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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Continuous Integration
  4. Continuous Integration
  5. CircleCI vs Drone.io vs Jenkins

CircleCI vs Drone.io vs Jenkins

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

CircleCI
CircleCI
Stacks14.5K
Followers7.1K
Votes974
Drone.io
Drone.io
Stacks884
Followers456
Votes258
Jenkins
Jenkins
Stacks59.2K
Followers50.4K
Votes2.2K
GitHub Stars24.6K
Forks9.2K

CircleCI vs Drone.io vs Jenkins: What are the differences?

Introduction: When comparing CI/CD tools like CircleCI, Drone.io, and Jenkins, it's crucial to understand the key differences between them to make an informed decision.

  1. Scalability: CircleCI is known for its scalability, able to handle large-scale projects with ease, making it suitable for enterprise-level applications. Drone.io is also highly scalable, offering horizontal scalability through containerization. On the other hand, Jenkins may require additional resources and configurations to scale efficiently for larger projects.

  2. Ease of Use: CircleCI and Drone.io are known for their user-friendly interfaces and easy setup processes, making them ideal for beginners or smaller teams. In contrast, Jenkins has a steeper learning curve and may require more configuration and maintenance, which can be challenging for newcomers.

  3. Extensibility: Jenkins stands out for its extensive plugin ecosystem, allowing users to customize and extend its functionalities according to their specific needs. While CircleCI and Drone.io also offer some level of extensibility through their APIs, Jenkins provides a wider range of plugins for various integrations and automation tasks.

  4. Hosted vs. Self-hosted: CircleCI and Drone.io offer both hosted and self-hosted options, giving users flexibility in choosing their deployment preferences. Jenkins, on the other hand, is typically self-hosted, requiring users to set up and maintain their own infrastructure, which can be a significant consideration for some organizations in terms of cost and resources.

  5. Community Support: Jenkins has a vast community of users and developers, providing ample resources, forums, and documentation for troubleshooting and support. While CircleCI and Drone.io also have active communities, Jenkins' extensive community support can be a valuable asset for users facing challenges or seeking best practices.

In Summary, understanding the key differences in scalability, ease of use, extensibility, deployment options, and community support can help in choosing the right CI/CD tool for your project.

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Advice on CircleCI, Drone.io, Jenkins

Balaramesh
Balaramesh

Apr 20, 2020

Needs adviceonAzure PipelinesAzure Pipelines.NET.NETJenkinsJenkins

We are currently using Azure Pipelines for continous integration. Our applications are developed witn .NET framework. But when we look at the online Jenkins is the most widely used tool for continous integration. Can you please give me the advice which one is best to use for my case Azure pipeline or jenkins.

663k views663k
Comments
Phillip
Phillip

Developer at Coach Align

Mar 18, 2021

Decided

The introduction of Orbs a few years ago has really streamlined CircleCI configuration files and made them really easy to work with. Haven't tried GitHub Actions and decided to go with what was familiar instead of trying something new. Tried to make AWS Codepipeline work a few years back on different projects and found it to be incredibly frustrating, lacking support for some of the most basic features and use cases.

41.1k views41.1k
Comments
Felipe
Felipe

May 24, 2020

Needs advice

My website is brand new and one of the few requirements of testings I had to implement was code coverage. Never though it was so hard to implement using a #docker container.
Given my lack of experience, every attempt I tried on making a simple code coverage test using the 4 combinations of #TravisCI, #CircleCi with #Coveralls, #Codecov I failed. The main problem was I was generating the .coverage file within the docker container and couldn't access it with #TravisCi or #CircleCi, every attempt to solve this problem seems to be very hacky and this was not the kind of complexity I want to introduce to my newborn website.
This problem was solved using a specific action for #GitHubActions, it was a 3 line solution I had to put in my github workflow file and I was able to access the .coverage file from my docker container and get the coverage report with #Codecov.

198k views198k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

CircleCI
CircleCI
Drone.io
Drone.io
Jenkins
Jenkins

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.

Drone is a hosted continuous integration service. It enables you to conveniently set up projects to automatically build, test, and deploy as you make changes to your code. Drone integrates seamlessly with Github, Bitbucket and Google Code as well as third party services such as Heroku, Dotcloud, Google AppEngine and more.

