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
HashiCorp Packer
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
HashiCorp Packer automates the creation of machine images, coming out of the box with support to build images for Amazon EC2, CloudStack, DigitalOcean, Docker, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure, QEMU, VirtualBox, and VMware.
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.
We use packer to generate new machine images for multiple platforms on every change to our Configuration Management tools like Chef/Puppet/Ansible It's act single tool for Image building for Multi-provider like AWS/Azure/GCP Helps to achieve Dev/Prod Parity Packer itself doesn't have a state like Terraform. You can't do packer output AMI ID. If you have a scenario where you want to maintain the state for images it would be tough to manage via Packer.
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.
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.
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.
There are lot of tools in market which does the job for Image creation but all of them are not complete Machine/Image as a code. All other alternatives can create Image partially. Main reason for selecting Packer are Packer is lightweight, portable, and command-line driven Packer helps keep development, staging, and production as similar as possible. Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image Multi-provider portability is the feature to die for
