Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) (or CI/CD) has become an integral part of software development and DevOps testing. It provides developers the necessary features so that they can deploy the code continuously. It detects bugs at an early stage and avoids integration problems due to frequent committing of source code. With so many CI/CD tools available in the market, it becomes essential to choose the best CI/CD tools that suit the budget and project requirements. To make it easy for you, we have created this list, which we hope will help you choose the best CI/CD tool.
1. Jenkins
Jenkins is a Java-based cross platform, open-source CI/CD tool. It offers continuous integration, along with facilitating continuous delivery. It also enables real-time testing and reporting. Jenkins can be installed by just downloading its executable in the .war format and starting the same from the terminal.
Jenkins Pipeline provides a set of tools that can be used for modeling delivery pipelines ‘as code.’ Jenkins implements the pipeline using DSL (Domain Specific Language). It is one of the widely used and best CI/CD tools as it is open-source and has existed for a long time.
Salient features of Jenkins
Available for Windows, Linux, and macOS platforms.
Free and open-source hence, it is preferable for startups as well as large-scale organizations.
16.3K Star & 6.5k Forked Repo on GitHub.
Highly extensible.
It has a thriving plugin ecosystem (1500+ plugins) and a best-in-class community.
Integrates with popular cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Digital Ocean, and more.
Can be leveraged for performing work in parallel and realizing complex CD requirements.
The installer in the .war format that is a stand-alone Java application and works out of the box.
2. TeamCity
TeamCity is a server based CI/CD pipeline tool in Java. It is developed and maintained by JetBrains, the company behind the development of several useful tools like PyCharm, IntelliJ Idea, and more. It is available for installation on Windows and Linux Servers.
TeamCity is free to use for open-source projects and offers small teams an easy option to integrate with Azure DevOps and Jira Software Cloud. It also supports launching build agents in the Kubernetes cluster.
Salient features of TeamCity
Highly extensible and can be customized for reusing settings of a project to the sub-project.
It can run parallel builds, thereby providing the flexibility to run builds simultaneously on different builds and environments.
Pipelines in TeamCity are defined using Kotlin-based DSL (Domain Specific Language).
Integrates with Docker, Visual Studio Team Services, Maven, NuGet, and more.
Its on-premise variant integrates with popular cloud platforms like Google Cloud, AWS, VMWare vSphere, and more.
It provides powerful features that enable running history, viewing test progress (and history) reports on-the-fly, and adding builds to favorites.
3. CircleCI
CircleCI is one of the best CI/CD tools that is suited for realizing CI/CD for open-source projects and large-scale projects. CircleCI Cloud is its cloud-based offering whereas CircleCI Server is its on-premise (or self-hosted) solution.
It supports languages that can be built on Windows, Linux, and macOS platforms. It is easy to set up and uses a proprietary YAML syntax for its pipelines. In 2019, Forrester Wave named CircleCI as a leader in Cloud Native continuous integration.
Salient features of CircleCI
Easy to set up and can be used with popular version-controlling systems like GitHub, Bitbucket, and more.
It offers CI/CD pipelines as ‘Workflows.’
It supports the majority of the popular programming languages out of the box.
For reducing the build time, builds can be split and balanced across multiple containers.
Parallel testing in CircleCI helps in running tests in parallel across different executors.
Tests can be separated using timing data that further helps in reducing the time involved in test execution.
CircleCI Server, which is CircleCI’s on-premise offering, can be integrated with popular third-party tools like GitHub Enterprise, LambdaTest, Coveralls, and more.
CircleCI Server supports widely-used cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and more.
CircleCI Orbs, which are reusable snippets of code, help in automating repetitive processes and accelerating the integration with third-party tools.
4. Travis CI
Like Jenkins, Travis CI is also one of the early movers in the CI/CD pipeline tools market. It was initially rolled-out only for open-source projects and later migrated to support closed-source projects as well.
Written in the Ruby programming language, Travis CI is one of the best CI/CD tools for open-source & enterprise-level projects, if your projects are in GitHub or Bitbucket. Like CircleCI, Travis CI also has different offerings for the open-source community and enterprises that intend to use Travis CI on their private Cloud (or self-hosted platform).
Salient features of Travis CI
Travis CI supports a whole range of programming languages (i.e., a total of 30 in number), including Java, C#, Julia, Python, and more.
Enterprises looking for more privacy and secured solutions can opt for Travis CI Enterprise, a self-hosted tool that offers seamless integration with GitHub and Bitbucket.
CI/CD pipelines use a proprietary YAML syntax, with seamless integration with GitHub Enterprise tools.
You can use the Cloud (or SaaS) variant of Travis CI for open-source projects and enterprises with small team sizes.
It provides runtimes on popular platforms like Linux, macOS, and Windows.
The build matrix feature in Travis CI lets you perform parallel builds on a range of combinations comprising different environments, languages, and runtimes.
Travis CI Enterprise supports integration with popular cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Azure, and more.
Integration with a cross-browser testing tool like LambdaTest helps perform testing across different combinations of browsers, platforms, and devices (emulators).
5. Bamboo
Bamboo is a popular tool for Continuous Integration (CI). It is an enterprise product developed by Atlassian, the organization behind the creation of Jira that provides the facility for performing builds, tests, and releases in a single window.
It only works seamlessly with Jira but also works with popular SCM tools like Bitbucket. It is available for deployment on popular platforms like Windows, Linux, and macOS. Like other popular CI/CD pipeline tools, Bamboo also supports many programming languages, along with technologies like AWS, SVN, Git, and more.
Salient Features of Bamboo
Bamboo offers seamless migration from an open-source CI/CD option like Jenkins to its platform.
It has built-in integration with Jira Software and Bitbucket server.
Bamboo can integrate with popular tools (or platforms) like Docker, AWS, and more.
It can realize parallel builds by executing builds on remote build agents. It can support up to 100 remote build agents and parallel test batches on the agents.
Bamboo is available in self-hosted and cloud-based variants.
Based on changes in the repository, Bamboo can trigger the builds, and you can subsequently send push-notifications from Bitbucket.
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