What is Buddybuild and what are its top alternatives?
Top Alternatives to Buddybuild
- Jenkins
In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project. ...
- fastlane
fastlane lets you define and run your deployment pipelines for different environments. It helps you unify your app’s release process and automate the whole process. fastlane connects all fastlane tools and third party tools, like CocoaPods. ...
- Bitrise
It is a Continous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) Platform as a Service (PaaS) with a main focus on mobile app development (iOS, Android). You can automate the testing and deployment of your apps with just a few clicks. When you trigger a build a Virtual Machine is assigned to host your build and your defined Workflow (series of Steps scripts) will be executed, step by step. ...
- CircleCI
Continuous integration and delivery platform helps software teams rapidly release code with confidence by automating the build, test, and deploy process. Offers a modern software development platform that lets teams ramp. ...
- Nevercode
It is a cloud-based continuous integration & delivery platform for iOS, Android, Cordova, Ionic and React Native. It helps you to release defect-free mobile apps and to save countless hours of manual work every week. ...
- Greenhouse
Greenhouse automatically builds your project for every commit you make and runs all your unit or UI tests on the emulator/simulator or on real hardware. Automatic build distribution is also supported so that your team and clients are always up to date with the latest state of your apps. ...
- Codemagic
Codemagic is the developer's favourite CI/CD tool for mobile app projects. Build your Android, iOS, React Native, Ionic, Unity and Flutter projects on Codemagic. ...
- Distiller
Distiller's hosted continuous integration platform takes the pain out of mobile development through automated build, test, and deployment of your iOS apps. ...
Buddybuild alternatives & related posts
- Hosted internally523
- Free open source469
- Great to build, deploy or launch anything async318
- Tons of integrations243
- Rich set of plugins with good documentation211
- Has support for build pipelines111
- Easy setup68
- It is open-source66
- Workflow plugin53
- Configuration as code13
- Very powerful tool12
- Many Plugins11
- Continuous Integration10
- Great flexibility10
- Git and Maven integration is better9
- 100% free and open source8
- Slack Integration (plugin)7
- Github integration7
- Self-hosted GitLab Integration (plugin)6
- Easy customisation6
- Pipeline API5
- Docker support5
- Fast builds4
- Hosted Externally4
- Excellent docker integration4
- Platform idnependency4
- AWS Integration3
- JOBDSL3
- It's Everywhere3
- Customizable3
- Can be run as a Docker container3
- It`w worked3
- Loose Coupling2
- NodeJS Support2
- Build PR Branch Only2
- Easily extendable with seamless integration2
- PHP Support2
- Ruby/Rails Support2
- Universal controller2
- Workarounds needed for basic requirements13
- Groovy with cumbersome syntax10
- Plugins compatibility issues8
- Lack of support7
- Limited abilities with declarative pipelines7
- No YAML syntax5
- Too tied to plugins versions4
related Jenkins posts
Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).
It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up
or vagrant reload
we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.
I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up
, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.
We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.
If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.
The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).
Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.
Releasing new versions of our services is done by Travis CI. Travis first runs our test suite. Once it passes, it publishes a new release binary to GitHub.
Common tasks such as installing dependencies for the Go project, or building a binary are automated using plain old Makefiles. (We know, crazy old school, right?) Our binaries are compressed using UPX.
Travis has come a long way over the past years. I used to prefer Jenkins in some cases since it was easier to debug broken builds. With the addition of the aptly named “debug build” button, Travis is now the clear winner. It’s easy to use and free for open source, with no need to maintain anything.
#ContinuousIntegration #CodeCollaborationVersionControl
- Easy to use20
- Open Source13
- Itunes connect deployment13
- Incredible flexability11
- Third party integrations9
- Provisioning profile management3
- Certificate management3
- All in one iOS DevOps1
- Can be used for Android as well1
- Integrate anything with fastlane0
Bitrise
- Easy setup18
- Bitbucket Integration9
- Advanced Workflow configuration8
- Github Integration7
- Slack integration7
- Great tools for iOS and Android development5
- Friendly & Easy to use5
- Great support4
- Pricing by concurrency, not team size3
- Discounts for contributors2
- Fast Updates2
- Open Source2
- Fast Builds1
- Developer centric1
related Bitrise posts
We are using React Native in #SmartHome to share the business logic between Android and iOS team and approach users with a unique brand experience. The drawback is that we require lots of native Android SDK and Objective-C modules, so a good part of the invested time is there. The gain for a app that relies less on native communication, sensors and OS tools should be even higher.
