What are the best self-hosted continuous integration tools?

6

Options
Considered

38

User
Recs.

Sep 8, 2018

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

6 Options Considered

Best self-hosted continuous integration tools	Price	License	Price
-- TeamCity	-	–	–
-- Jenkins	-	MIT	Free
-- Bamboo	-	–	–
-- Drone.io	-	–	–
-- Gitlabs integrated CI	-	–	–

TeamCity

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Top Pro

Cross-Platform Builds

The fact that it's based on Java does not hinder it's capability to support different build environments. TeamCity supports a large number of tools and languages. See More

Top Con

Projects and configurations are not kept under VCS

TeamCity does not keep projects and configurations under Version Control. This means that deploying older revisions of a project is almost impossible in TeamCity. See More

Top Pro

Good quality of plugins

Not as many plugins as Jenkins, but they are reliable. See More

Top Pro

Designed for easy scripting (of build steps)

Scripts can easily set parameters by printing specifically formatted output. Packing your scripts/utilities as agent tool plugin is easy and ensures scripts are distributed to all agents. See More

Top Pro

Easy installation

TeamCity's installation is really simple. It has different installation packages for different operating systems. All that's needed is to download the correct one and run it. See More

Jenkins

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Top Pro

Free and open source

Jenkins is a free and open source continuous integration tool. Jenkins' source code is hosted on GitHub. See More

Top Con

Plugin overload

The flip side of "highly customizable" is that things most people want to do still require plugins not installed out-of-the-box. Worse, some common capabilities will require multiple plugins to get working right. The overhead of adding so many plugins amplifies many of the other cons. Although 400 plugins exist for Jenkins, that doesn't mean they are all well-maintained and up-to-date. See More

Specs

Top Pro

You can source control your chain of automation

Starting with Jenkins 2.0, the pipeline capability which has been available as a plugin before this version, has been built-in into Jenkins itself. This allows developers to describe their chain of automation in text form, which can be version controlled and put alongside the source tree. See More

Top Con

Clunky GUI

Top Pro

Scalable

The distributed builds works effectively, thanks to the Master and Slave capabilities. See More

Top Con

Poor quality plug-ins that are difficult to combine

There have been several complaints by users regarding the quality of the plug-ins found in Jenkins' official plugin repo. A lot of plugins found in the default plugin directory are no longer actively maintained and as a result, they may be incompatible with later versions of Jenkins or other plugins. See More

Top Pro

Stable release line for users who want less changes

This is called the Jenkins Long-Term Support (LTS) version and helps to provide the most stable and the most assuring version of the Jenkins CI possible. About every three months a version which has been deemed the most reliable by the community is chosen. After this, it's branched, well-tested features are added if they are missing, it's then tested with the new features, bug fixes are done if necessary and then it's released as the official Jenkins LTS version. See More

Top Con

Unstable and lack of plugin integration QA process

Jenkins without plugins is almost useless. All plugins are treated equal and published almost right away. Because there is no process for testing Jenkins' integration, the overall Jenkins experience is not that great. Furthermore, Jenkins' core and plugins are released on a regular basis, all requiring instant restarts, meaning that updates appear more than once a day! See More

Top Pro

Easy to get up and running

A Jenkins install is very simple and in minutes allows having the service up and running. To install Jenkins, just the command java -jar jenkins.war is needed. Nothing more. See More

Top Con

Outdated Interface

The Jenkins interface seems outdated and clunky by today's standards. It does not follow good design principles, has no whitespace which makes the views feel crowded and confusing. See More

Top Pro

A lot of resources and tutorials available

Jenkins has been in development since 2004 and is one of the most popular tools of it's kind. This means the technology is very mature and there are a lot of documentation and resources available for it. See More

Top Con

Poor support for diagnosis

Builds only run on Jenkins agents, not locally, so it is hard to find and fix problems in build jobs. Worse, the UI compounds the problem. Trying to find the build output log for a failed build in Jenkins can be up to 3 clicks from the home page. See More

Top Pro

Highly customisable

Even though Jenkins comes pretty functional and useful out of the box, there's a large plugin ecosystem from which you can choose plugins to integrate into your Jenkins build if you want to extend any of its features. See More

Top Con

Poor documentation

The most useful information found about Jenkins is on StackOverflow and various strange corners of the internet that careful Googling may sometimes find. The actual documentation for Jenkins is poorly organized and extremely vague and outdated. Documentation for plugins, even the plugins most heavily relied upon, is almost non-existent. See More

Top Pro

Multiple test environments for different runtime versions

They can be added easily under your Global Configuration. See More

Top Con

Labourous Scripting

it takes more fiddling with plugins, more trial and error rounds, more lines of code than for the same tasks on TeamCity See More

