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
Travis CI
Score 7.3 out of 10
N/A
Travis CI is an open source continuous integration platform, that enables users to run and test simultaneously on different environments, and automatically catch code failures and bugs.
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.
TravisCI is suited for workflows involving typical software development but unfortunately I think the software needs more improvement to be up to date with current development systems and TravisCI hasn't been improving much in that space in terms of integrations.
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.
It's simple and easy to get started (it can detect the language being used based on build configuration files like a Maven pom.xml).
It's free (as in beer) for open source projects.
It has a responsive staff (you can file issues on GitHub to ask for new languages or packages to be supported, and the turnaround time isn't too bad for the free offering).
The user interface is beautiful and easy-to-use, including features like live-tailing in-progress builds.
It supports specifying private environment variables and encrypted credentials, so that you can safely automate deployments (for example, pushing built docker images to DockerHub).
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.
Travis CI is a fairly mature platform now, and most, if not all of the common complaints have been improved. This includes documentation and logs with color support.
TravisCI hasn't had much changes made to its software and has thus fallen behind compared to many other CI/CD applications out there. I can only give it a 5 because it does what it is supposed to do but lacks product innovation.
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.
After the private equity firm had bought this company the innovation and support has really gone downhill a lot. I am not a fan that they have gutted the software trying to make money from it and put innovation and product development second.
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.
Jenkins is probably the leading choice for automation and has loads of features and a large community behind it, but it can be overkill for many projects. It also has more of a web 1.0 look and interface. CircleCI is another similar big competitor, but cannot compete with Travis CI's free account [in my opinion].
