TrustRadius Insights for CircleCI are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Constant improvement: Users appreciate the continuous enhancements and additions made to CircleCI, demonstrating the company's commitment to providing a high-quality product. Many users have expressed their satisfaction with the constant improvement of CircleCI.
Responsive support: The highly responsive and helpful support provided by CircleCI is valued by users when they encounter any issues. Numerous users have praised the responsiveness and helpfulness of CircleCI's support team.
Seamless integration with GitHub: Users praise the seamless integration between CircleCI and GitHub, highlighting its reliability and efficiency in not missing any commits. Many reviewers have specifically mentioned the seamless integration between CircleCI and GitHub as one of its standout features.
We use CircleCI to deploy our app to various environments as well as run integration and E2E tests. This allows these processes to run independently from an individual machine.
Pros
Deployment
Testing
Cons
Uptime can be an Issue
Better redundancy
Native apps
Likelihood to Recommend
CircleCI is perfect for our needs. It allows us to merge a release branch into an environment branch and the deploy workflow kicks off automatically. It further allows us to add integration testing and E2E testing right into the build workflow.
VU
Verified User
Technician in Engineering (Internet company, 11-50 employees)
We use CircleCI as an independent part of our continuous integration testing process, which handles both automated building and testing our software projects, as well as with our deployment pipelines to power constant delivery efforts. We use CircleCI because their environment is exceptionally customizable and generally reliable for our needs. There is also a generous free tier.
Pros
The generous free tier will get development teams quite far before money needs to be paid.
The very customizable platform, with intelligent pricing as you scale.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
CircleCI has been an excellent option for us for several years. Still, we're beginning to invest in Github Actions and other platforms where CricleCI runs closer to our existing test and deployment pipelines. Because so many different integrations exist, it's easily adaptable to many kinds of applications. At this point, though, it's worth looking at the CircleCI embedded in other parts of the deployment pipeline before concluding that CircleCI is the best direction to go in.
VU
Verified User
Director in Engineering (Computer Software company, 51-200 employees)
We use CircleCI for most of our development workflows. Building, testing and deploying. We use it across most teams and departments. It integrated nicely with GitHub and we are able to validate every change on every branch before merging and automatically deploying to production. I use it for both Ruby and React projects.
Pros
Shows a clear workflow diagram and be able to re-run specific steps.
Fast set-up integration with GitHub.
Cons
Jobs can sometimes take too long.
Documentation on how to set up could be improved.
Likelihood to Recommend
We have many developers that push to production every day. Every branch runs continuous integration on CircleCI and clearly links to GitHub with an indication on whether it failed or passed. Things work fine when you work against the GitHub links but searching on the CircleCI site is not intuitive. Configuration with YAML files can also be hard to do and some UI tools for scaffolding them would be nice.
At the moment, Circle is used across the company to make continuous integration and continuous delivery for the mobile native applications. Circle went to solve us the problem of have a dynamic and easy-to-use cloud-based continuous integration and delivery for mobile, without the maintenance cost of the resources and using only for the computing use.
Pros
Jobs Configuration: I think that the configuration way of Circle CI is very simple and useful. You only have to add an YAML file in your Git repository root and add some tasks inside it.
Environment Variables Encryption: The way to encrypt sensible data, for example tokens or credentials, is very simple and secure.
The compute credit cost is cheap: You don't need a large amount of money to start using Circle.
Cons
Cost per user: The cost per user is very high.
UI: The UI is not as intuitive as I need. If you have a lot of applications enabled, it's a bit difficult to find in the home page the build which you're looking for.
The billing and usage information: It's a feature that was enabled in 2019 June. But it's not specific to any place, and the information of June is incomplete.
Likelihood to Recommend
Circle suits if you're looking for a cloud-based continuous integration and continuous delivery system for web and native-based applications. The uptime is very good and the features included in the platform are very useful. On the other hand, it's a little difficult to combine Circle with your on-premise stuff, such as registry dependencies (npm, Maven Nexus, etc) ... because the only way is to give Circle access to your on-premise network and it could be a little insecure.
CircleCI is being used as the main product for continuous integration, continuous delivery software development. It's being used primarily by release management/engineering and software engineering teams. It is solving the problem of needing to build a process around pushing code into production and following a schedule where code is continually deployed.
Pros
Continuous deployment
Continuous integration
Process building for engineering deployment
User interface and experience
Cons
Support for cloud provider integration directly
Likelihood to Recommend
CircleCI is one of the best CI/CD pipeline tools available. I'm not sure I can advise anything else besides this because it's still the most used and continually developed tools.
