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
Octopus Deploy
Score 10.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Australian company Octopus Deploy offers their eponymous automated deployment and release management software that integrates with the user's preferred CI server and adds deployment & ops automation capabilities. Octopus Deploy enables developers, release managers, and operations folks to bring all automation into a single place. The vendor states that by reusing configuration variables, environment definition, API keys, connection strings, permissions, service principals, and automation logic,…
$12
Pricing
CircleCI
Octopus Deploy
Editions & Modules
Server
Contact Sales
Performance
starting at $15
per month
Scale
starting at $2000
per month
Cloud
Free 30 day trial
unlimited targets/users/projects
Server
Free 30 day trial
unlimited targets/users/projects
Enterprise
Starting at $18 per month
Enterprise
Starting at $18 per month
Server
Starting at $12 per month
Cloud
Starting at $12 per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CircleCI
Octopus Deploy
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
—
Octopus Server edition is available as a 30 day free trial on our unlimited tier for any scenario, including production, and commercial use. After the trial period ends you can keep your working configuration and upgrade to a paid license and continue deploying uninterrupted.
Octopus Cloud is an alternative that is hosted by us, and is also available as a 30 day unlimited trial. No credit card is needed to create a Octopus Cloud trial instance. You can convert the Cloud trial to a paid instance at any time during or after the trial period, and keep all of your instance configuration.
Octopus also offers an Enterprise tier which offers advanced features for teams at scale including, advanced high availability, insights & DORA metrics, ServiceNow & Jira Service Management integration, unlimited instances, 24/7 support & service credits, and a Customer Success Manager.
Volume discounts are available above 500 targets, and temporary bursting for certain scenarios is supported.
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.
The ability to manage different stages and define a workflow is very useful for ops troubleshooting as well as deployment. You can see which version each environment has for each project, and promote or redeploy versions.
You can view deployment logs and dig deep into problems or long deployment steps.
Finding old releases can be a pain, and there isn't a good way to compare releases.
It does not really lend itself well to viewing what the content of a release is further than the version number. Ideally, you would be able to tie a deployment to the builds from the build server as well as specific commits from source control.
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.
Many different platforms, languages, and operating systems are supported. You can deploy to your own server or the cloud. You can deploy to Windows, Linux, etc.
Many different "step templates" are included, which make it very easy to deploy what you want, how you want. Such as deploying over SSH, FTP, etc.
Support is very responsive and personable. You won't just be talking to a robot or a script. They will either solve your problem or understand it enough to solve it in a future release.
Their documentation is well thought-out and very helpful. I have found very few missing pieces.
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.
Support for non-Microsoft applications needs to be improved to bring it on par with other comparable automation tools.
It doesn't yet provide integration options with other IT management tools like JIRA and HP Support to implement continuous delivery and true DevOps processes.
Support for AWS/Azure has been included very recently and it's not still very mature and feature rich and is expected to improve further in upcoming releases.
Some functionality feels slightly hidden in the menu system. For example: script modules are in the same menu as packages, where I feel that are not related entities. One is code for the deployment, the other is the thing that you are deploying...
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.
Octopus Deploy is a software that runs very effectively, is easy to use, does not require such a high learning curve, provides the necessary tools to carry out the functions it offers, making it a very flexible software, it also allows that can be configured according to the needs of the user and provides integrations with other very advantageous tools since they are carried out in a very favorable way.
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.
Octopus Deploy support has always been there for us, even when using the free tier, we get responsive hands-on help. We haven't needed to use that level of support since the documentation is clearly written, and help is readily available within the interface itself. Using Octopus Deploy is a truly joyful experience.
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.
Octopus Deploy was the obvious choice at the time, its strong .net support, robustness, ease of use, and integration into an existing process was a big plus. Also, Octopus Deploy was kind enough to give my organization a not for profit community licence. In addition, the product comes from a local Brisbane based company and it is always good to support local businesses when you can.
Any automated deployment process will save your company a ton of money on testing and bugs. When you don't automate your deployments, you can't be certain that what you are moving between environments is the exact same code with the same or appropriate configuration. What you tested might not be what got deployed.
We've saved a lot of money using Octopus over the mostly manual process we were using before. We've removed a lot of the errors that come from manual, human intervention.
Octopus has also allowed us to accomplish more with fewer people. It is easy to bring new people up to speed on the deployment process, and we can be confident of success after very little training.
