Server
Contact Sales
Performance
starting at $15
per month
Scale
starting at $2000
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Azure PipelinesCircleCI
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Azure PipelinesCircleCI
Best Alternatives
Azure PipelinesCircleCI
Small Businesses
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.7 out of 10
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.7 out of 10
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.7 out of 10
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Azure PipelinesCircleCI
Likelihood to Recommend
7.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
7.8
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
6.9
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Azure PipelinesCircleCI
Likelihood to Recommend
With a fully Microsoft Azure based workflow - Azure Pipelines makes absolute sense. Azure Pipelines are robust and work very well with SonarQube for test coverage and are shared with our developers. This prevents the developers for pushing code without unit tests across our backend and frontend platforms. We have reduced our instances of manual regression tests especially when there are multiple teams working across the same repositories.
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CircleCI is well suited if you, your developer, or team of developers have already worked with it in the past. They don't need to go through the learning curve of yet another Continuous Integration tool. Circle handles Continuous Integration workflows very well, including pretty complex workflows. With that said, Circle can get expensive if you need to run multiple containers in parallel and might not be as easy to setup as some alternatives, such as Jenkins.
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Pros
  • Code Integration/Code Deployment
  • Azure Engine Auto Scaling Up with help of Pipeline
  • Managing Version Control and deploy in rollback with just one click
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  • Full customization and scripting abilities. Using tools like bash scripts, SSH, and Node, running almost anything upon committing some code to GitHub becomes possible.
  • Integration with all of our favorite services. GitHub and Slack in particular are crucial to our business and CircleCI's integration is seamless and full-featured.
  • Great config file syntax. Many CI services require you to perform advanced configuration in a UI. This is fine at first (and CircleCI offers this for many options available), but when you start needing to manage a large number of projects, committing configuration changes to a Git repository is more consistent and maintainable than making the change many different times manually in a UI.
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Cons
  • Error messaging when team members don't have permissions
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  • CircleCI mostly getting built into both upstream platforms (Github/Gitlab) and downstream platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), in which cases it's often a better fit or can be used as a part of existing tooling
  • UX can be confusing to navigate and see what's happening.
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Usability
No answers on this topic
CircleCI interface is awesome in that it is relatively modern and makes it clear exactly which parts of the engineering lifecycle you are in
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Performance
No answers on this topic
It's pretty snappy, even with using workflows with multiple steps and different docker images. I've seen builds take a long time if it's really involved, but from what I can tell, it's still at least on par if not faster than other build tools.
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Support Rating
No answers on this topic
I haven't personally used their support service, but I have heard from others that they are responsive. I've also seen only one or two downtimes in over a year of use and both were no more than an hour or two.
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Alternatives Considered
We have used the GitHub CI/CD. Earlier we were using the Azure Pipelines but after GitHub had their actions, we integrated that for CI/CD. It runs the tests and makes a production build which can be live. GitHub CI/CD is more useful because we have to make script only once then just by few changes we can deploy it onto Azure, AWS, Google anywhere so we found it more convenient
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Jenkins and Teamcity both have additional features that maybe you require, but they are also a lot more work to get set up and working. There's a much longer learning curve to getting these configured for a simple build. They're not hosted, so you have to maintain the infrastructure and scale yourself. They're both good products if you require more than CircleCI, but if not, skip the extra headache and go with something simple like CircleCI.
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Return on Investment
  • We don't have to deploy changes manually
  • But because of this that we automated some tasks, we need to be still aware of some edge cases we can meet and which can cause a pipelines failures
  • We can deploy changes pretty fast
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  • Saves us a lot of time and reduces potential mistakes by making our deployment and QA process completely automated
  • Builds docker images for us so we don't have to build them locally on our machines
  • Runs tests automatically on every commit, so we catch mistakes early
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ScreenShots