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CircleCI

Score9.6 out of 10

53 Reviews and Ratings

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What is CircleCI?

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.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about CircleCI.
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CI/CD for every developer and any organisation

Incentivized
Sagiv FrankelView profile
Senior Software Engineer in Engineering at WeWork (10,001+ employees employees)

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.

Return on Investment

  • Simple continuous integration for every branch before merging for safety.
  • Simple continuous deployments means better velocity.

Alternatives Considered

Travis CI and Jenkins

Other Software Used

Heroku Platform, Algolia, Node

Continuous Integration for your software

Incentivized
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use CircleCI for continuous integration and delivery of our mobile app. The main users are our DevOps team to help manage code releases. It's helped us push code to production with a standardize process and can now ensure we get a build with each merge. Our codebase is ReactNative and run on AWS CloudFront.

Pros

  • Automated builds and process
  • Simple too use and set up
  • Scales well as we integrated additional projects

Cons

  • Sometimes hard to debug issues with builds and unable to find help
  • Customizations not supported
  • Outages impacted our workflow

Most Important Features

  • scalability
  • github integration
  • easy to use ui

Return on Investment

  • less devOps staff needed to manage builds
  • lower investment to create build process
  • some dev cost in debugging when builds fail but less than if we had a custom solution

Alternatives Considered

GitHub and CloudBees Codeship

Other Software Used

GitHub, HubSpot Academy, Google Analytics

Circle CI the best on-cloud CI/CD system on cloud

Incentivized
Javier CardosoView profile
Architecture Tech Leader in Engineering at MercadoLibre (5001-10,000 employees employees)

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.

Return on Investment

  • Positive: Circle helped us to make a fast release process of our native based application and reduced our time to market.
  • Positive: Circle helps us avoiding the time and money maintenance cost of a release process system.
  • Negative: The cost per user and billing it per month make it a bit difficult to make the payments on time if you are working in a big company with a lot of payment processes.

Alternatives Considered

Travis CI

Other Software Used

New Relic, Datadog, OpsGenie

Help your developers build/test/deploy code quick!

Incentivized
John GrosjeanView profile
DevOps Engineer in Engineering at Avizia (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • Automated builds! This is really why you get CircleCI, to automate the build process. This makes building your application far more reliable and repeatable. It can also run tests and verify your application is working as expected.
  • Simple. Unlike Jenkins, Teamcity, or other platforms, CircleCI doesn't need a lot of setup. It's completely hosted, so there's no infrastructure to set up. The config file does take a bit to understand, but if you follow their example and start with something small and add to it, you can get it up and going quicker than it first looks.
  • Scales easily. Again, since it's all cloud-based, you don't have to manage or scale infrastructure. Simply subscribe to the number of containers you want, and scaling up just means buying more containers.

Cons

  • No static IPs. This could cause problems if you want to enable only CircleCI to access your environment. Much of the limitations for us were around this issue, since we're in such a regulated industry.
  • The search feature needs improvement. If you're doing a lot of builds, the history can go on for pages. We didn't find it suited our needs for audits/reports as you can't search by a particular developer who triggered a build, filter for only successful builds, etc.
  • Slightly limited customization, something like Jenkins is more flexible. CircleCI used to have a very defined build process, but now with the introduction of workflows, it's gotten a lot better. I think they hit the right balance between simplicity and flexibility though. If you need a lot of integrations or other things that they don't offer, Jenkins is probably better. CircleCI isn't intended for complex applications, it's really about keeping it simple so you can focus on code development.

Return on Investment

  • Greatly increase the speed of code delivery. We no longer need to go through a long deployment process for every feature. Developers can spin up their dev environments at will, test new features, and verify their code is ready to ship in just minutes.
  • Reduced labor. Again, no more long, manual code deployments. And this means big savings in labor costs.
  • Code quality. Since CircleCI runs various tests after building, we know if a code change broke a feature immediately. It can be fixed before the feature is even scheduled for release to production.

CircleCI - Solid Continuous Integration Tool

Incentivized
Gabriel SamarooView profile
Senior Software Engineer in Engineering at Rocketrip (11-50 employees employees)

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.

Return on Investment

  • Continuous Integration saves time for developers to manually handle deploying code.
  • Ability to build complex workflows with test suites catches bugs before they get to production - saving a lot of headache.
  • The integrations with Slack and DataDog keep the entire company informed of builds and deploys, increasing our awareness and efficiency.

Alternatives Considered

Jenkins

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