VU
Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology (Internet company, 51-200 employees)
We use CircleCI to allow for continuous integration across all of our software applications and environments. CircleCI allows us to build complex workflows, including steps to run pre-deploy / post-deploy scripts, execute test suites, and send slack notifications. With Circle, we can ensure code that is "broken" doesn't make it's way out, so we can be more confident that we are shipping bug-free code.
Pros
Multiple builds can be run at the same time in parallel.
The CircleCI web interface (UI/UX) is very easy to understand and use.
Easy Configuration to learn and use. Just a single configuration YAML file.
Many integrations. We use the GItHub, Slack, and DataDog integrations.
Cons
While configuration is easy, the config files can get very very long.
Price compared to some alternatives that are cheaper / free. Especially so if you are running multiple containers in parallel.
Have experienced numerous outages (3-5) in the last few months where CircleCI has been down.
Web documentation and tutorials haven't been as good as some of the competitors.
Likelihood to Recommend
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're an early-stage startup, and we use CircleCI to run automated tests in the cloud. In the early days, developers ran tests locally on their own development machines, but as the test suite grew, it simply took too much time. Running tests in the cloud lets us parallelize, so an hour's long test suite can run in minutes.
Pros
High degree of parallelization, ability to run on many containers at once.
Ability to customize the whole process through setup scripts.
Collecting of detailed test artifacts such as screenshots.
Cons
Really needs per-minute pricing. The static container model doesn't let us scale up/down easily.
The web UI is finicky and constantly frustrating.
Likelihood to Recommend
CircleCI is a good fit for any software development organization with a large or complicated set of automated tests, especially one that uses cloud services for most of their development process (such as GitHub). It might be less appropriate if you already have a strong in-house ability to set up and manage automated test environments.
We use CircleCI for continuous integration and deployment at Troops. It builds all of our feature branches (PRs) as well as our major branches and automatically triggers deployments to both QA and production environments. We also run unit and integration tests as well as code coverage in CircleCI. It is primarily used by the Engineering team.
Pros
It's easy to get started
It's very quick to automate builds regardless of dependencies or technology
It integrates well with GitHub as well as other tools
Cons
Speed of builds - I wish you could upgrade to a larger VMs
Likelihood to Recommend
For complicated builds that take a really long time and require specific performance considerations, CircleCI might not be the best choice. Right now there is one size fits all VM that does that build and the only performance upgrade that it offers is an ability to run parts of the build in parallel. This is not always possible, depending on your build system.
We use CircleCi as an integral to our continuous delivery pipeline across engineering. Using Circle allows us to focus on our application development. The concurrency of builds helps us split out our test suite across 15 different slices. Tight integration with github allows us to easily integrate into pull request checks. While there are occasional hiccups there are way fewer problems than any other CI tool we've used in the past and we've used several different ones. Support is also pretty responsive and it's apparent that Circle is continuing to improve their product.
Pros
Concurrency of builds (we use 15)
Constant improvement to service by adding features and optimizations
When things go wrong their support is responsive and helpful.
Cons
Proactive communication about updates and breaking changes
Questions to account rep can sometimes take too long (for us -- > 1 day) to respond
Likelihood to Recommend
I wonder if we are growing out of Circle. Can we increase concurrency beyond 15? While circle is helpful when things go wrong we sometimes have problems for several days in a row (recently) and each time there is some different reason that sounds like a one-off. Makes me wonder if there is something more going on.
CircleCI is being used by our organization for continual integration and automated deployment of Drupal and WordPress websites to Pantheon, among many other smaller CI jobs. It is used entirely by our Development and DevOps team members. It allows us to commit a simple config file to Git that controls the way that our software gets deployed, making the tedious job of deploying changes for hundreds of websites regularly much simpler.
Pros
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.
Cons
It would be nice if you could configure everything via the YML file. Some things are only available via YML, and some things are actually only available in the UI, and many other things have full overlap between the two. I'm sure there are good reasons for this, but this is a pretty confusing situation. For example, certain PHP versions are only available on certain Ubuntu releases. Configuring the PHP version is done via the .yml file, but configuring the Ubuntu release being used for the build has to be done in the UI. This can easily lead to things not building properly.
Likelihood to Recommend
For relatively advanced users comfortable with YAML configuration and the GitHub workflow, I wholeheartedly recommend CircleCI and think it's perfectly suited. For people who prefer to work completely in a user interface and not edit text files, there are other solutions more suited to that scenario.