Also it helps us set different testing stages: we use Travis CI for the javascript (business logic), Bitrise to run build tests and @Detox for #end2end automated user tests.
We use a microservices structure on top of Zeit's @now that read from firebase. We use JWT auth to authenticate requests among services and from users, following GitHub philosophy of using the same infrastructure than its API consumers. Firebase is used mainly as a key-value store between services and as a backup database for users. We also use its authentication mechanisms.
You can be super locked-in if you also rely on it's analytics, but we use Amplitude for that, which offers us great insights. Intercom for communications with end-user and Mailjet for marketing.
- Github integration226
- Easy setup177
- Fast builds153
- Competitively priced94
- Slack integration74
- Docker support55
- Awesome UI45
- Great customer support33
- Ios support18
- Hipchat integration14
- SSH debug access13
- Free for Open Source11
- Mobile support6
- Nodejs support5
- Bitbucket integration5
- YAML configuration5
- AWS CodeDeploy integration4
- Free for Github private repo3
- Great support3
- Clojurescript2
- Continuous Deployment2
- Parallelism2
- Clojure2
- OSX support2
- Simple, clean UI2
- Unstable1
- Ci1
- Favorite1
- Helpful documentation1
- Autoscaling1
- Extremely configurable1
- Works1
- Android support1
- Fair pricing1
- All inclusive testing1
- Japanese in rspec comment appears OK1
- Build PR Branch Only1
- So circular1
- Easy setup, easy to understand, fast and reliable1
- Parallel builds for slow test suites1
- Easy setup. 2.0 is fast!1
- Easy to deploy to private servers1
- Really easy to use1
- Stable0
- Unstable12
- Scammy pricing structure6
- Aggressive Github permissions0
related CircleCI posts
Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).
It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up
or vagrant reload
we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.
I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up
, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.
We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.
If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.
The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).
Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.
We actually started out on Travis CI, but we've migrated our main builds to CircleCI, and it's been a huge improvement.
The reason it's been a huge improvement is that Travis CI has a fundamentally bad design for their images, where they start with a standard base Linux image containing tons of packages (several versions of postgres, every programming language environment, etc). This is potentially nice for the "get builds for a small project running quickly" use case, but it's a total disaster for a larger project that needs a decent number of dependencies and cares about the performance and reliability of their build.
This issue is exacerbated by their networking infrastructure being unreliable; we usually saw over 1% of builds failing due to transient networking errors in Travis CI, even after we added retries to the most frequently failing operations like apt update
or pip install
. And they never install Ubuntu's point release updates to their images. So doing an apt update
, apt install
, or especially apt upgrade
would take forever. We ended up writing code to actually uninstall many of their base packages and pin the versions of hundreds of others to get a semi-fast, semi-reliable build. It was infuriating.
The CircleCI v2.0 system has the right design for a CI system: we can customize the base image to start with any expensive-to-install packages we need for our build, and we can update that image if and when we want to. The end result is that when migrating, we were able to delete all the hacky optimizations mentioned above, while still ending up with a 50% faster build latency. And we've also had 5-10x fewer issues with networking-related flakes, which means one doesn't have to constantly check whether a build failure is actually due to an issue with the code under test or "just another networking flake".
related Nevercode posts
- Easy setup & usage13
- Free6
- Great customer support6
- Awesome team with awesome project5
- Great and fast builds3
- A lot easier than Jenkins1
related Greenhouse posts
- Apple Developer Portal integration2
- Flutter support2
- Fast and great support1
- 500 free build minutes/month1
- Fast builds1
- Bitbucket integration1
- GitLab integration1
- Github integration1
- Easy setup1
- Automatic iOS code signing1
- Newest Xcode version1
- Always up to date with the latest developer tools1
- Customisable workflows1
- CI/CD for Unity1
- Great for teams1