Top Pro

Supports most of the technological stacks for free by specific plugins

Including, Docker, Amazon EC2 and S3. See More

Top Pro

Encryption of secrets

Thanks to JENKINS Credentials and Plugin. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform build support

Being a Java application it can be installed under any OS: Windows, Linux, and macOS. On the other hand, JNLP slaves also enriches the cross-platform build support for its agents. See More

Top Pro

Quantity of available Plugins

For most operations we need not reinvent the wheel, there are plugins already existing. See More

Top Pro

User can source control their chain of automation

Starting with Jenkins 2.0, the pipeline capability, which has been available as a plugin before this version, has been built into Jenkins itself. This allows developers to describe their chain of automation in text form, which can be version controlled and put alongside the source tree. See More

Top Pro

Multiple version control systems supported

Supports the most popular version control systems out of the box: SVN, Mercurial, and Git. See More

Top Pro

Safe to store key environment variables

Self-hosting provides a safe location to store key environment variables since it is the user who is in charge of the server and environment where Jenkins is hosted. See More

Top Pro

Highly customizable

Even though Jenkins is pretty functional and useful out of the box, there's a large plugin ecosystem from which the user can choose plugins to integrate into their Jenkins build. This is needed for when the user wants to extend any of the tool's features. See More

Top Pro

Awards and recognition

Including InfoWorld Bossie Award (Best of Open Source Software Award) in 2011, and Received Geek Choice Award in 2014. See More

Top Pro

Great community

Jenkins has a large and helpful community, which welcomes new users and provides a great number of tutorials. Project Website, including links to Blog , Wiki, Docs. Community groups via Jenkins Users ML group. See More

Top Pro

Self hosted

You stay in full control of your source code, build environment and deployment. No third party gets access to your source code or knows exactly how to build your software. See More

Bamboo

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Top Con

Not free

The prices start at $800 for 1 agent. See More

Top Pro

Good integration with other Atlassian software

Bamboo is made by Atlassian, the company that also made and maintains tools such as JIRA, Stash and BitBucket, so it's a given that they would integrate quite nicely. For example, when connecting Bamboo with Stash and JIRA, details like JIRA issues, commits, reviews and approvals follow each release from development to production. If HipCHat is part of the integration, team members get notified right away in addition to email notifications. See More

Top Pro

Deployment Projects

Bamboo is the only build server to offer first-class support for the "delivery" aspect of continuous delivery. Deployment projects automate the tedium right out of releasing into each environment, while letting you control the flow with per-environment permissions. See More

Top Pro

Test automation

Out-of-the-box features that let developers perform parallel testing on elastic agents and quarantine flakey tests. See More

Top Pro

Easy Enterprise-grade Administration

Bamboo is not just built for teams, but teams-of-teams. It has the administrative features you need to manage and maintain CI at scale. Enterprise model for access control, management, and support. See More

Top Pro

Integration with Docker

Bamboo allows using Docker containers to create build agents. Using Docker agents lets you run multiple remote agents on the same host without conflicting requirements. It makes it easier to duplicate and distribute changes to build agents, and to use scripts for creating and maintaining agents. How can you define and build your own image and push it to a registry to share?This is when Bamboo’s Docker tasks come into play. Docker tasks make it possible to build an image, run a container, and push a Docker image to a registry from within your build or deployment project. See More

Top Pro

Out-of-the-box support for Git branching workflows

Bamboo allows you to automatically detect and build new branches, merge branches together when tests pass and continuously deploy code to staging and production servers based on branch name. See More

Top Pro

Integration with Amazon S3

Bamboo can also be integrated with Amazon S3 for unlimited storage. See More

Top Pro

Bundled AWS CodeDeploy task

Deploying applications with AWS CodeDeploy was always possible by using Bamboo script tasks, and it's now an easier process with a bundled add-on and its accompanying CodeDeploy task. See More

Drone.io

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Top Pro

Easy self-hosted setup

Drone can be easily set up locally: all that's needed is Docker. See More

Top Con

Does not allow you to configure two projects using the same GitHub repo

Drone.io does not let developers configure two different projects against the same repository. Instead, one must fork that repository into a new one and use that to create a new Drone.io project. You could go around this with downstream deployments, it's a missing feature but it shouldn't hurt much. See More

Top Pro

Docker integration simplifies deployment

Drone uses Docker containers to build and test code. Using Docker containers makes it easier for developers to then deploy this code to production. See More

Top Pro

Integrated with GitHub, BitBucket, and Google Code

Drone.io integrates perfectly with GitHub, BitBucket and Google Code. See More

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