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.

Language-Inclusive Support;Custom Environments;Flexible Resource Allocation;SSH Or Local Builds For Easy Debugging;Improved Caching;Unmatched Security;Parallelism;Insights
Free for open-source;GitHub, BitBucket integration;Browser testing;Deplot with Amazon, Heroku, Google AppEngine;Flexible scripting;Team billing;
Easy installation;Easy configuration;Change set support;Permanent links;RSS/E-mail/IM Integration;After-the-fact tagging;JUnit/TestNG test reporting;Distributed builds;File fingerprinting;Plugin Support
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
24.6K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
9.2K
Stacks
14.5K
Stacks
884
Stacks
59.2K
Followers
7.1K
Followers
456
Followers
50.4K
Votes
974
Votes
258
Votes
2.2K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 226
    Github integration
  • 177
    Easy setup
  • 153
    Fast builds
  • 94
    Competitively priced
  • 74
    Slack integration
Cons
  • 12
    Unstable
  • 6
    Scammy pricing structure
  • 0
    Aggressive Github permissions
Pros
  • 51
    Open source
  • 50
    Built on docker
  • 27
    Free for open source
  • 23
    GitHub integration
  • 18
    Easy Setup
Cons
  • 3
    Very basic documentation
Pros
  • 523
    Hosted internally
  • 469
    Free open source
  • 318
    Great to build, deploy or launch anything async
  • 243
    Tons of integrations
  • 211
    Rich set of plugins with good documentation
Cons
  • 13
    Workarounds needed for basic requirements
  • 10
    Groovy with cumbersome syntax
  • 8
    Plugins compatibility issues
  • 7
    Limited abilities with declarative pipelines
  • 7
    Lack of support
Integrations
dotCloud
dotCloud
GitHub
GitHub
Xcode
Xcode
Azure Container Service
Azure Container Service
Slack
Slack
Heroku
Heroku
JavaScript
JavaScript
Node.js
Node.js
Python
Python
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Docker
Docker
Bitbucket
Bitbucket
Google App Engine
Google App Engine
Heroku
Heroku
GitHub
GitHub
Amazon S3
Amazon S3
dotCloud
dotCloud
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to CircleCI, Drone.io, Jenkins?

Travis CI

Travis CI

Free for open source projects, our CI environment provides multiple runtimes (e.g. Node.js or PHP versions), data stores and so on. Because of this, hosting your project on travis-ci.com means you can effortlessly test your library or applications against multiple runtimes and data stores without even having all of them installed locally.

Codeship

Codeship

Codeship runs your automated tests and configured deployment when you push to your repository. It takes care of managing and scaling the infrastructure so that you are able to test and release more frequently and get faster feedback for building the product your users need.

TeamCity

TeamCity

TeamCity is a user-friendly continuous integration (CI) server for professional developers, build engineers, and DevOps. It is trivial to setup and absolutely free for small teams and open source projects.

wercker

wercker

Wercker is a CI/CD developer automation platform designed for Microservices & Container Architecture.

GoCD

GoCD

GoCD is an open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks. GoCD offers business a first-class build and deployment engine for complete control and visibility.

Shippable

Shippable

Shippable is a SaaS platform that lets you easily add Continuous Integration/Deployment to your Github and BitBucket repositories. It is lightweight, super simple to setup, and runs your builds and tests faster than any other service.

Buildkite

Buildkite

CI and build automation tool that combines the power of your own build infrastructure with the convenience of a managed, centralized web UI. Used by Shopify, Basecamp, Digital Ocean, Venmo, Cochlear, Bugsnag and more.

Snap CI

Snap CI

Snap CI is a cloud-based continuous integration & continuous deployment tool with powerful deployment pipelines. Integrates seamlessly with GitHub and provides fast feedback so you can deploy with ease.

Appveyor

Appveyor

AppVeyor aims to give powerful Continuous Integration and Deployment tools to every .NET developer without the hassle of setting up and maintaining their own build server.

Semaphore

Semaphore

Semaphore is the fastest continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) platform on the market, powering the world’s best engineering teams.

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