When comparing Solano CI vs Concourse CI, the Slant community recommends Solano CI for most people. In the question“What are the best continuous integration tools?” Solano CI is ranked 12th while Concourse CI is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose Solano CI is:
Solano CI offers safe parallel execution and dynamic task distribution which finish builds automatically and up to 80x faster.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Extremely fast parallel testing
Solano CI offers safe parallel execution and dynamic task distribution which finish builds automatically and up to 80x faster.
Pro Excellent customer support
Solano CI offer highly-responsive customer support, while extensive documentation and tutorial materials help customers keep Solano CI running in optimal condition.
Pro CLI interface
Solano CI has a CLI interface available, making it less time-consuming to work with and allowing for remote usage over the internet.
Pro Highly compatible and integrates easily with existing workflows
Solano CI supports popular languages seamlessly such as Java, C/C++, Python, Ruby, Javascript, Scala, PHP, and Go. It also works with Mercurial, Git, and Perforce via Git Fusion.
Pro Fully-managed cloud infrastructure
Solano CI provides cost-effective and resizable capacity. It also manages time-consuming systems' administration tasks, freeing you up to focus on your applications and business.
Pro Simple dashboard view and intuitive UI
Solano CI has a simple dashboard view that allows you to see test results in real-time, providing all relevant system output for failed tests.
Pro Build Pipelines feature
Build Pipelines allow users to chain together multiple Solano CI sessions into a Continuous Deployment pipeline. Each step represents a separate session, so each can run with its own set of parallel workers.
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 No free OSS plan.
There is only a 14-day free trial available for Solano CI.
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.