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.
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.
Mostly it is very suitable for any product based company who wants to add a CI system for their products. This tool is perfectly suitable for a company which releases builds very frequently. By using this tool they can reduce a tremendous amount of manual effort. If company's budget is not high and if they can not afford the premium plan then this tool won't be suitable for them because the basic version of this tool won't provide much functionality
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.
First thing is this tool is scalable which is the biggest advantage of this tool. It won't take much time in setup and making it ready. It has a very good user interface.
This tool has almost every source code repository support like Git, SVN, Microsoft Foundation Server etc. Moreover, it has very good support for various build tools like Visual Studio, MSBuild etc., which makes it even batter.
We can trigger multiple builds at a time with the Premier subscription.
It allows users to apply many deep levels of configurations which make the whole system even easier.
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.
Mostly I don't have much more recommendation for improvement because this tool provides almost everything which would be required in any continuous integration system. But still I would suggest improvement in the reporting system. The build report is a field where they can make improvement by adding more information if they want.
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.
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.
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.
In my previous company I have used Jenkins for maintaining their CI system. Even this tool is also very good. The good thing about this tool is it’s an open source project. So in terms of pricing, we can consider this tool as an alternative to continua CI. One has to compare both of the products before going to use any one because both have their own benefits and drawbacks.
Basically, this tool will reduce manual effort of creating, deploying and testing software products. So ultimately it will reduce manpower which would otherwise be required for such things.
It is time saving and improves the overall performance of the entire team and system.
