When comparing Buildbox vs Concourse CI, the Slant community recommends Concourse CI for most people. In the question“What are the best open source continuous integration tools?” Concourse CI is ranked 3rd while Buildbox is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Concourse CI is:
Debugging on remote build agents is a nightmare (especially without isolated builds). Concourse CI can be run locally. When there are problems with the pipeline definition, it can be run and debugged locally. That means it takes less time to find and fix problems.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Drag - and - drop editor
Drag - and - drop editor without writing any line of code.
Pro Easy to learn
Buildbox is a drag and drop engine, making it easy for beginners to pick up. There are many tutorials available to help get you started.
Pro Has many game templates
Buildbox has 20+ different game templates including templates for platformers, racing games and Flappy Bird clones.
Pro Built-in support for ads
You can add banner and interstitial ads from multiple ad networks, including AdMob, RevMob, Facebook. They can work with Amazon's, Microsoft's, Google's and Apple's app stores.
Pro Develop once publish everywhere
Exporting iOS/Android/macOS/Windows/Steam/Amazon
Pro Cross-platform
Pro Local iteration
Debugging on remote build agents is a nightmare (especially without isolated builds). Concourse CI can be run locally. When there are problems with the pipeline definition, it can be run and debugged locally. That means it takes less time to find and fix problems.
Pro Flexible
Resources are to Concourse as plugins are to Jenkins. In other words, resources allow Concourse CI to do just about any work necessary in a build. But resources follow a "service provider interface" that makes them easy to build in any language (not just JVM languages) and have a clearly defined computing model, built for composition. Resources don't clutter UI or tax performance.
Pro Scalable, reproducible deployment
BOSH is an open source tool for release engineering, deployment, lifecycle management, and monitoring of distributed systems. Since Concourse CI is built on top of BOSH, Concourse can scale across many servers or be run in the Cloud.
Pro Isolated builds
Build isolation keeps workers "clean". There's no configuration drift of agents. Or flaky interactions between build jobs.
Pro Usable
Visual pipeline view makes it clear what the automation does. Simple navigation to logs makes it easy to understand what happened in a build.
Pro Simple
Concourse defines three primitives that, together, can express arbitrary features and pipelines.
Cons
Con Incredibly Expensive
$99/mo for full functionality probably makes this the least accessible piece of game development software in regards to price, all with a very limiting feature set.
Con You are restricted by it's limitations
For example, you can only make certain kind of games.
Con Not very powerful
You will be limited to using templates to build games.
Con Subscription Model
The two more reasonable price points limit the functionality of a software already far less powerful than many more cost effective alternatives.
Con Very expensive
Buildbox has a 15-day trial version, after that a $2675 license to use it must be bought.
Con Stability Issues
The software has stability issues on Windows, with the preview window causing program crashes when simple functionality is added.
Con Limited infrastructure options
The downside of building on BOSH is that a full, scalable deployment of Concourse CI requires AWS, vSphere, or OpenStack. If you don't already have these, any one of them can be a big effort to set up, just to get a build server running. Might not be a good fit for smaller teams.